> Isn't it wiser to stop at some point, and find other stuff to do, even if all your nerves say otherwise?
The problem is that government doesn’t have a line, that line is defined by the resistance it faces. Today it might be people sharing MP3s, tomorrow they will come after you for hosting a parody of mickey mouse. 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).
Sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses is a fool’s errand. Copyright holders, the government, and powerful interests are entities that have no problem playing dirty.
To add: you know with the stable-diffusion function, there are ranges of vectors whereby technically just conjuring them is 15 years federal and possessing them is 5 each. That is 20-25% of a lifetime in one, 7.5% in the other!
You know how nuts that sounds to me as a mathematician?!
It’s not nuts when you stop being intentionally obtuse and speak plainly: yes, child abuse material can be represented by a variety of mathematical means, but it’s abhorrent nature makes it morally correct for those laws to exist.
I've had to avoid taking certain cutesy photos of my 3 year old toddler son because he is sometimes naked (example: bathtime or beach) and I have to fear my innocent photos being misidentified as CSAM.
What's crazy is that my library contains naked photos of ME as a toddler (I scanned a bunch of old slides in a few years ago) and I have to of course wonder if that is going to get flagged. (My parents were German immigrants. Germans DNGAF about human nudity, unlike the puritanical Americans.)
There's a cost to automating this. You might say "well a human can tell" but humans don't scale.
Regarding the evaluation of everything else, I find it useful to ask what the concrete demonstrable harm is that has been done. Not the hypothetical harm, mind you. So for automatic generation of self-indulgent pornographic material (or for example things that are not even possible in reality such as... hentai?), I don't see an issue unless it is acted upon and demonstrably harms someone or violates consent (harm caused by creating a court case should not count towards this since that is circular reasoning). Most people who are only attracted to adults have fapped to content that is something they would never do in reality; I don't think it's a strong argument that the mere possibility that that might occur is enough to ban it.
For a multitude of reasons, both are evil and should be illegal. However, I do think they are significantly different severities of crime, and ought to be treated as such. Same for sex offenders; streaking should not be punished the same way as rape.
Something can only be evil when it harms or is going to harm somebody.
No matter how abhorrent a picture is it can not harm anybody by merely existing. Harm can (or may not) only be inflicted to others during its production or with its demonstration.
Banning possession of pictures produced without participation of any living person other than the viewer makes no sense.
Banning possession of child abuse pictures used to make sense because possessing implied buying and buying incentivized production which depended on actual child abuse. Nowadays nobody has to be abused and I'm totally fine with weirdos using whatever pictures their sick imagination may want as long as this keeps them satisfied enough to be able to keep their wicked desires secret from every living person. I don't want the police to bust such people as long as they don't actually harm anybody and don't pay anybody to do the harm. No crime without an actual victim is worth ruining anybody's life, whatever kind of freak they are.
Child porn is a unique case. Its presence normalizes child sex in the mind of its consumers, and feeds an addiction that greatly increases the likelihood of an actual action taken against a child.
It's the same logic most countries use to ban possession of firearms. Their presence greatly increases the risk of lethal violence and suicide, despite being harmless to people when used correctly at the range or for hunting. The lack of need for firearms weighed against the harm they cause to others makes it a hard sell for remaining legal.
Firearms may get a pass because they have real utility in self defense, but there are no positive benefits to having an endless stream of fake child abuse.
I get your point and won't hurry to object. You maybe right. But I wouldn't hurry to agree either. You may be wrong as well. This is questionable. For example many people enjoy bloody violent games and movies (I specifically did during my teen years, when I actually wasn't formally allowed by the ESRB ratings) but absolutely don't want and never wanted anything like that to happen in the real life. Perhaps a middle way should be chosen - still ban all, incl. AI generated child abuse content - don't really normalize it, but don't put anybody in prison for having artificial pictures on their PCs.
Probably in the exact same capacity as violent media normalises murder, or rough porn normalises sexual assault. Or drug use in media normalises… drug use.
When you're talking about "evil" and percentages of life spent in jail, I'm going to ask for a more direct causal link to harm than just "demonstration is trivial and left to the reader".
1s and 0s can be sending bitcoin to a hit man to kill your wife. In this case, link to harm is indeed obvious, and evil and years in jail are justified. Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?
> When you're talking about "evil" and percentages of life spent in jail, I'm going to ask for a more direct causal link to harm than just "demonstration is trivial and left to the reader.
I don't know if theres a correlation between evil and jailtime. The debate around the severity of punishment is different than the debate about whether or not something should be illegal. I do think my (US) justice system is very flawed, especially around sentencing.
> Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?
