[Citation needed]
Teach a man to fish and all that.
I didn't post it because he (and you) can search for yourselves. Literally first result for "uk illegal meme".
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/09/two...
I suppose in a way advocating for arson and hate crimes is an "illegal meme"..
At which point is the boundary between meme and instigator?
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!
Do you have a source? There's plenty of disinformation on the internet, and I'm curious to learn what has happened.
You know how nuts that sounds to me as a mathematician?!
There’s also a limit to going too far in connecting abstractions.
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.
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.
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...
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.
You could even stretch the idea further to say that someone making a bomb is merely mixing certain perfectly legal chemicals just so...
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?
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.
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.
Stop being such a coomer dildo
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
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've watched my own three children learn to talk, then to write. The human mind is also trained on inputs.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It depends what is considered unlawful, obtaining the tears and causing the harm, or is it enjoyment of chemical compound?
Since when? Some people keep local copies of their media. Censorship and arbitrary license disputes can have streaming content snatched away at any moment.
Tell me a legal streaming service that I can use while swimming and I'd consider using it.
Until then, I'll stick to my MP3.
And what do you think people use now to store their music offline?
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.
Curious what you have done instead?
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?
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.
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.
[0] https://izajodm.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2193-9039-...
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
[2] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...
[4] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
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.
> The 2023 CONTEST report indicated that 75 per cent of the Security Service (MI5)'s caseload was from monitoring Islamist threats.
I don't support the violence and ultra-right (or just right) wings. I think that people have the right to protest.
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.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/operation-of-police...
Yes. I do not think so. I think that if you come to the UK you have to accept the culture of the UK. And if you don't like it - do not come to the UK.
I am a Russian living in Spain. I completely accepted the Spanish culture, my daughter (born in Russia) speaks Spanish and Catala as her native language, and her Russian is (much) worse than her Spanish. That's how we assimilate. Who doesn't want it should not come in the first place.
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.
Sharia law is not a part of European culture and should never be. Women and queer people should be respected, and no form of slavery should be justified by "religious beliefs."
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?
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.