Hidden inside the foundation of popular artificial intelligence image-generators are thousands of images of child sexual abuse.

Those same images have made it easier for AI systems to produce realistic and explicit imagery of fake children as well as transform social media photos of fully clothed real teens into nudes, much to the alarm of schools and law enforcement around the world.

Until recently, anti-abuse researchers thought the only way that some unchecked AI tools produced abusive imagery of children was by essentially combining what they’ve learned from two separate buckets of online images — adult pornography and benign photos of kids.

But the Stanford Internet Observatory found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that’s been used to train leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion. The watchdog group based at Stanford University worked with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities to identify the illegal material and report the original photo links to law enforcement.

  • @ricecake
    9•7 months ago

    Did you know that they actually do check? It’s true! There’s a big difference between what happened, which is CSAM was found in the foundation data, and that CSAM then being used for training.

    Stability AI on Wednesday said it only hosts filtered versions of Stable Diffusion and that “since taking over the exclusive development of Stable Diffusion, Stability AI has taken proactive steps to mitigate the risk of misuse.” “Those filters remove unsafe content from reaching the models,” the company said in a prepared statement. “By removing that content before it ever reaches the model, we can help to prevent the model from generating unsafe content.”

    Also, the people who maintain the foundational dataset do checks, although which was mentioned by the people who reported the issue. Their critique was that the checks had flaws, not that they didn’t exist.

    So if your only issue is that they didn’t check, well… You’re wrong.