I can take a stab at it. Simulated CSAM :
* if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.
* has the potential to normalize the distribution of CSAM due to #1
* has the potential to normalize the consumption of CSAM.
To address the comments being birthed around unproven causal relationships- yeah I know. The parent asked for arguments. Besides, a study into this doesn't seem very ethical or possible.
I am not able to discount the "ick factor", but I'll try to make a counterpoint.
All of the arguments I can think of to the contrary center around free speech, false positives and weaponization. That's where I think the challenges are and where subjectivity can cause issues. Without a real person, it's difficult to assign a simulated age unless a prompt is captured or other context. Otherwise it becomes the job of a person or other 'AI' to guess the simulated age of the image.
> if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.
Yes, but at the same time it'll greatly devaluate the real CSAM. It'll be like flooding the black market of perfect copies of rhinoceros horns. People won't have any economic incentive to create real CSAM.
Perhaps. I can't speak to the motivation of these folks, but I suspect it's more than just sending the pictures for them. Also, even if the market is flooded, I imagine we'd still want people looking for victims so it doesn't really help.
Child porn consumption is a product of an unhealthy addiction. Addicts tend to need more and more extreme fixes to feed upon. In the case of drugs, that generally leads to self harm. In the case of child porn, a child ever more likely is to be harmed.
We've banned this account. Whatever you're arguing for or against (and I'm not tracking it), you can't attack another user this way on this site.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
As much as i'm leery of connecting abstractions for the sake of bad laws, your example is a bit reductionist. After all, the people who created things like Stuxnet (ironically, a government-created worm) were really just assembling code characters in a certain interesting way.
You could even stretch the idea further to say that someone making a bomb is merely mixing certain perfectly legal chemicals just so...
> Writing down 1’s and 0’s in certain permutations, is ‘evil’ and ‘should be illegal?
I think the parent was making the point that creating and distributing simulated child pornography should be. The medium that is used to reproduce the image is irrelevant. Real digital images are also made of 1s and 0s.
True, but ‘creating and distributing’ some physical paper or pdf filled with 1 and 0, is the actual action. Just blank white rectangles with lots of lines and ovals on it, being shuffled around.
Even in the extreme case, where it really does contain images in binary format, there is only the latent potential of that being transformed into something objectionable, several steps removed.
If this was the accepted norm everywhere, then practically every adult in the US would be guilty of some latent potential crime, after several degrees of separation.
e.g. even though lunatics use knives in mass stabbing sprees, we don’t assign blame to those selling knives or knife making equipment in stores where the lunatic happened to have gone shopping.
I don't follow the point you're trying to make. We are talking about the output of an image generation model, right?
If we are talking about a physical book containing 1s and 0s that represent CSAM, I'd ask how you encoded the image to get the binary representation...
That is the point, once it’s been transformed into 1’s and 0’s and distributed for the first time, it’s all random intermediaries handling it.
Intermediaries who likely cannot recognize it and won’t think twice about reproducing it, even if later on it does get transformed back.
What the original impetus for creating and distributing it is irrelevant to anyone subsequently encountering it.
To continue the knife analogy, even if the knife factory was also in fact owned by some maniac, the salespersons in the retail stores still not assigned blame even if they promote the knives.
The salespersons are just random middle men who couldn’t possibly have been expected to personally investigate the actual background or provenance behind what they’re handling.
Sorry, you lost me. If the knives were illegal, the salespeople would held responsible. We aren't going to agree, no matter how clever the analogy, so I'll leave you here.
Huh? Some types of knives are illegal in certain jurisdictions… and I haven’t heard of anyone blaming them for not opening and verifying every knife box that passes through.
"Every (bad) thing we do, makes the next one so much easier."
For a more than just relevant part of people who would play with weights on a model to create anything that compensates for "child abuse" with "fake child abuse", the risk of lowering the threshold is extremely high. VR, AR, fake news and the scripted nature of some world events that are driven by common subgoals of interest groups are decrementing the opaqueness of the line between reality and delusion/illusion. Loss of reality & dissociation from humanity are things, especially among people with a fanbase & influence, money, power.
Games & TV and their influence are obvious and they do erode the threshold as well but it's reversible because the player is not the creator of his reality while with gen ai, prompts & weights, the player becomes more and more capable of simulating his own reality based on his derived preferences & idiosyncrasies. Games and TV have constraints that are set by the devs and show runners and all the crews involved in the process. Gen AI doesn't have that.
I'm working on gathering the fractions. In order to go from observations, witness accounts and quantifications in and of institutions and identify logical links in patterns of consumption of future abusers, I would have to travel in time.
