I don't get it - isn't this blatant copyright infringement? Seems like they're just running some kind of cracked Minecraft build with a JVM-in-JS layer or some such trickery?
I had a lot of love for cPanel back in the 2000s, when the days of shared hosting and self-installed PHP scripts were in their heyday. Nowadays, though, isn't this just a relic of an earlier time? Who/why would use it for anything today, versus deploying on some PaaS, or Lambda, or.. what have you? Particularly at the prices they're charging.
I can appreciate the technical aspect of a translation layer, but I struggle to understand the use case for a tool like this. If your data is inherently relational, then you should be using a relational store anyway. And if it isn't, trying to hammer it on-demand into something that looks relational is going to eat you with performance implications. Unless I'm missing something.
Do people forget how to drive if there are no lights? I can't imagine many people would think "well, there are no lights, which means GREEEEEEEN!". Over here, a traffic light that doesn't work means it's now a stop sign.
That's still a recipe for massive gridlock as treating most traffic junctions as stop signs doesn't scale unless there are traffic cops to manually direct traffic
I've never seen a traffic cop but I've driven past maybe fifty or a hundred broken or shutoff traffic lights, mainly in our largest city and never got stuck. Local law states that you give cars coming from the right precedence and the crossing self organises around that.
I work in Barcelona and live in a town 20Km outside it. I drove back home just fine at around 16PM. Some traffic in the city, but manegable. My town has had electricity in homes since 15PM, some neighbourghs told me.
At night I drove to my parent's (different town, 10km away) since I couldn't communicate with them and was worried. Their town was pitch black. People were driving mostly safe and slowly. Of course you get the random POS that doesn't care, but I didn't feel in danger at any moment. My parents were fine. I drove back home later and same story.
I just woke up (it's 7AM here) and the Internet is back and I have a message from my parents, their electricity is back too.
Overall, I didn't see any crazy behaviour.
Not a lawyer, but this sure seems to open a legal and ethical can of worms.
Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing, the possession of which is inarguably illegal and immoral.
So how could the model be legally or ethically trained? And if they _cannot_ be legally or ethically trained, then how can the _use_ of those models be okay?
What will be the implications of this in cases where _real_ CSAM was produced or possessed? Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses. After all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not, unless the chain of production is verified?
From the article:
> ...If purely private possession of AI-CSAM is constitutionally protected under current caselaw but production is not, then using AI models (even locally-hosted ones) to generate child obscenity in one’s own home is not wholly insulated from criminal prosecution. Subsequently transmitting it to someone else, especially someone underage, is also grounds for liability...
This is a common misunderstanding. The thing knows how a naked woman looks, also knows how a child looks, it puts two and two together and voila. It doesn't need to be trained on the real thing to be able to generate it.
Diffusion models do posses some capability to synthesize ideas, but that capability does not necessarily generalize to every possible use case. So it's impossible to say for certain that that is what is happening.
We can get more certainty by testing combinations of those concepts with a whole bunch of other ones. Naked skateboarder. Child construction worker. It has a lot more variety for both of those concepts than with wine glasses.
We can also check models that have very highly vetted input sets.
That video makes some good observatons, but it's also hilarious that he tried to "retrain" ChatGPT by asking it in the chat to remove some items from its dataset.
Why not? I am pretty sure there is no training data of “whales playing the guitar”, but if you ask a model to draw one, it will do a respectable job of imagining that scenario.
If it is trained on well-tagged images of adult men and women both clothed and unclothed, and clothed children (not that all pictures of unclothed children are CSAM to start with), understanding the relation of clothed to unclothed appearance could allow a model to reasonably generalize unclothed child bodies.
Further, models that are otherwise well trained with a mix of photographic and drawn content can often generalize specific concepts for which their training only includes examples from drawn content to photorealistic imagery involving that concept.
I don't believe that is true. A woman and a child have distinct characteristics that are not interchangeable. A child for example can be detected by the shape of the nose and nostrils as just one data point. There are many more data-points that psycho-analysts use to determine if a person is attracted to children. AI would have to understand quite a bit of biology and understand how humans develop to get this right.
