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Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

arstechnica.com

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Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#31

Post by Hizonner »

empressplay wrote: post #12

In British Columbia both text-based accounts (real and fictional, such as stories) and drawings of underage sexual activity are illegal (basically any sort of depiction, even if it just comes out of your mouth.) So California is just starting to catch up.

All of Canada. The Canadian Criminal Code is federal.

I think they did carve out a judicial exception in a case where some guy was writing pure text stories for his own personal use, and didn't intentionally show them to anybody else at all, but I also seem to recall it was a pretty grudging exception for only those very specific circumstances.

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#32

Post by ashleyn »

falcor84 wrote: post #2

> "The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims," it says, "revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity." The word "inherently" there seems like a big stretch to me. I see how it could be harmful to them, b…

I always found these arguments to be contrived especially when it's already well-known that in the tradition of every Western government, there is no actual imperative for every crime to be linked directly to a victim. It's a far better argument to me, to suggest that the societal utility in using the material to identify and remove paedophiles before they have an actual victim far exceeds the utility of any sort of "freedom" to such material.

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#34

Post by ashleyn »

danaris wrote: post #30

If it's AI-generated, it is fundamentally not CSAM. The reason we shifted to the terminology "CSAM", away from "child pornography", is specifically to indicate that it is Child Sexual Abuse Material: that is, an actual child was sexually abused to make it. You can call it child porn if you really want, but do not call something that never involved the abuse of a real, living, flesh-and-blood child "CSAM". (Or "CSEM"—…

This is where my technical knowledge of genAI breaks down, but wouldn't an image generator be unable to produce such imagery unless honest-to-god CSAM were used in the training of it?

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#35

Post by Hizonner »

tetrisgm wrote: post #24

Between the 3D printed weapons and the AI CSAM, this year is already shaping up to be wild in terms of misuses of technology. I suppose that’s one downside of adoption.

The main "3D printed weapons" scare was years ago. The current thing is just a blip.

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#37

Post by defrost »

Hizonner wrote: post #27
defrost wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a legally challengable assertion there; "trained on CSAM images". I imagine an AI image generation model could be readily trained on images of adult soldiers at war and images of children from instagram and then be used to generate imagery of children at war. I have zero interest in defending exploitation of children, the assertion that children had to have been exploited in order to create images of children…

> There's a legally challengable assertion there; "trained on CSAM images". "Legally challengable" only in a pretty tenuous sense that's unlikely to ever haven any actual impact. That'll be something that's recited as a legislative finding. It's not an element of the offense; nobody has to prove that "on this specific occasion the model was trained in this or that way". It could theoretically have some impact on a ch…

My comment was in response to a portion of the comment above:

> because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims

I'd argue that CSAM imagery falls into two broad categories; actual real photographic image of actual real abuse and generated images (paintings, drawings, animations, etc) and all generated images are more or less equally bad.

There's a peer link in this larger thread ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn... ) that indicates at least two US citizen have been charged and sentenced for 20 and 40 years imprisonment each for the possession and distribution of "fictional" child abuse (animated and still japanese cartoon anime, etc).

So, in the wider world, it's a moot point whether these specific images came from training on actual abuse images or not, they depict abuse and that's legally sufficient in the US (apparently), further the same depictions could be generated with or without actual real abuse images and as equivilant images either way they'd be equally offensive.

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#38

Post by _aavaa_ »

jsheard wrote: post #26
defrost wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you would be hard-pressed to prove that any model trained on internet scrapes definitively wasn't trained on any CSAM whatsoever. I'd be hard pressed to prove that you definitely hadn't killed anybody ever. Legally if it's asserted that these images are criminal because they are the result of being the product of an LLM trained on sources that contained CSAM then the requirement would be to prove that asser…

Framing it in that way is essentially a get out of jail free card - anyone caught with CSAM can claim it was AI generated by a "clean" model, and how would the prosecution ever be able to prove that it wasn't? I get where you are coming from but it doesn't seem actionable in any way that doesn't effectively legalize CSAM possession, so I think courts will have no choice but to put the burden of proof on the accused.…

This seems like a long way of saying “guilty until proven innocent”.

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#39

Post by 6ix8igth »

ashleyn wrote: post #34
danaris wrote: post #30

If it's AI-generated, it is fundamentally not CSAM. The reason we shifted to the terminology "CSAM", away from "child pornography", is specifically to indicate that it is Child Sexual Abuse Material: that is, an actual child was sexually abused to make it. You can call it child porn if you really want, but do not call something that never involved the abuse of a real, living, flesh-and-blood child "CSAM". (Or "CSEM"—…

This is where my technical knowledge of genAI breaks down, but wouldn't an image generator be unable to produce such imagery unless honest-to-god CSAM were used in the training of it?

It's possible for the model to take disparate concepts and put them together. E.g. you can train a LORA to teach stable diffusion what a cowboy hat it is, then ask for Dracula in a cowboy hat.that probably doesn't exist in it's training data, but it will give it to you just fine. I'm not about to try, but I would assume the same would apply for child pornography.

Re: Under new law, cops bust famous cartoonist for AI-generated CSAM

#40

Post by darquomiahw »

AI-generated "CSAM" is the perfect form of kompromat. Any computer with a GPU can generate images that an American judge can find unpalatable. Once tarred by the sex offender brush and cooled by 20+ years in prison for possession, any individual will be effectively destroyed. Of course, no real children are being abused, which makes it all the more ludicrous.
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