Sex offender banned from using AI tools in landmark UK case
Sex offender banned from using AI tools in landmark UK case
The decision could set a precedent for future monitoring of people convicted of indecent image offences
A sex offender convicted of making more than 1,000 indecent images of children has been banned from using any “AI creating tools” for the next five years in the first known case of its kind.
Anthony Dover, 48, was ordered by a UK court “not to use, visit or access” artificial intelligence generation tools without the prior permission of police as a condition of a sexual harm prevention order imposed in February.
The ban prohibits him from using tools such as text-to-image generators, which can make lifelike pictures based on a written command, and “nudifying” websites used to make explicit “deepfakes”.
Dover, who was given a community order and £200 fine, has also been explicitly ordered not to use Stable Diffusion software, which has reportedly been exploited by paedophiles to create hyper-realistic child sexual abuse material, according to records from a sentencing hearing at Poole magistrates court.
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As a UK citizen, I'm ashamed of my government.
I am firmly against child abusers, but AI images don't harm anyone and are a safe and harmless way for pedophiles to fulfil their urges, which they cannot control.
Where does the training data come from to create indecent images of children?
It doesn't need csam data for training, it just needs to know what a boob looks like, and what a child looks like. I run some sdxl-based models at home and I've observed it can be difficult to avoid more often than you'd think. There are keywords in porn that blend the lines across datasets ("teen", "petite", "young", "small" etc). The word "girl" in particular I've found that if you add that to basically any porn prompt gives you a small chance of inadvertently creating the undesirable. You have to be really careful and use words like "woman", "adult", etc instead to convince your image model not to make things that look like children. If you've ever wondered why internet-based porn generators are on super heavy guardrails, this is why.
I'm not going to say that csam in training sets isn't a problem. However, even if you remove it, the model remains largely the same, and its capabilities remain functionally identical.
At that point it's still using photos of children to generate csam even if you could somehow assure the model is 100% free of csam
That would be true, it'd be pretty difficult to build a model without any pictures of children at all, and then try and describe to the model how to alter an adult to make a child. Is anyone asking for that though? To make it illegal to have regular pictures of children in these datasets?
No but it is a reason why generating csam should be illegal. You're using data trained on pictures of real kids
I'm not arguing whether or not it should be legal, I was just offering my first hand experience in regards to the capabilities of these local models since people seem to be confused as to how this actually works.
Is anyone asking for that though? To make it illegal to have regular pictures of children in these datasets?
I was responding to this part of your comment which directly refers to legality
I guess I just misunderstood what you were arguing then. For posterity: I believe datasets containing children is fine, datasets containing csam is not, and the legality of generating csam should be left up to psychologists on whether or not it is a societal net benefit. Whichever way is better for children that exist is my vote.
Thanks for the reply, it's given me a good idea of what's most likely happening :)
It's a shame that the rest of the thread went to shit, but unfortunately it's an emotional topic, and brings out emotional responses
Always happy to try and productively add to someone's learning.
It is true, a 10 year old naked woman is just a 30 year old naked woman scaled down by 40%. /s
No buddy, there isn't some vector of "this is the distance between kid and adult" that a model can apply to generate what a hypothetical child looks like. The base model was almost certainly trained on more than just anatomical drawings from Wikipedia - it ate some csam.
If you've seen stuff about "Hitler - Germany + Italy = Mousillini" for models where that's true (which is not universal) it takes an awful lot of training data to establish and strengthen those vectors. Unless the generated images were comically inaccurate then a lot of training went into this too.
Right, and the google image ai gobbled up a bunch of images of black george washington, right? They must have been in the data set, there’s no way to blend a vector from one value to another, like you said. That would be madness. Nope, must have been copious amounts of asian nazis in the training set, since the model is incapable of blending concepts.
You're incorrect and you should fucking know better.
I have no idea why my comment above was downvoted to hell but AI can't "dream up" what a naked young person looks like. An AI can figure that adults wear different clothes and put a black woman in a revolutionary war outfit. These are totally different concepts.
You can downvote me if you like but your AI generated csam is based on real csam so fuck off. I'm disappointed there is such a large proportion of people defending csam here especially since lemmy should be technically oriented - I expect to see more input from fellow AI fluent people.
