AI will make it harder to spread CSAM online, child safety org says.
Today, a prominent child safety organization, Thorn, in partnership with a leading cloud-based AI solutions provider, Hive, announced the release of an AI model designed to flag unknown CSAM at upload. It's the earliest AI technology striving to expose unreported CSAM at scale.
No. This is an inference model, not a generative model. You generally cannot train a model for both, unless you do it on purpose, and they certainly did not (especially since inference models are way easier to train than generative models).
A generative model uses the classifier as part of its training. If you generate a picture of pure random noise, then iteratively pick random noise that the classifier says "looks" more like csam, then you can effectively generate images that the classifier says it's 100% certain is csam. Whether or not that looks anything like what a human would consider to be csam depends on other factors but it remains a possibility.
It could also, of course, make mistakes, but Kevin Guo, Hive's CEO, told Ars that extensive testing was conducted to reduce false positives or negatives substantially. While he wouldn't share stats, he said that platforms would not be interested in a tool where "99 out of a hundred things the tool is flagging aren't correct."
I take this to mean it is at least 1% accurate lol.
This sort of rhetoric really bothers me. Especially when you consider that there are real adult women with disorders that make them appear prepubescent. Whether that's appropriate for pornography is a different conversation, but the idea that anyone interested in them is a pedophile is really disgusting. That is a real, human, adult woman and some people say anyone who wants to live them is a monster. Just imagine someone telling you that anyone who wants to love you is a monster and that they're actually protecting you.
There was a a porn studio that was prosecuted for creating CSAM. Brazil i belive. Prosecutors claimed that the petite, A-cup woman was clearly underaged. Their star witness was a doctor who testified that such underdeveloped breasts and hips clearly meant she was still going through puberty and couldn't possible be 18 or older. The porn star showed up to testify that she was in fact over 18 when they shot the film and included all her identification including her birth certificate and passport. She also said something to the effect of women come in all shapes and sizes and a doctor should know better.
I can't find an article. All I'm getting is GOP trump pedo nominees and brazil laws on porn.
The guy went from a D list star and hanging out with the likes of Danny Masterson and going to Diddy’s infamous parties - to suddenly overnight courting the US government and being the face of ‘helping’ children everywhere.
Wasn't he also featured in a video about how he couldn't wait until Hillary Duff and the Olsen twins turned 18 because he wanted to date them when they were like 15 ?
I’d be wary of calling him guilty by association. Maybe when he realized who he was really hanging out with he was so horrified and disgusted that he just had to get involved and do something to fight back?
People can grow and change. Not saying he did or didn’t. Just saying that people aren’t a monolith. It’s plausible he just grew and his views changed / evolved.
That being said, it’s highly convenient where he’s positioned himself these days…
I don't think you even need the actual stuff to train a neural network to recognize it. For example, if I wanted to train a neural network to recognize pictures of lions, but I didn't have any actual pictures of lions, I could use pictures of lion-shaped things, lion-colored things and locations where lions might appear. If a picture is hitting all three of those, it's very likely to be a lion. Very likely is all a neural network can do, so it's good enough for my purposes.
There are laws around it. Law enforcement doesn't just delete any digital CSAM they seize.
Known CSAM is archived and analyzed rather than destroyed, and used to recognize additional instances of the same files in the wild. Wherever file scanning is possible.
Institutions and corporation can request licenses to access the database, or just the metadata that allows software to tell if a given file might be a copy of known CSAM.
This is the first time an attempt is being made at using the database to create software able to recognize CSAM that isn't already known.
I'm personally quite sceptical of the merit. It may well be useful for scanning the public internet, but I'm guessing the plan is to push for it to be somehow implemented for private communication, no matter how badly that compromises the integrity of encryption.
It's the earliest AI technology striving to expose unreported CSAM at scale.
horde-safety has been out for a year now. Just saying... It's not a trained AI model in this way, but it's still using Neural Networks (i.e. "AI Technology")
And will we get that technology to keep the Fediverse and free platforms safe? Probably not. All the predecessors have been kept away for sole use of the big players, despite populism always claiming we need to introduce total surveillance to keep the children safe...
Thisone? I loosely followed your work... Maybe I should try it someday. See how it does on a regular VPS. Thanks for the link to the IFTAS. Seems they have curated some useful links... I'll have a look at their articles. Hope they get somewhere with that. At this point, I don't think there is any blocklist accessible to the average Fediverse admin?!
Edit: Thx, saw your other comment with the link to horde-safety.