I have not tried to reduce my hypothesis but there's plenty of discussions and research into mental health crisis, recurring and one-time/impulsive (sexually) violent behavior as well as the correlating &or causal psycho-pathologies.
But I'm not a scientist. I just think. And sometimes I read.
It matters anyway. It's hard studying this stuff in the lab. Relevant measurements in the field need to be isolated but that can mostly only be done in retrospect and we are talking about LLMs, what can be generated, what will be generated and should it be legal or not?
Should the system prepare? Can it? What kind of colony will we become? Are there multiple endings/"liminals"/paths? Who (exactly) cares? Who will be affected? Who is aware and who isn't? Who is misguided (maybe it's me)?
If I was a different kind of idiot in the past, I would have made the money to have the peace of mind to dive deeper but as it stands, just babbling some thoughts isn't gonna get me anywhere. Except that it stimulates to put it into words and maybe get something coherent on paper some day, something that isn't purely wannabe-megalomaniac, but constructive ^^
That statement is carrying a lot of non-evidence with it.
Say my fetish is chocolate. If I ask an image generating AI to give me a photo of an adult made of chocolate and covered in sprinkles, that doesn't necessarily mean it was trained on that specific thing.
Thank you for dodging my point with a non-sequitur. The contrived example does not diminish the potential real harm that exists in the original use case.
You don't seem to understand that "potential" is not "actual" (and also conveniently says nothing about actual probabilities). I could claim almost anything is "potential".
Eating grapes could "potentially" result in choking. Living in a house made of wood could "potentially" result in dying in a house fire. Driving over 70MPH could "potentially" result in hydroplaning if it is raining.
Why do we not care more about the "actual" harm (and its probability), as measured by science?
Oh, of course- Things that are banned are difficult to study, which is why people can invent any beliefs about them that they want to.
the abhorrence is not in the vectors, not in the pixels' inherent nature.
the problem with CP is ... sigh ...the violations, the harm, the unconsentability, the trafficking, the exploitation, the "gateway drug" problem (which might or might not be the correct model of this psychopathology), and the other negative externalities.
Same thing happens in chemistry: some compounds are legal, some aren't. If you come up with a clever way to synthesise the illegal thing, it's still illegal, or will be made illegal eventually.
I think theres some detail missing. Are you talking about someone crafting a prompt to generate simulated child pornography and being held accountable for the action and content?
Yeah writing down the 0s and 1s of a child pornopgraphic image is forbidden, like the 0s and 1s of copyrighted material. Nothing to do with stable diffusion. Some numbers are forbidden to use since the 90s. That's basically what it came to.
This is what an illegal meme looks like: "Tyler Kay, 26, wrote a post... calling for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set alight. He responded to several comments posted by others following his post, adding that it was “100% the plan”.
Kay also reposted... another message inciting action against a named immigration solicitors in Northampton" https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/man-jailed-just-two-days-aft...
I think we are stretching the definition of a meme here. This was original content orchestrating attacks. Not some repost of a joke (however bad taste it might be).
At which point is the boundary between meme and instigator?
I'm pretty sure that's the point they're getting at - that the original person commenting was talking about this stuff like it's just memes, in bad faith.
It’s a pity you’re being downvoted because this is a very reasonable request.
I too would love to know the story behind that claim because, having lived in the UK for a good number of years, I’d guarantee there would be more going on than simply just what the GP suggested.
I don't believe you, since you didn't bother to actually post what you found, when you directly responded to someone asking for a citation. Your comment is less than useful, and completely untrustworthy.
> 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).
UK law does not prohibit memes. It prohibits incitement to riot, as does US law. It prohibits incitement to murder, as does US law. In fact, these acts are illegal in almost every democracy in the World, even the most progressive and liberal ones, because they are reasonable statutes to extend common law (protecting people and their property from damage by others).
In recent weeks, a young man born in Wales to Rwandan-born Christian migrant parents, diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders, stabbed three 6-year old girls to death at a dance class. He attempted to murder the other children in the class, and the adults who intervened.
The "illegal memes" as you put it, were that he was a foreign-born Muslim who had entered the country illegally (all aspect of this narrative are false), and that people should riot to show their displeasure, and kill Muslim migrants to "save our children".
Seeing these "facts", mobs rioted in multiple towns over the course of a week, injured multiple (unarmed) police officers, caused tens of millions of pounds in damage to private property, and attempted to burn down a hotel with 200+ migrants (including children), staying in it, while many people of colour were individually attacked, their shops looted, their homes and cars damaged, and so on.
Arresting and charging the people who did these things is an obvious priority.