You’re spreading misinformation and getting called out for it.
Just a note - csam has been found in model training sets: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/investigation-finds-ai-image-generation-models-trained-child-abuse
Ok? Hundreds of images of anything isn't going to necessarily train a model based on billions of images. Have you ever tried to get Stable Diffusion to draw a bow and arrow? Just because it has ever seen something doesn't mean that it has learned it, nor, more importantly, does that mean that is the way it learned it, since we can see that it can infer many concepts from related concepts- pregnant old women, asian nazis, black george washingtons (NONE OF WHICH actually have ever existed or been photographed).. is unclothed children really more of a leap than any of those?
It is, yes. A black George Washington is one known visual motif (a George Washington costume) combined with another known visual motif. A naked prepubescent child isn't just the combination of "naked adult" and "child" naked children don't look like naked adults simply scaled down.
AI can't tell us what something we've never seen looks like... a kid who knows what George Washington and a black woman looks like can imagine a black George Washington. That's probably a helpful analogy, AI can combine simple concepts but it can't innovate - it can dream, but it can't know something that we haven't told it about.
It isn't misinformation, though, generative AI needs a basis for it's generation.
The misinformation you’re spreading is related to how it works. A generative AI system will (without prompting away from it) create people with 3 heads, 8 fingers on each hand and multiple legs connecting to each other. Do you think it was trained on that? This argument of “it can generate it, therefore it was trained on it” is ridiculous. You clearly don’t understand how it works.
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You're extremely correct when it comes to combining different aspects of existing works to generate something new - but AI can't generate something it doesn't know about. If a generative model knows what a prepubescent naked body looks like it has been exposed to them before. The most generous way to excuse this is that medical diagrams exist and supplied the majority of inputs for any prompts about cp to work off of. A must more realistic view is that some cp made it into the training set.
I don't disagree with any of your assessments but if you wanted a Van Gogh painting of a Glorp from Omnicron Persei 8, you'll get out... something, but because the model has no reference for Glorps it'll be hallucinations or guesses based on other terms it can find.
To be clear, I'm coming at this from the angle as someone who has trained and evaluated models in a company that's used them for the better part of a decade.
I understand I'm going up against your earnestly held belief, but I've seen behind the curtain on a lot of this stuff and hopefully in time the way it works becomes demystified for more people.
For reference, the comment I made was improperly displayed, and I thought I replied to the wrong person. It said:
Hi, I'm a mathematician that's been following the development of generative neural networks for about a decade or more.
You're wrong. Your knowledge of the inner workings of these AI is accurate, but somehow you've reached an incorrect conclusion. I sometimes run a local instance of Stable Diffusion on my home PC, and it can make things that have never existed look totally unlike anything it's ever seen, and yet match certain specifications in principle.
I don't use it to generate porn, so I can't speak to the difficulties in avoiding csam while doing so. Mostly I generate is paintings in the style of Van Gogh, and it does a remarkable job of doing so, even when I can't get it to do what I want. For example: it generated a painting of him in profile wearing armor when I asked for a weapon. I don't think Van Gogh ever painted himself in profile, and he certainly never did so in armor. And yet the model was capable of imagining what this human-like figure so closely associated with the artist style "Van Gogh" would look like in profile because it knew what humans tend to look like in profile, and it could conceptualize how the features would present themselves. I'm certain that an AI can imagine a convincing image of simulated csam without ever having seen it, because these models really are just that good at imagining new things.
If the system must see something to generate it, and the system can't generate things that don't exist, then how is it generating pregnant old women?
Wow, you're such an expert on something you know nothing about.
Bro googled the word vector and was waiting to use it.
No, they's referring to the internal workings of AI models, which are essentially a series of incredibly high-dimension matrices with extra bits around them to make them work. Individual concepts are embedded as vectors in the space that these models work in. That's why linear algebra is brought up so frequently in discussions of AI.
