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

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

#161
post #65

I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.

Reported an obvious sexual ad the other day and got a very AI generated response that started with "Dear Username" stating that they reviewed the ad and found nothing wrong with it.

Before I gave up on Facebook entirely, I reported an ad that was an explicit blow job and received a similar response and this was before AI was huge. I really don't think they've ever cared.

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

#162
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…

In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all. Maybe yeah, if you can't build a sufficiently strong automated system, then you need human moderators across a huge number of locations. Them's the breaks for running a wildly profitable service that half the world's population uses.

[deleted]

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10^9 is the standard definition of a billion, it's very wrong to call 10^12 a "standard billion." You can say "long scale billion" if you want to refer to the definitively non-standard 10^12 billion.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many industries, if you can't do something safely, you simply can't do it at all. Maybe yeah, if you can't build a sufficiently strong automated system, then you need human moderators across a huge number of locations. Them's the breaks for running a wildly profitable service that half the world's population uses.

Then let's not have any infrastructure or services because some people use it to commit crimes. The car industry doesn't prevent accidents, the telecom industry doesn't prevent scams, the school industry doesn't prevent bullying, the nightlife industry doesn't prevent rape or drug use and i can go on and on. You can't have a perfect system, people will do what they do, all you can do is trying to prevent those crimes…

Although I agree, thats a textbook slippery slope you started out with there.

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

#165
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is filters/moderation.

There are, but only for using IP of large corporations. If you put 12 seconds of a major label song in your video review of an album, that video belongs to the major label now.

It's a lot easier to automatically detect a match to 1 specific thing than detect a match to a completely novel thing that offends sensibilities in a similar way to other things.

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

#166

I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.

I just don't get their algorithm. I used to show YT videos to my students but I stopped that totally because of this kind of crap.

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

#167
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…

> I'm wondering what people expect these companies to do? Human moderators? Sure, but Meta products have approximately half the worlds population using them

In this case, we are talking about ad images.

1000 moderators x 5 second per image to click deny or approve.

So 1000 moderators review 720000 ads/hour

Per 8 hour workday: 5,760,000 ads

Per full 24h day: 17,280,000 ads

So we will use 3k for 3 shifts.

51,840,000 new image ads moderated per day.

At ~$1,000 per moderator per month (most jobs are outsourced to Africa and Asia):

$3 million per month $36 million per year

I don't see any public numbers for how many new ads they add daily but meta reported removing 159 million scam ads during 2025, so equivalent to around 436,000 scam ad removals per day.

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

#168
post #100
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…

They have the resources to hire a vast number of people. So yes they probably could manually review every ad. And either way it is their problem to solve. They are not entitled to be hugely profitable or free from the obligations that smaller organisations have.

Surely there is no need to review every ad. Coke and Apple and whatnot are not going to be doing this. New companies or companies with a history of complaints can face extra scrutiny. With AI capabilities so far along you have tier 1 ready for free…

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

#169
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…

There are two separate content moderation issues at play here: user-generated content and Meta & advertisers-generated content. The moderation challenge related to the fomer is much harder. But this article is about the latter. The researchers literally found these ads in Meta's own ad library. Meta sells these ads so they must content moderate them. There is no excuse.

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

#170

I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.

Google Play Store showed my child an ad of a bloody body on a bed for a murder mystery game. The game was rated 18+ and the account had my daughter’s correct single digit age. I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.

Listen, we need you to verify your identity in order for us to not serve these ads to your kids. It's very important that you do this.
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