Arresting and charging the people who spread misinformation (I believe it was actually disinformation - purposeful, intentful lies), and suggesting that riots and murder should take place, are just as guilty of incitement in the UK as they would be anywhere else in the World.
The internet is not a fantasy land. What you post has real World consequences. If you get together in a private forum and plan to kidnap, rape and kill a celebrity (a case also tried in the UK recently), that's not "online meme banter", that's conspiracy to kidnap, rape and murder. You're going to prison, you're a threat to public safety.
The lines you say the government don't have, they're there. They're called "laws". Some of them are arguably unjust - I've campaigned against some IP law extensions in the past, including the introduction of software patents in the EU (when the UK was still a member), and think RIPA was a tragedy of law making - but to say that laws are irrelevant and action is defined only by the resistance a government faces is absurdly cynical, naive, and simply not true.
Your last sentence leads to an obvious question: what do you think people should do instead of "sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses"? Do you think inciting riots and murder are the way to go?
These people know what they're doing. All the crowds at the riot are the same kind of person. Yes, it's scary that the government has such power, especially when the government is usually so socially and technologically inept, and usually panders to the hateful people rather than prosecute them. I think the situation was that an online post was having a direct influence on the real world; there were people actively carrying out the requests.
Definitely something to keep an eye on, though. Then again Youtube comments sections are still full of homophobic comments, often including suggestions to imprison or kill people like me; would the people leaving those comments feel so brave when unmasked? Why don't they put their faces on what they say?
That case of murder was not the only reason. And while it is based on misinformation (and I agree it was made on purpose), just one case would not cause the riots. It was just “the last drop”.
Perhaps you could explain the previous drops. I don't think they exist, other than as disinformation and propaganda.
Migration of all forms is at a record high in the UK [0], yet violent crime is at an all-time low. How is violent crime correlated to migration, as so many people claim on Twitter, WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages?
"What about the money we spend on them?", some ask. Well, contrary to popular belief, asylum seekers don't get mainstream benefits [1] and legal migrants aren't entitled to public funds until they have been granted indefinite leave to remain [2]. NHS costs need to be paid for either through the IHS scheme, or directly at 150% of cost [3]
"Oh, employed are they? Taking jobs off locals, are they?", the pub bore starts to snort. Well, no. Nobody really wants to spend 12 hours a day running a corner shop, or working in a field picking sprouts on minimum wage, which is why there are record levels of job vacancies in the UK right now. [4]
I'll ask again then, where are the previous drops? Migration does not cause increases in crime by any measure, the only costs incurred are caused by delays in processing, they're not "taking anybody's else's job" and overall migration leads to higher tax incomes, and they pay their way for services through taxes on jobs no local wants.
So please, spell it out for me. I'm really curious about those previous drops. I suspect that you may have been lied to.
How is beating up police officers protecting the cenotaph “protest” that people should have a legal right to?
What about burning down a community library because somebody had put the lie up on a local Facebook page that “all the kids books have been replaced by copies of the Quran”? Never happened, somebody lied, the lie spread, mob burns a public library down. Is that a legally protected right to protest?
On the 75% number, well, now you’re showing your hand. I will take your insistence you’re not a fellow traveller at face value, but I do need to point out you have drawn a line of association that the far-right want you to, they do it all the time, and it’s intentional and harmful.
You have called out a number referring to Muslims, but the “protests” were meant to be about immigration. Do you not think British people can be Muslim?
So let’s dive into the numbers [0], and have a think about something important.
In table 2.1 we find “Number of persons arrested for terrorist-related activity, since 11 September 2001, by self-defined nationality”. 3,302 of these people (62.6%), define themselves as British. It seems to me that by the logic of the dominant group being the dominant threat, MI5 should be spying on every Briton they can - these British people are all a threat to public safety!
Ah, but of course that’s not what people mean by “British”, is it? And there’s the problem. This is thinly veiled Islamophobia and racism. The far right like to suggest that “Muslim” and “migrant” are synonyms. It’s othering. It’s dehumanising. And you just showed you unconsciously agree at some level. Many people do, and it’s that sort of lazy thinking that means a) we never solve the actual problems we face as a society and b) create divisions when there don’t need to be any.
Migration has never been the risk some think it is. Protesting it by looting shops in your local high street is transparent thuggery. Provoking people to do so because of “immigrants” (nudge, nudge, we all know the targets are all brown people), is incitement to racial hatred. Threatening British born people because of their religion and skin colour because of “immigration” is - I think you can agree - not a reasonable form of protest at any level. The objection isn’t sound, never mind the protest action itself.
