Yeah, it's unclear whether copyright is even relevant when it comes to training AI. It feels a lot like people who feel very strongly about intellectual property but have clearly confused trademarks, patents, copyright, and maybe even regular old property law - they've got an idea of what they think is "right" and "wrong" but it's not closely attached to any actual legal theory.
Well, I haven't gone to any of my image AIs and actually asked them to generate naked pictures of young people. So unless you want to go there this will necessarily involve some degree of theoretical elements.
However, according to the article it's possible to generate this stuff with Stable Diffusion models, and Stable Diffusion models have a negligible amount of CSAM in the training set. So short of actually doing the experiment that would seem to settle it.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate just how surprisingly sophisticated the "world model" that these image AIs have learned is. There was a paper a while back where some researchers were trying to analyze how image generators were working internally, and they discovered that if you were to for example ask one to make a picture of a bicycle it will first come up with a depth map of the image before it starts doing anything to the visual output. That shows that the AI has figured out what the three-dimensional form of a bicycle is based entirely on a pile of two-dimensional training images, with no other clues telling it that the third dimension even exists in the first place.
We aren't disagreeing because that's not what I was addressing in the first place. The comment I'm responding to, from Dave, reads:
In that case probably the strongest argument is that if it were legal, many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can't prove that it wasn't AI generated.
Emphasis added. The premise of the scenario is that possession of such images (ie, AI-generated CSAM) is not illegal. Given that, for purposes of argument, it follows that this would indeed be a valid defense. You'd need to prove in court that the CSAM pictures that you're charging someone with possessing are not AI-generated, in that scenario.
If you want to have a wider discussion of whether AI-generated CSAM images should be illegal, that's a separate matter.
It's not the specific thing being made illegal, it's the underlying philosophy of "Better a dozen innocent men go to prison than one guilty man go free" I'm arguing against here. Most western justice systems operate under a principle of requiring guilt to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and if there is doubt then guilt cannot be considered proven and the person is not convicted.
The comment I'm responding to is proposing a situation where non-AI-generated images are illegal but AI-generated ones aren't, and that there's no way to tell the difference just by looking at the image itself. In that situation you couldn't convict someone merely based on the existence of the image because it could have been AI-generated. That's fundamental to the "innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt" philosophy I'm talking about, to do otherwise would mean that innocent people could very easily be convicted of crimes they didn't do.
But it doesn't fully understand young and "naked young person" isn't just a scaled down "naked adult".
Do you actually know that, or are you just assuming it?
Personally, I'm basing my assertions off of experience with related situations, where I've asked image AIs to generate images of things that I'm quite sure weren't in its training set and that require conceptual understanding to create "hybrids." It's done a decent job of those so I'm assuming that it can figure out this specific situation as well, since most of these models have a lot of examples of naked people and young people in their training sets. But I haven't actually asked any AIs to generate images of naked young people to test this one specific case.
This thread isn't about websites, it's about functions built into operating systems. Those are generally much more configurable. Microsoft wants corporations to run Windows, after all, and corporations tend to be very touchy about this sort of thing.
Yeah, it's not stopping me from commenting. I'm only noting the downvotes in this case because I was making a point elsewhere in the thread about the extremely anti-AI sentiment around here. In this case I'm not even saying something positive about it, merely speculating about the reason why Microsoft is doing this, and I guess that's still being interpreted as "justifying" AI and therefore something worthy of attack.
Copilot has boosted my programming productivity significantly. Bing Chat has replaced Google when it comes to conceptual searches (ie, when I want to learn something, not when I want to find some specific website). I've been using Bing image creator extensively for illustrations for a tabletop roleplaying campaign I'm running. I still mostly use Gimp and Stable Diffusion locally for editing those images, but I've checked out Paint because of the AI integration and was seriously considering using it. Paint of all things, a program that's long been considered somewhat of a joke.
3,226 suspected images out of 5.8 billion. About 0.00006%. And probably mislabeled to boot, or it would have been caught earlier. I doubt it had any significant impact on the model's capabilities.
3,226 suspected images out of 5.8 billion. About 0.00006%. And probably mislabeled to boot, or it would have been caught earlier. I doubt it had any significant impact on the model's capabilities.
3,226 suspected images out of 5.8 billion. About 0.00006%. And probably mislabeled to boot, or it would have been caught earlier. I doubt it had any significant impact on the model's capabilities.
It understands young and old. That means it knows a kid is not just a 60% reduction by volume of an adult.
We know it understands these sorts of things because of the very things this whole kerfuffle is about - it's able to generate images of things that weren't explicitly in its training set.
I'm not overly concerned because I know how to use these things. I know what they do, and so when one of them is doing something concerning I turn it off.
People are frightened of things they don't understand, and it's apparent that lots of people don't understand AI.