At least with copyright law, there's an argument for training being fair use. If generative art becomes a notorious market for CSAM, everyone in the field goes to jail.
[0] Also, I'd like to know what your opinion is on GitHub Copilot. A lot of people decry Copilot for stealing code but love Stable Diffusion for being public, even though they're the same concept and trained in the same quasi-ethical way.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/y9ga5s/com...
If you constantly watch videos of people eating cheeseburgers, you might want to eat a cheeseburger yourself.
Hasn't this nonsense been thoroughly debunked by multiple studies at this point? I would assume evidence and "modern thinking" supports the exact opposite of what you claim, unless by modern thinking you mean the same thinking that tries to hide research they don't like.
Video games do not cause violence. End of story.
> I would not assume that the reactions to simulated sexuality is the same as simulated violence.
A would not assume anything. Conduct research and draw conclusions. Don't speculate.
This is the right conclusion, but the logic is entirely wrong.
The reason why video games do not cause violence is that play violence is not anywhere close to the real thing, not that people firewall off fiction from reality. There's plenty of cases in which a piece of fiction has changed people's views! Crime shows are notorious for skewing how actual juries rule on cases. Perry Mason[0] taught them to expect dramatic confessions and CSI[1] taught them to weigh whiz-bang forensics over other kinds of evidence.
In the specific case of porn, there isn't really a difference between "play sex" and "real sex": they poke the same regions of your brain. And the people who are responsible for keeping actual pedophiles from reoffending are pretty much unanimous that the worst thing you can do is give them a bunch of, uh... let's call it "material". So if you're already a pedophile, giving you access to simulated CSAM won't substitute for the real thing. It'll just desensitize you to reoffending.
>> Conduct research and draw conclusions. Don't speculate.
There are way too many factors at play to simply point at porn, which is probably harder to obtain now in all honesty. I found many random porn magazines/pages as a child. Never did I ever go looking for it, but finding it was always a thrill.
People buy less magazines now (based on convenience store shelves increasingly excluding them.)
More likely people will just generate more synthetic content to consume.
But they are not harming anyone else.
this is retarded, if you watch a movie, play a video game, read a book with crime events then you will become a criminal. We have a ton of shooter games and still no evidence that this caused more gun violence around the world.
Same with CP. You have to be sick to enjoy it. Very sick.
It's not well explored at all and you just made that up lmao.
That's akin to the idiotic arguments of the past that "allowing people to see homosexuality will make them homosexual!"
Completely ridiculous.
I'm familiar with the research in this area, and that's not something you can say confidently; most work (and by that I mean 2 or 3 papers in total) has gone into investigating the role 'generated' depictions of CSAM play in the collections of hoarders. No psychological study, as far as I'm aware, has conducted an investigation on those who enjoy cartoon material akin to what you might find in a Japanese manga.
In fact, there's some evidence against what you're saying; anthropological research on fans of cartoon material ('lolicons' or 'shotacons') in Japan shows that their communities draw hard lines between '2D' and '3D' not just in this area of sexuality, but in their sexualities as a whole. This sexual inclination toward the 2D world is termed the 2D-complex and is akin to 'digital sexuality' or fictophilia, not pedophilia.
By way of analogy, perhaps BDSM would work as a good counter point to you. Many people (some studies suggest the majority of people) engage in 'rape fantasies' or other such fantasies of illegal or immoral nature, yet although actual depiction of rape is rightly banned by the state, its simulated variants are not, and we are comfortable to acknowledge that sexual desires do not always manifest in real life, and sometimes the thrill of fantasy itself is the attraction. To make it real would, ironically, defeat the whole point.
One example of a bad thing - you could easily imagine an instagram bot that looks for pictures of people with their kids, then uses a Stable Diffusion like model to produce pictures of the people having sex with their kids, or horrible things happening to the kids, and reply to the target account. The bot might threaten to post the pictures and accuse the person of being a pedophile unless the person pays X in bitcoin (or whatever). Or, the bot could just post such pictures for fun.