While it's true that linear algebra and vectors are used in learning models, they're not using the term correctly in a way that says they know something about the subject (at least, the modern subject). Concepts aren't embedded as vectors. In older models (before the craze), concepts were manually embedded as numbers or a collection of numbers, which could be a vector (but could be something else as well), and the machine would learn by modifying weights. However, in current models (and by current, I mean at least more than a couple years), concepts are learnt by the machine (weights are still modified by the machine as well) and the machine makes its own connections between features presented to it.
For example, you give it a dataset of 10x10 pixel images (with text descriptions) and it reads that as 100 pixels split into 3 numbers (RGB) and then looks for connections between those numbers and in which pixels. It's not identifying what a boob is, but knows that when an image has 'boob' in the text description then there's a very high likelihood that there will be a circular collection of pixels with lots of red somewhere in the image that are also connected to other pixels that are often also lots of red. That's me breaking down what a human would think given the same task/information, but the reality is the machine will come up with its own connections/concepts which are both often far better than humans (when the model works, at least) and far more ineffable to humans.
From my perspective as an algebraist, you seem to be splitting hairs when you're making a distinction between vectors and n-tuples of real numbers. Furthermore, he's referencing a specific 3blue1brown video. I'm not saying their conclusion is correct; they's dead wrong but that doesn't mean their understanding is so shallow that they're simply repeating a word they heard to sound smart.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The whole point of diffusion models is that you can generate new concepts using training data. Models trained on any nsfw images can combine those concepts with any of its non-nsfw concepts. Of course, that's not to say there isn't CSAM in any training data, because there objectively has been in the past, but there doesn't need to be any to generate it.
Thanks for the reply, that makes a lot of sense :)
Thanks for not being a dick! I aim to inform
Ai is able to fill in the last field in a table like "Old / young" vs "Clothed / naked" when given three of the four fields.
Csam is in the training data. From a few months ago
Please reiterate your statement but instead using the "goose chase meme" format.
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I don't know what the right answer is, but we provide substitutes for drug addicts to help them overcome their addictions. Methadone and nicotine patches come to mind.
Is it completely inconceivable that a similar tool would help with harmful sexual desires?
I was listening to a podcast on moral philosophy (wouldn't you wanna be as cool as me??), and one suggestion that's stuck with me was the morality of, trigger warning,
spoiler
'life like child sex robots'.
As in, would we as a society want to permit such things, knowing that they could potentially save humans from actual harm if they offer an outlet that scratches an itch? On the other hand, would they bring forth more harmful desires in a greater number of potential perpetrators, leading to even more harm?
Anyway, I'm glad it's not my job to contemplate such disturbing topics.
Permit is a difficult thing. There is always someone willing to make such things profit. Yay, capitalism!I
I have no idea where they come from but I've dove deep enough into the darker web to know people possess such items. I have no doubt that anyone willing to dive in pursuit of such an item would have little problem in finding one.
I recall reading an article about the creators of the real doll and how they received such requests but refused them. They also claimed they had requests for animals which they didn't think were serious and also refuse.
I'm sure those exist as well and I would rather those exist than for people to harm real animals.
The underlying behavior is the problem though. While substitutions could potentially be made available, this isn't the same as drug addiction. The reality is that while a pedo could be satiated with a drop in replacement for a time (and possibly indefinitely), there is a very real risk that after a while they're not satisfied with pretending and could quickly jump to the real thing in a split second. The due course, in my mind, is either modifying the depraved behavior or removing the person from society. While drug addiction can be a vice that doesn't inflict harm on the rest of society (ie an addict is potentially able to silo their use from the rest of society), pedophilia is always a crime with a victim. The entire purpose of the situation is ensuring that no one becomes a victim of sex crimes, especially minors, and it is too great a risk to allow in any form.
It also runs the risk of giving pedophiles something to form communities around wherein they reinforce the idea amongst one another that society is the one who has a problem not them.
Additionally, in those communities it becomes more difficult to identify pictures and video of abuse to real children by muddying the water. The more sophisticated AI image generation becomes, the harder it will become for law enforcement that deals with this shit.
Let's compare it with adult pornography. Does the consumption of adult pornography remove the desire to have sex with another adult in the long term? Or does it reinforce the sexually desirable characteristics of adults?
