Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#111

Post by olelele » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

carljungslabtek wrote: post #88

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #45

Somewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window. Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad. The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know…

Part of me would like to stop paying for a youtube premium family subscription because they keep raising the price, but my mom watches it a lot and I don’t want her to see (or have to see) those ads. They’re so unbelievably bad. It can’t be good for your brain to watch, the few times I’ve seen them on my work computer I can’t help but watch part of them.

Install Brave Browser for your mom?

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#112

Post by ASalazarMX » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

burningChrome wrote: post #67

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #11

All their fines are merely a cost of doing business, and they won't change their ways until the fines hurt.

This is so true. When you have a billion users, you can literally lose hundreds of millions of users and it wouldn't make a dent. The only way is to get the government involved and regulate this and just keep hammering them with massive fines that really make a dent in their bottom line. For a lot of people, government regulation of this sort is not desirable, but at what point does someone need to drop the hammer to…

I guess you're used to standard billions (a million millions). A US billion would certainly suffer from losing hundreds of millions, you're talking about a double-digit percent.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#113

Post by olelele » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

lenerdenator wrote: post #50

This is what happens when you let a company be controlled by one person who has no reason to be accountable to anyone. If Zuckerberg wants total voting control, then he can also deal with the consequences of being caught hosting CSAM.

Digital feudalism. Musk is building a city where he can prohibit worker organizing. Joe Hill died for nothing.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#114

Post by ethanwillis » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

meric_ wrote: post #57

I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number. This truly is a case where AI is the solution. There's no way to automate this at scale with humans. As AI gets better hopef…

Their right to a business model doesn't outweigh the right of the public to not be harmed.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#115

Post by techjamie » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

spacecadet404 wrote: post #64

meric_ wrote: post #57

I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them. At this scale it's pretty mind bogglingly difficult to moderate down everything. The ads/posts served per second is an astronomical number. This truly is a case where AI is the solution. There's no way to automate this at scale with humans. As AI gets better hopef…

AI is generating ads that will be reviewed by AI that will then be pushed to humans largely to ignore. Ad pipeline is malware at this point.

> Ad pipeline is malware at this point.

Always has been.

Occasionally my girlfriend will comment on something she saw in an ad, even buy things off them. Thing is though that ad platforms don't seem to be doing anything meaningful to stop bad actors.

So really, clicking any ad and interacting with it amounts to placing your trust in a total stranger with the only criteria being they paid a little bit of money for you to see them. To which you will then download their software, give them your credit card, or whatever the end goal is.

It's far easier to assume anything in an advertisement is a scam and block them accordingly.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#116

Post by otherayden » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #45

Somewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window. Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad. The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know…

I tried this experiment out and it is right on the money. The ad I got was AI generated video with AI script & audio selling fake 16TB SSDs. Wonder if anybody has some insider info on how these ads are produced at scale / who's behind them

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#117

Post by bilegeek » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #66

godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #45

Somewhat related: open YouTube in an incognito window. Search something rather innocuous like "news". Click the first thing then go back to the main page. You have to watch through the ad. The amount of slop you will get suggested as soon as the algorithm warms up is nuts. The ad you are first served might also be slop. I mean AI generated video advertising overt bogus cures (a memorable one recently - "did you know…

Youtube is pushing a lot of AI features without creators' consent. Some of it can be turned off but others cannot. It's becoming a major problem. Can't wait till they lose so much money on the infrastructure that they have to remove it all.

The auto-translation especially bothers me. Kinda cool for casual viewing... but the inability to disable it gives me an immediate skeptical "this entire channel is probably AI slop" response before I recognize what's happened.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#118

Post by disillusioned » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

Beyond these obviously deplorable ads, my wife got sniped by an ecommerce lookalike ad on Google the other day: a near-identical match of the vendor she was looking for, with a paid for sponsored ad (that was clearly linked to some chinese firm upon further review). Site had prices that were just a bit too good to be true, and a slightly different TLD that _I_ would've caught, but she missed because the price was a bit too good to be true. Only caught it when Citi asked me if I was spending 9000EGD on some random website.

And my point here is, we're in this great revolution of AI empowered everything and... these companies can't be bothered to scan this volume of AI ad slop to make sure we're not being actively scammed? Or having porn or CSAM spread? I understand it's a "perverse incentive" in the truest sense: they make money by taking the scammers money, but I was scammed once by an insanely clever lookalike Facebook ad, and had trusted their verified checkmark (about a decade ago)... with AI, these things should be a thing of the past.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#119

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

Guys, it's fine.

Relax.

It's only a crime if someone else does it or is not sufficiently wealthy, otherwise it's a mistake.

Re: Meta Ran Ads That Contained AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Imagery

#120

Post by john_strinlai » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

jimjimjim wrote: post #109

john_strinlai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they couldn't possibly do it at that the scale they're operating at. They couldn't hire enough people in the countries they operate, or know the language, or trust that who they do hire aren't corrupt or working against their interest. And they can't manually approve every ad, or make sure targeting isn't illegal or otherwise harmful. you say sarcasm, but i think this is literally true. this isn't a defense of…

"While remaining a going concern." Well, tough. Maybe they should have to find a way. If that means requiring everybody to have to pay to afford the moderators then so be it. All the other companies would have to as well.

>Well, tough.

right, that was my point.