Image generation models are perfectly capable of mixing different concepts to create images of things they're incredibly unlikely to have seen during training.
That sounds like a hit-or-miss concept to me. Without logic that teaches the AI why a child and an adult look the way they do it would maybe sometimes get it right by chance and other times not. I do not see how one could guarantee an outcome with the logic of the generation models unless it understands biology or was trained on real people which advertisements have no shortage of. Advertisements lack nudity and would leave out details like a hymen.
You can have artist draw art with the differences. And then you can get it via style transfer. But there are already many images of children with noses.
Statistically, you'd expect this to result in depictions of children with public hair - some adults opt to get rid of theirs, but most have it. Are you sure you're not projecting your prior knowledge about human biology onto an image transformer model?
> Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing,
I doubt that is so. In practice they might be trained on the real thing, but models generalise pretty well. It is going to be technically possible to train a model on other material (children, nudity and non-CSAM abuse scenes or maybe not even that) and have it generate CSAM.
But even if it was true, that would only make training the model illegal and ethically dubious. We use a tonne of technologies where the creator was legally and morally dubious. It's never been an ongoing issue before. So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created.
I’m gonna give this a very charitable read by saying that while I find the ways that the treatment of burn victims was advanced by abhorrent means, we as a society have still benefited from those means.
> So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created.
I am trying to be very specific here. I assume no untoward motivations from the parent commenter. I am not intending to cast aspersions. Whoever wrote this, I feel no ill will for you and this is not meant as a personal slight.
And I will be very clear, this statement as written could probably be defended because of the “by how it was created” clause.
However, “So once the model is created there isn’t a good reason to encumber it” is so… fucking I don’t even know, because what the actual fuck?
I apologize for the profanity, I really do. But, really? Are you fucking kidding me?
These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail.
I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. That’s all I think happened here. But holy fuck, please pause and consider things a bit.
Outlawing the use of existing material is vital market protection for producers. Denouncing these models may not actually be a good way to reduce harm.
> These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail.
If it's possible to produce CSAM that doesn't involve actual children and have a measurable impact in profitablity and demand of the real thing, leading to a net reduction in the harm done to children wouldn't you be on the wrong side of the argument you think you're making?
> I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment.
I would argue it's a rational take.
Can we agree the goal to reduce harm of children is good? Or only if the solution is comfortable to you?
All the alternatives are likely to result in more children being harmed. These models probably should exist. Ideally they'll destroy the commercial incentives for people to hurt children.
> Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses
You are probably right, given what we saw with all the porn popup adware back in the 90's and 2000's. A friend of mine was a malware analyst for the FBI for a while.
All CSAM possession cases she heard about, the defense was "malware did it". Nearly all cases the jury convicted them. 100% of her cases for sure.
At some point using the defense everyone else uses and fails with is probably going to become a liability. Shit I am sure people are already trying to use this defense and failing!
It only went to court because they had enough evidence to prove it is not malware. You have excluded all of the possible cases that used the malware defense and plea’d out or never went to trial.
Similarly, I think using the AI art excuse may be an uphill battle but not one that is impossible to defend
This isn't how the legal system works. Most CP cases get prosecuted because the defendant solicits or shares CP with a minor of some other CP collectors, but let's imagine a situation where someone gets busted from something else and then investigators discover they have CP (real-world non-AI CP in this example).
Having it at all is a strict liability crime. If the defendant says malware put it on their computer and they don't know how or when it got there, that's called an affirmative defense - it's admissible as a claim, but the burden of proof for the claim is on the defendant. Otherwise you could just claim it was planted on your computer by ghosts or demons or space aliens. If the machine was infested with malware to the point of the browser being nearly inoperable and all sort so fother junk being present, a jury might buy it. But the defendant has to make some sort of showing to back up the claim. The whole thing about 'reasonable doubt' in criminal cases is not that something sounds possible or even plausible, but that you can support the claim with some mix of logic and empirical evidence like any other reasoned argument.