Yeah, unless someone publishes even a set of hashes of known bad content for the general public... I kind of doubt the true intentions are preventing CSAM to the benefit of everyone.
If everyone has access to the model it becomes much easier to find obfuscation methods and validate them. It becomes an uphill battle. It's unfortunate but it's an inherent limitation of most safeguards.
You're probably right. I'm not sure if it's a good idea to walk close to the edge with things like this, though. Every update to the detection model could change things and get them in jail.... So I certainly wouldn't play a cat and mouse game with something that has several years of jailtime attached... But then I don't really know the thought process of the average pedo. And AI image detection comes with problems anyways. In the article they say it detected 6 million pictures already. While keeping quiet about the rate of false positives. We know people have gotten in serious trouble for (false) claims. And I also wouldn't want to be the Fediverse admin who has to go through thousands of flagged pictures and look at them and decide which is which. With consequences attached... Maybe a database of hashes would be the only option. That doesn't detect new pictures, but at the same time it comes without flase positives and you can't draw conclusions from hash values.
Available image generators are already capable of generating those images and they weren't even trained on it. Once a neural network can detect/generate two separate concepts, it can detect/generate the overlap. It won't be as fine-tuned obviously, but can still turn out scarily accurate.
If AI was reliable, maybe. MAYBE. But guess what? It turns out that “advanced autocomplete” does a shitty job of most things, and I bet false positives will be numerous.
It's possible to have a good AI system, but it takes millions of dollars and several thousand manhours to do, and most companies won't put in the effort.
"detect new or previously unreported CSAM and child sexual exploitation behavior (CSE), generating a risk score to make human decisions easier and faster."
False positives don't matter if they stick to the stated intended purpose of making it easier to detect CSAM manually.
And is there any risk of people turning these kinds of models around and using them to generate images?
There isn't really much fundamental difference between an image detector and an image generator. The way image generators like stable diffusion work is essentially by generating a starting image that's nothing but random static and telling the generator "find the cat that's hidden in this noise."
It'll probably take a bit of work to rig this child porn detector up to generate images, but I could definitely imagine it happening. It's going to make an already complicated philosophical debate even more complicated.
I think image generators in general work by iteratively changing random noise and checking it with a classifier, until the resulting image has a stronger and stronger finding of “cat” or “best quality” or “realistic”.
If this classifier provides fine grained descriptive attributes, that’s a nightmare. If it just detects yes or no, that’s probably fine.
Nobody would have been looking directly at the source data. The FBI or whoever provides the dataset to approved groups, but after that you just say "use all the images in this folder" and it goes. But I don't even know if they actually provide real full-resolution images, or just perceptual hashes, or downsampled images.
And while it's possible to use the dataset to generate new images assuming the training data had full-res images, like I said, I know they investigate the people making the request before allowing access. And access is probably supervised and audited.
This is a great development, albeit with a lot of soul crushing development behind it I assume. People who have to look at CSAM or whatever the acronym is have a miserable job, so I'm very supportive of trying to automate that away from people.
Yeah, I’m happy for AI to take this particular horrifying job from us. Chances are it will be overtuned (too strict), but if there’s a reasonable appeals process I could see it saving a lot of people the trauma of having to regularly view the worst humanity has to offer without major drawbacks.
I think all CSAM should be destroyed out of respect for the victims, not proliferated. I don't care who is hanging onto this material or for what purpose.
How is this proliferating csam? Also, how do you expect them to find csam without having known images? It gives a really nice way to check based on hashes without having someone look at every picture on someone's harddrive. With this AI it should greatly help determining new or unknown images while minimizing the number of actual people that have to see that stuff, and who get scarred from looking at such images. The only reason to be against this is if you are looking at CP and want it to be harder to find, or if you don't understand how this technology is being used.
Sharing it with people and companies that it wasn't being shared with before.
Also, how do you expect them to find csam without having known images?
The same way it is now: people reporting it and undercover police accounts. People recognise it.
without having someone look at every picture on someone's harddrive
If it's going to get used as evidence in court a human will have to review and confirm it. I don't think "Because the AI said so" is going to convince juries.
The only reason to be against this is if you are looking at CP
Or if it's you or someone you love who is in the CP. Having further copies of it on further hard drives, whether it's so someone can bake it into their AI tool or any other purpose is wrong. That's just my view though.
It differs in basically being something completely different.
This is a classification model, doesn't have generative capabilities. Even if you were to get the model and it's weights, and you tried to reverse engineer an "input" that it would classify as CP, it would most likely look like pure noise to you.