Technology

In all seriousness, there are some very interesting legal questions that will be raised if this case makes it that far.

The problem is that there's no existing law that would effect this on its own. To my knowledge, no country in the world has a law on the books specifically dealing with AI models trained on CSAM. So the question, under existing laws, would turn on whether the data stored within the model itself would constitute CSAM.

The problem, in no small part, is that we have serious gaps in our public consensus knowledge about how LLMs actually work.

There's a case that, AFAIK, is still being argued in Germany pushing the theory that LLMs actually do, in effect, store a copy of all their training data, just in a compressed form. This certainly seems to hold some water given both the tests they relied on, and the situation with this Jane Doe where the model produced images so alike to real images of her that they tripped hash detections.

The German case argues that this is analogous to the difference between an MP3 and a WAV, or a JPEG and a PNG. That sharing a lossy copy of a work is no less infringing just because it's imperfect.

If the underlying claim - that LLMs function as a form of lossy compression - can be substantiated then there would be a real argument that the model itself would constitute CSAM. Since there would be no realistic method that I'm aware of for removing the offending material from the model - and presumably SpaceX would have to somehow prove that they've done so - that would make the entire model contraband. They'd have to retrain on a clean dataset.

Of course I said "if the case makes it that far" at the top because I don't think it will. SpaceX will do anything and everything to avoid handing over meaningful discovery in this case, including, I suspect, outright destruction of evidence. If there is anything that actually proves that they used CSAM in the training data then they are so far beyond fucked that there's simply no downside to further illegality in pursuit of concealing their crimes. They have the world's wealthiest asshole in a position to throw literal billions at making this go away. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if people turn up dead off the back of this if that's what it takes.