While disgusting, I'm thinking that if the courts insist on allowing this, I can try and comfort myself with this thought: I don't doubt that if you find one "AI CSAM" image on someone's drive, keep digging — you'll find illegal stuff too.
Usually when someone is arrested for this kind of thing it's not one image but a couple thousand so you are right.
Edit add:
I have mixed feeling about this...Let me preface by saying that child abuse is abhorrent.
One of my former coworkers was arrested for possession of CSAM...he was never charged or accused of any abuse. I wasn't close to him; he was quiet and went out of his way to help. He (probably)killed himself(young, died suddenly) last week ahead of his trial.
So I have to wonder would having something like this help him and protect kids as well? Or does possession lead to abuse?
I don't know...people have problems and are sick. At what point do we write them off as irredeemable?
I know. I am aware of a man who abused some of my friends — also committed suicide before trial. By all accounts, most of the boys (who were from broken homes, FWIW) thought of him as a father figure and were not eager to see him prosecuted — shocked when they learned of the suicide.
A friend of the family tried to molest me when I was young. A quick search on the internet shows he kept at it (arrest records across decades abound). So, yeah, this kind of sick person kind of stays sick.
> Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing
This is absolutely not true. Generalization is a key capability of image generation models.
> Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses.
The worst justification for a criminal prohibition that I can think of is that it is provides a convenient out for the difficulty of proving another, more clearly warranted, crime.
> After all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not, unless the chain of production is verified?
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is not, and never had been, "definite".
Interestingly, Ireland is not a NATO member, so it's somewhat surprising Russia is poking around there. Although they're still EU, so maybe that's why.
I'm mostly with you in general. Especially for the amount we pay in taxes, we really ought to have better protections for vulnerable people.
For me in particular, if I were fired a year into every job and had to be unemployed for ten, counting all the health insurance bullshit and whatnot you have in this country when you're unemployed, I'd still be better off financially than in any EU tech job I've found. HN isn't exactly a representative sample of the sort of people who benefit from EU labour protections.
Man, nothing makes me appreciate USA labor laws like reading the HN comments. I (unironically) love how it's easy to get a job here; since firing is easy, employers are more willing to take a chance on hiring someone. Plus it would suck as an employee to be forced to give your employer 4+ weeks of notice if you want to resign. Whereas in the USA with at-will employment we can quit tomorrow with zero notice and suffer no financial penalties.
I have worked both in the EU and in Brazil and I do have to say that the Brazilian system is better. Labor protection is high (25 vacation days, guaranteed overtime pay, etc), but companies can still fire people. However doing so involves paying severance proportional to how long you been at the company.
When you leave a company you need to give one month notice (so you can't just get up and leave). I never seen a "layoff" (you get notice that you are leaving, but still have your job for a few months and usually no severance) like they do in the EU. When you are fired, you are out of there the same day with your severance and unemployment benefits.
This specific practice does have a few problems:
1) companies not firing about-to-retire employees who have been at the company for 10+ years because of the huge severance required. Instead they just wait for them to retire. However employees also really don't want to get fired in their last few years either before retirement because of how the pension system works, so it balances-out. 60+ year old people usually take it easy, but they are usually not just showing up for a paycheck.
2) Younger employees trying to get fired instead of quitting. If you been at a company for 3-4 years and you want to leave it is really a lot more beneficial to get fired instead. I have seen this happen, but not nearly as much as you would think (at least in IT).
Although you would think companies would want to "recycle" employees by firing them every year to prevent the severance from piling up. The math doesn't really work out like that on top of all possible disruptions of such high attrition rate.
EU is certainly not a single country and states have sometimes wildly different rules and labor laws. That specific situation is impossible at least in some countries.
I used quoted "layoff", in my experience when people are let go it happens during a reorganization mediated by an union where some positions are found to be unnecessary and people are given notice that their employment is being terminated but still work for a few months.
Since this is mediated by an union it only happens if there is a good reason (usually financial problems). I never seen it on an individual case basis it is always multiple people at the same time.
Sorry if I wasn't specific, but the severance part is Brazilian specific which I was claiming works better than the "can not fire anyone ever" way a lot of EU countries work
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