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.

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    146
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    13 days ago

    Not a single peep about false positives.

    I’m sure it won’t be abused though. And if anyone does complain, just get their electronics seized and checked, because they must be hiding something!

    • oldfart@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      89
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      13 days ago

      Reminds me of the A cup breasts porn ban in Australia a few years ago, because only pedos would watch that

        • Scratch@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          50
          ·
          13 days ago

          Not to mention the self image impact such things would have on women with smaller breasts, who (as I understand it) generally already struggle with poor self image due to breast size.

          • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            25
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            13 days ago

            Clearly the state gives zero fucks about these women, or anyone else or even “the children”

            Catholic Church is still around for a reason

            • Halosheep@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              ·
              edit-2
              12 days ago

              Typically the state only cares about things they perceive as children.

          • Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            23
            ·
            13 days ago

            If this is the price I must pay, I will pay it, sir! No man should be deprived of privately viewing a consenting adults perfectly formed small tit’s. They can take my liberty, they can take my livelihood, but they will never take away my boner for puffy nipples on a small chested half Japanese woman!

      • baldingpudenda@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        49
        ·
        12 days ago

        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.

      • AmidFuror@fedia.io
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        12 days ago

        Australia has a more general ban on selling or exhibiting hard porn, but is is legal to possess it. So it’s not just small boobs.

    • Erasmus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      80
      arrow-down
      8
      ·
      13 days ago

      Just remember folks. Kutcher is a slimeball too.

      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.

      Yeah right……

      • Nine@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        arrow-down
        4
        ·
        13 days ago

        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…

      • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        13 days ago

        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?

        • Erasmus@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          18
          arrow-down
          9
          ·
          12 days ago

          It’s awful coincidental that he seems to hang out with the ‘rapist’ crowd. Even going as far as writing a letter for Masterson as to how nice of a guy he is to try to get him a lenient sentence.

          Even Hollywood has ostracized him and his wife - news sites recently reported they were looking to leave the country and let things cool off for a while.

          I’m sure everyone is right though that keep posting here, that he is a swell guy who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, multiple times. Several years worth of multiple times with wrong people. Just a coincidence.

          • BassTurd@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            22
            arrow-down
            6
            ·
            12 days ago

            The difference between us giving him a benefit of the doubt and claiming innocence and your take, is that you are labeling him a pedophile without proof. That’s a significant claim if false, and imo takes an assumption too far. Maybe he’s bad and it should be looked into, but saying he did something because he was on a show with and good friends with a guy that happened to be a rapist is wrong.

        • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 days ago

          Nah, it’s much easier to chastise people for not knowing what nobody knew

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        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 ?

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      13 days ago

      Has he ever called put the Catholic church or does he only care about pictures of abuse but not actual abuse?

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    55
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    13 days ago

    I am a bit confused how it is legal for them to have the training data here?

    Like is there anything a corpo can’t do?

    Like why can’t subway Jared and Catholic church “train the AI”

    Only half way joking, what’s the catch here?

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      36
      ·
      13 days ago

      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.

      • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        13 days ago

        So doesn’t that make the law enforcement having the biggest CP collection from everybody? This sounds kinda dangerous…

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          26
          ·
          edit-2
          13 days ago

          It does. Kinda.

          The police are seldom allowed to be in possession of CSAM, except for in terms of grabbing the hardware which contains it in an arrest. The database used in modern detection tools is maintained by NCMEC which has special permission to do so.

          And of course there are risks, but it’s just digital data. Unless you are creating more, you’re not actively harming anyone. And law enforcement absolutely needs that data to take some of the most obvious steps to prevent it being spread further.

          Obviously, someone has access, but to get to the actual media files wouldn’t be simple. What typically happens, is that anyone wanting to detect CSAM, is given a hashed version of the database. They can then scan their systems for CSAM by hashing any media they are hosting, and seeing whether there are any matches.

          Whenever possible, people aren’t handling the actual media. But for any detection to be possible to begin with, the database of the actual media does need to be maintained somewhere.

          AI is a touchier subject, as you can’t train a model to recognize CSAM not already in the database using hashes, so in those cases you have to work with actual real media. This is only recently becoming a thing.

          It also leaves open the possibility for false positives. An oft cited example is parents taking pictures of their own children for innocent reasons, or doctors and parents handling images for valid medical reasons. In a system that flagged such content, it would mean someone else would be seeing that “private” content because it was flagged.

