Not big surprise. We live in a "do evil now, ask for forgiveness" later world. I'm getting tired of evil.
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Any and all AIs that scraped the net for training data has inevitably come across CSAM. This is why wholesale scraping is a terrible idea and has corrupted all the data with pretty nasty things.
And it's not just CSAM, it's all the worst shit humanity has to offer.
This is beyond fucked up. There should be laws in place such that if a company is found to be using CSAM in any way, the company ceo and anyone else involved in the work that uses it is personally criminally liable. No hiding behind a corporate shield with this stuff.
I don't believe ANY AI company using internet data to train AI has gone through all of the data to insure it's not absolute shite.
That seems pretty obvious when you realize that AI is stupid. Most people are stupid, AI is stupid. Tons of pedophiles, AI makes kiddy porn. Millions of racists, AI is racist.
Once I realized this, AI made sense. Checks out.
*ensure. Ensure means 'to make secure', and insure means 'to have an insurance policy'.
But you're right. Unfortunately, the biggest weakness with AI is that it's a funhouse mirror. Problem is, none of us are having fun.
I'm morbidly curious about the engineers Musk hires, because overwhelmingly the most intelligent engineers and scientists I know wouldn't dream of applying to work at one of his companies. Even the ones that don't care about the Nazi shit have still read the many reports about how badly he treats his staff.
Working at spaceX is appealing, because there are not many opportunities to work at the frontier of the industry.
I can't imagine any 5 year old wanting to work at the boaring company.
i think part of the answer to your curiosity are IT layoffs. job market is shit right now. even though overwhelming majority of people would not work under these conditions if they could choose freely, when they have a mortgage and a family to take care of and they've been out of work for long enough the moral concerns and dignity can quickly be overriden by more pressing needs...
If Doe is actually recognizable, then chances are high that actual pictures of her or him were used for training the AI. Wouldn't surprise me. They scrape the internet for everything they can get their digital hands on, regardless of copyright or criminal law. They are bound to find illegal stuff on that track.
The next thing is that there are probably confidential data in the training sets, either exposed by neglient users, or by hackers that breached sites and blackmailed them.
And of course all the copyrighted material they used without permission.
If AI companies would really get sued on those three illegal sources, they could probably close their doors.
Next is a "funny" issue: scraping the web without checking sources will inevitably lead to AI trained on illegal content.
The only way for them to prevent that is to train their AI to recognize illegal content. And the only way to do that is to feed it that content with label.
AI corps would have to pay people to watch children sexual abuse and label the videos. (Not that I have the slightest doubt they would proceed if that was allowing them to keep going rampage on web scraping)
People have that job already. How do you think that websites where you can upload amateur porn, filter and block CSAM? Someone has to view the flagged material.
freaks
This should make the entire model illegal. Train it on illegal stuff: delete the whole model.
The US legal system still runs on powdered wigs and good ol boys and closed door midnight meetings. It didn't catch up to the technology booms during our childhood, and it's sure as shit not catching up to anything happening now, hence the unbridled tech bro dystopia currently enshitifying everything you can possibly imagine.
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.
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.
CSAM laws are already overreaching in dimensions that are rife with abuse. It's rare to have a law where owning a picture of something is highly illegal. It's the only law I know of where somebody can just send you a picture on your phone, and suddenly, you're breaking the law. You could be arrested and thrown in prison for even admitting that somebody else sent you the picture.
Police use CSAM as an excuse all the time to search without a warrant. Remember the duress passcode case? Police claimed he had CSAM on his phone, when everybody knew they were targeting his activist work.
And what should we really care about? The CSA. Go after the CSA. Focus on the abuse. The Epstein files are right over there.
Yeah, it's absolutely valid to question the degree to which this is an outcome that we should even want. If someone hides a CSAM image in the Linux kernel should Linux become illegal?
I think there is a valid distinction to be drawn in this case, because removing individual components of an LLM isn't really something we know how to do. So there's a fair argument that a model which is built using illegal content should be illegal, and if that means they have to completely retrain from scratch, so be it.
But yes, I'd want to be very careful about the lines around a law or ruling like that and exactly what it's extent is. Child sex crimes and child safety are topics that tend to short-circuit all reasonable objections, and are frequently exploited as a means of getting bad laws onto the books. Bill C-22 up here in Canada is a great recent example.
Child sex crimes and child safety are topics that tend to short-circuit all reasonable objections,
Globally, there's powers at work to get all kinds of "age verification" laws on the books, which we all know is just a thin excuse for de-anonymization and identity gathering. These same powers were fucking with Steam and Itch.io's payment methods, because "what about the children", which then ties to similar events with PornHub a few years earlier. Congress passed three different "Internet child safety" laws in the 2000s and 2010s, and all three were struck down by the Supreme Court for being unconstitutional. Decades earlier, DARE abused "child safety" justifications for personal gains.
This excuse is used all the time, and the emotional weight it carries makes it shocking effective to the proles that buy it at face value.
It's illegal to posses. Anyone training the models on that is criminally liable for possession as is the company. And it's a conspiracy to posses that was directed by someone, which is now RICO. Will they prosecuted? No.
including, I suspect, outright destruction of evidence
If it was trained on it, that means they are in possession of it, which that right there is straight to jail. I have a feeling they're scrubbing everything they can right now as we chat
Must suck to be a rich pedophile and not even get an invite to Epstein island.
Elon was too creepy for Epstein
You know I know you're joking, but I'm concerned people believe this. Because Elon did hang out with Epstein. There was one email where he was ignored because he was being too thirsty. But that's not the whole story. He loved the island so much he wanted to go back too hard.
thanks for the truth, truth guy :)
Yeah, it is concerning that the myth of him not being allowed to the parties is so common on the internet. It is a myth that is very much in favour of Elon, because it makes people believe that he did not attend the pedo-parties, when we know that he absolutely did.
I knew Elon was a pedophile (he begged to be on the island) but to actually train your AI on CSAM...
Well he should be arrested for possession of child pornography and Grok should be shut down until all of its CSAM is erased from its databanks
Unfortunately that's not really how the actual data is stored. Functionally there is no CSAM at all in its "databanks". Once Info goes through training what comes out the other side is just a mass of goop.
It's like if you took an entire cow ran it though a meat grinder. Then demanded that you remove only the chuck from the resulting ground beef.
It's not physically possible.
You can demand it's retrained entirely from the ground up with vetted data. To produce a higher quality clean dataset. And I would agree that is what should be done.
But you can't unground the beef
on the one hand, it makes sense if your goal is to train AI to recognize child porn as a simple binary state (bool isCP). Social media sites used to have humans looking at that stuff moderating from afar and it really takes a horrendous toll on their employees.
On the other hand, Elon has repeatedly shown he refuses to censor child porn. They didn’t train it to stop making kiddie porn. They trained it to create more kiddie porn. And that’s why he’s rich. Elon won’t say no. He doesn’t care.
bruh
amazing... I know of smaller models that specifically avoided that sort of thing because even negative training could go wrong so easily... they could have avoided that thing entirely, but nope...
I could understand if they were training a safety classifier (a model that learns what danger stuff is so it can recognize it when it sees it) but I doubt this is what they were doing here. That and handling such a radioactive dataset makes handing the demon core seem safe.
"You don't understand! I need my 400 terabytes of child pornography to keep the kids safe!"