Do you mean pre-Windrush when Irish people were OK, but black people were not? Do you mean pre-1926 when Irish people were not OK? Are Americans terrorists (18th century), or fellow countrymen (prior to that?). Catholicism was outlawed for 400 years, so we keep that or adopt the view after that (it’s tolerated), or prior to that (it’s a requirement to be accepted in society)? Do we need to roll back to pre-Norman invasion and expunge French influence? Is Magna Carta OK, because we have thousands of years of history prior to that meddling? Wait, do I like Vikings (they settled), or reject them (they raped and pillaged their way in)? What about the Romans who eradicated Celtic and Pagan ways of life?
What your comment suggests is that there is a single “British culture” to conform to. There isn’t, but the closest we have to it is a fusion culture.
The most popular foods - curry, fish and chips, burgers - are a result of remixing immigrant flavours. Our music, film, writing, all a fusion of ideas and styles and backgrounds. There is an official religion (the Monarch is the head of the church), but it’s observed by less than 2% of the population. Our laws (and constitution), are intended to flex and evolve over changing understandings of who we are.
So this might be hard for you to understand, but it’s what we like: come here, be you, be free, respect all around you. It’s what that whole punk thing was all about, it’s why Cool Britannia exists.
I doubt you find many people here who are against the right of peaceful protest. But protests are only worthwhile if they address real issues, not misinformation.
Don't forget about the Heisenberg immigrant, who is simultaneously
1. a lazy sponger who just came here to live on benefits
and
2. taking your job
Sky News interviewed someone recently who said he was against immigration because it meant he couldn't get a job. It turned out that this guy was a convicted sex offender who had been in prison for his offence. But no, it was definitely immigrants to blame for him not having a job.
Some of the people that rioted were a motley assortment of right wing thugs following their warped ideology. Others were just yobs who were gullible enough to believe the misinformation, or just saw an opportunity for mayhem (one of the rioters has, IIRC, 170 previous convictions).
Yes, people are frustrated about many things in the UK (lack of affordable housing, dentists, decent jobs etc). But a most of these things are down to austerity, poor governance and the greed of the ruling classes. They aren't caused by relatively tiny numbers (29,437 in 2023) of desperate people coming across the channel in small boats. They are just a convenient scapegoat.
Mp3s were yesterday literally long time ago. Parody is always legal. And Mickey mouse by the way is way past copyright. Don't you know at least the original.
Since when? Some people keep local copies of their media. Censorship and arbitrary license disputes can have streaming content snatched away at any moment.
I'm sure there's still a large number of people downloading mp3s and other files to permanently store.
But really, how often are people offline? For me it's only when I'm on a flight, and I can prepare for that by using spotify or youtube and pressing the download button on a playlist.
I am when I am hiking, camping, or have poor reception like in my apartment complex. There are vast swathes of the globe that do not have connectivity at all.
Also, worth considering the online service could change its offering or die at any time. Songs I like are routinely removed from various online platforms, and it enrages me every time.
I agree with you with content changing being one of the many downsides of relying on streaming services. I just think that most people are willing to accept the trade off.
THIS is why the Second Amendment. It's easy to revenge-kill a crazy, it's harder to revenge-kill a government. Keep your governments small and your crazies armed!
I've never understood that sentiment. The US has the second amendment, and it doesn't seem to do much for personal freedom there. Europe does not, and I feel a lot more free in most European countries than I do in the US, especially when it comes to encounters with representatives of the state (LEOs).
I can imagine an alternate reality where the second amendment has the benefits often ascribed to it, but it would be very different to the one we live in.
Checks out for Europe provided you're not an immigrant. Being blond also helps. I never get flagged for traffic inspections or in any way harrased by cops. But I constantly see people who aren't my skin color, or simply poor, get treated rough. True for France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and based on personal experience. ACAB.
There was a twitter thread where someone from Russia said he was beaten up by police in Netherlands during a peaceful protest. He was accused of attending the wrong protest by twitter Europhiles. Now, something tells me it's easy to feel safe when you conform.
Sad to hear that. Was that completely peaceful pretest? Why was police even involved then? For a record, I was never beaten up by a police officer, and I've attended all kinds of "wrong" protests (what is the right protest anyway).
Do you have a source? There's plenty of disinformation on the internet, and I'm curious to learn what has happened.
The problem is that government doesn’t have a line, that line is defined by the resistance it faces. Today it might be people sharing MP3s, tomorrow they will come after you for hosting a parody of mickey mouse. 10 years from now they’ll be busting down doors for sharing illegal memes (Seems to already be the case in the UK).
Sitting by passively and praying that the system will come to its senses is a fool’s errand. Copyright holders, the government, and powerful interests are entities that have no problem playing dirty.