    • Hoimo@ani.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      12 days ago

      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.

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    edit-2
    13 days ago

    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”)

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    13 days ago

    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…

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      12 days ago

      IFTAS is already working with Thorn towards this goal. But you already have access to such technology through my toolset.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        This one? 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.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          12 days ago

          Ye, a normal VPS would be too slow for production use, as a GPU is recommended. But you can plug in any home PC to do it without risks

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            12 days ago

            Do you think this approach would be worth a try for the threaded Fediverse (aka Lemmy)? I mean your use-case is very different. We have some rudimentary image detection to flag other kinds of unwanted images in Piefed. I could experiment with something like https://github.com/monatis/clip.cpp. Have it go through the media cache and see if it can do something useful for us. But I don’t think it’d be worth all the effort unless the whole approach is somewhat accurate and runs in real time on average VPSes.

            • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              12 days ago

              This approach was developed precicely for threaded fediverse. The initial use-case was protecting my own lemmy from CSAM! Check out fedi-safety and pictrs-safety

    • BetaDoggo_@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      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.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        12 days ago

        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.

  • sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    Jesus Christ. If someone ever got their hands on this model they could use it to generate new material. The grossest possible AI model to date

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      12 days ago

      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).

      • sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        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.

        • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          12 days ago

          You are describing the way deepdream works, not the way modern Diffusion models work. It’s the difference between psychedelic dog faces and a highly adherent generative image of a German Sheppard.

          I can’t imagine you’re going to get anything out of this model that actually looks like CSAM, unless there’s some sort of breakthrough in using these models for previously unrealized generative purposes.

    • Kbobabob@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      12 days ago

      I thought being able to do that was already a thing. This is designed to do the opposite.

      I know, I know… bad actors and such.

      • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        …but if simple posession defines who a bad actor is…

        The irony of this never ceases to amaze me.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    13 days ago

    This seems like a potential actual good use of AI. Can’t have been much fun to train it though.

    And is there any risk of people turning these kinds of models around and using them to generate images?

    • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      35
      arrow-down
      11
      ·
      13 days ago

      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.

      • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        13 days ago

        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.

        But, there should always be a human in the loop.

      • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        13 days ago

        “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.

        • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          edit-2
          13 days ago

          The problem is that they won’t.

          Yes, AI tools, in the hands of skilled people, can be very helpful.

          But “AI” in capitalism doesn’t mean “more effective workers”, it means “fewer workers.” The issue isn’t technological so much as cultural. You fundamentally cannot convince an MBA not to try to automate away jobs.

          (It’s not even a money thing; it’s about getting rid of all those pesky “workers rights” that workers like to bring with us)

          • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            12 days ago

            Here’s the thing. This technology is unequivocally one of the things AI would be very useful for. It can potentially do a lot of good. Yes, MBAs could screw it up like they screw anything else up in society. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be happy that we’ve created this new tech.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      13 days ago

      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.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      13 days ago

      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.

    • Hoimo@ani.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      12 days ago

      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.

  • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    13 days ago

    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.

    • atomicorange@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      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.

  • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    13 days ago

    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.

    • Ghostie21@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      12 days ago

      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.

      • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        11 days ago

        How is this proliferating csam?

        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.

        • Ghostie21@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          10 days ago

          Sorry I cannot post a longer response but I’d suggest you look up how this type of forensic software is developed and used. There are a few good documentaries on it if you look, one I remember watching was on googles team for this stuff.

          The images are not exactly shared in that very few people have access to them, and they treat it very much like classified information so that only select people can see them.

          These models would be developed using normal images and then trained in closed systems with the real images where the accuracy is used and not the images. No need to scar the developers who just want to work.

          Nothing about the reporting of people will change, the only difference is this will allow the FBI to have a list of suspected CP and a list of normal images from a computer allowing them to spend a fraction of the time looking at this stuff to document it. This is very important when you have people who have literally terrabytes of the stuff and probably even more normal images. In general we like to minimize the time spent looking at such stuff because it is so scarring.

          As for showing the images in court, in the US hashes are acceptable evidence, again we don’t like to scar people by showing them this stuff. Additionally after you’ve been shown the 100th picture of a baby being abused and the FBI is telling you they have 1000000 more, you’ll just take their word for it.

          Anyways, hope you have a good one

    • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      12 days ago

      This ain’t about the victims… It never was, otherwise churches would NOT exist in current form.

      This is about police and corpo state gaining power.