I think we don't know if fake CSAM will have a good or bad effect on pedophiles and, sadly, there is no real way to reliably test that (so far as I know). Fake CSAM might placate pedophiles, or it might whet their appetite. It's hard to know what to do.
I think we will eventually get to the point where very good unrestricted image generation models are available to the general public. When that happens there will be chaos - you will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
And of course, I'm not looking forward to the world ushered in by free roam with this technology, mainly for the reasons you stated.
I’m referring to legally, sorry I should have specified.
[0] Evidence Mounts: More Porn, Less Sexual Assault. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601...
Detection becomes easier - is it pornography with a child in it?
Generation starts to become trivial - this video, but this person has the features of an X year old.
At least in the latter case no-one's actually getting raped.
No one will go to jail, except maybe some people who get caught creating, distributing or collecting those images.
A human artist is obviously capable of generating CSAM, even if they have never seen that before.
Filtering of training data is countered by increasing capabilities to generalize:
Two years ago, that was a viable strategy: models could barely produce what was in the training data again.
Today models can generalize much better and compose concepts they have been trained on into new concepts that they haven’t.
Two years from now, filtering will be irrelevant.
Keep in mind, there already are a lot of illustrated/anime style pictures of CSAM on that site of years though (something that is legal in many countries), so it's sort of becoming a blurred area as these AI art generators are still somewhat like that but now are getting to be more photorealistic.
As far as the models not being trained on NSFW content, there was already leaked models that were, and there are unofficial models trained by outsiders using SD that are specifically trained on for example adult image websites.
Then there are narratives. They are weaved so that the suggested actions and solutions will somehow fit the interests of the participants. The narrative can be CSAM, it can be copyright of artists and owners of the training set, the narrative can be disinformation. The narrative doesn't care that current laws do not prohibit anything and that it's all legal. The narrative justifies actions the participants wanted to do because of their interests.
And finally there are actions. They can push legislations, but that's not the only tool (and yes it's slow). Companies can always comply and cooperate, especially when their interests align. Google itself is a participant, with Imagen. They can create a restrictive policy and kick things off their search engine, because that is in their interests too, not because of a narrative or legislation. Just like they profited in YouTube for every piracy site suppressed.
The interests of every single company is stacked against individuals running this at home for free. There are enough narratives to be weaved to justify actions which would stop that.
For decades, and in many countries even today, just getting paid to drive someone in your car is illegal, and you need a "taxi license". It doesn't need to make sense. We could end up with required license to use generative AI in 10 years and nobody would bat an eye after decades of propaganda and narratives.
https://youtu.be/0_BBRNYInx8?t=85 This video (released yesterday) talks about how SD takes an image, converts it to latents.
You'd need to decode those latents back to an image representation and scan. (possibly other ways but that's the most straightforward I can come up with although time intensive).
The entire art tradition is based on copying for study, and then using our brains to convince ourselves that we've "transformed it enough" or "my reference is obscure enough that no one will know."
Now we've simplified that process, and more people are exposed to the risk. I hope that the law takes a minute to evaluate the pace of change instead of saying "ITS TOO DANGEROUS, we must BAN IT", but my hopes are low.
> getting these tools in the future will only be from untrustworthy websites where half the download buttons give you an exe
These models can already be downloaded via well known (ie community reviewed) torrents. So can many terabytes of labeled training data. This particular horse is well out of the barn.
You can't predict future legislation. Intellectual property legislation (which is an absolute cancer IMO) can outlaw models and their results. It can outlaw distribution of the data sets, the training, the models. Tech companies already acted way beyond the requirements of the law and effectively censured open source projects like popcorn time.
Can they prevent a determined hacker which already got everything? No.
Could this be the last model to be trained on a wide dataset, available to the public? Yes.
Could they make it a living hell where getting these tools in the future will only be from untrustworthy websites where half the download buttons give you an exe, and all your less tech savvy friends won't bother? Easily.
Could this tool become impossible for companies to use without risking litigation? Very easily.
People tend to forget those making the rules do not have their interests at heart, and every single intellectual property law is designed to leave companies and not people holding all the rights. And those laws can absolutely do damage. Do not underestimate the power of legislation.