Well considering porn addiction can often lead to lower libido and decreased performance with a partner, sorta yeah.
Just pray the pedo away.
Send them to a camp, or something.
Maybe electro-shock therapy?
Seriously, have you seen pedophile rehab? They'll literally show pedos suggestive images of kids then measure their penis to see if they get a boner. It's pretty sickening, tbh.
Current mental help methods for pedophiles include acceptance of their desires as normal, just not something to act on IRL.
It does not prohibit any fictional materials including children, nor can it make someone uninterested in children.
By stripping away safe outlets, we may come at risk of these people increasingly turning to real CSAM, which is way more harmful.
What do you know of the current methods. Where did this information come from? I’d really like to see it. You spoke with such knowledge, you must have the data to make it up, right?
The approach was originally pioneered by the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, and later adopted for a wider use in Germany, Europe and abroad.
Studies have shown that this approach does work, which led to its widespread adoption and popularization.
You can read details of the treatments coming out of this research here.
Beware of the corporate greed and prepare good old Sci-hub to read sources in full text if you want to.
i read three of the sources you provided (all of them, except the book), and the only thing you've said which is true is that the treatment 'includes acceptance of their desires' (though you have added the words 'as normal')
the other two claims you've made, including 'it does not prohibit any fictional materials including children' and 'by stripping away safe outlets we may come at risk of these people increasingly turning to real CSAM' are your own inventions, and are not stated anywhere in the texts you have linked, in fact, they are directly refuted by both of them, because the actual prevention project recommends a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and medication
I specifically addressed the "current methods" part of it, as questioned.
The second point was beyond the scope of the sources I provided, except maybe the book, but the project is in line with this as well - it does not focus on the fictional materials and does not explicitly prohibit them. It doesn't encourage the consumption of such materials, either, so the position can be best described as "neutral". It does, however, strongly object real CSAM.
The latter was answered in another thread - yes, you are right about this being my speculation, as the scientific community, for all I know, currently doesn't have data to either prove or disprove this point. But that seems likely to me.
Current mental help methods for pedophiles include acceptance of their desires as normal, just not something to act on IRL.
I am not aware of the research in this area although I have a minor psych background so that's interesting and makes sense in hindsight. My understanding is that a large part of the compulsion is driven by guilt, shame, feelings of worthlessness, prior victimizations of themselves, etc. Essentially trying to gain a sense of power by taking it from those more vulnerable than them, like an abuser beating their spouse because someone at work put them down. So it makes sense to encourage a sense of power and lessen any sense of guilt and shame.
On a side note, I can't imagine having their name plastered everywhere does anything but trigger the compulsion to re-offend. Maybe when we advance more as a society, we can separate individuals into categories of has-offended and child-attracted, with the former being on a public danger list and the latter having frequent discreet visits by social workers and mandatory counselors, etc. To lessen the chance of offense and possibly start helping them before they get to the offense stage (those that were ever going to offend.)
I'm pretty sure that this is not true. I'd love to see sources.
There was some research before the ongoing AI-panic, focusing on hentai instead. As it is as "harmless" as the AI-generated content.
And I do recall that at the time there were voices in research making the point that the consumption of material did not have correlation with actually reducing the urges. So this seems highly unlikely.
Upon proper search, I agree I must have been too rushed in decisions as the topic of the influence of computer-generated or drawn CSAM on escalation in offending still seems to be a matter of speculations, with severe lack of sources on both sides (correct me if I'm wrong).
Both sides draw from singular testimonials.
Still, I will remove the notion on science. Thank you for issuing the correction.
P.S. This paper does some job of evaluating both sides, although has its own strong bias not based on presented evidence. Still, it is useful to get some basic overview of the current state of affairs.
This sort of problem-solving acumen is how HIV became so widespread in Africa. Have you considered instead trying competence?
Have you considered not advocating for the sexualization of children?
You're using sensationalist language to hide the fact that you're the person in this conversation arguing for more aexual abuse of children, not me. I'm advocating for using drawn artwork to reduce abuse of children. You're advocating for banning said artwork, which we know leads to more abuse of real children.
Please stop supporting pedophilia.
It brings me to ask the question if lolicon could be their next target?
