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Study shows AI image-generators being trained on explicit photos of children
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Say it with me folks: regulatory capture.
Google et Al wants to make it illegal for the average user to run any kind of ai model locally.. it's scaremongering.
Even if po}pular image generation AIs did have images of children as part of their training dataset how many people would be able to have them generate anything even remotely like that?
Big tech will use this research, and research like it, to de-democratize artificial intelligence and take it out of the hands of ordinary people while actual pedophiles are training image generation AIs on actual child sexual assault media.
Sooner or later someone with a full blown cp generating stable diffusion model will be found and big tech is going to latch on to it like a lamprey on a shark, doing everything in their power to best the world over the head with it and ensure only they have the tools to make aim
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I disagree. There's huge money being pumped into the open source models space. These players are connected and wouldn't bother if the writing was on the board room wall.
Look at who finances "thebloke" on huggingface for example.
How? I can just go to civitai and download tons of models, clone the stable diffusion and lora tools, and buy better hardware now, and they'll never be able to do shit about it.
I think he's pointing out that in the future, this could lead to regulatory measures by the government because they get pressured by the big corps that AI locally is dangerous, but AI with big corps is all good and the right way. Which is an understandable concern. It's not about you using whatever model you're using; it's about the broader philosophy of how AI should be integrated into our world. He's saying the big corps are trying to monopolize the AI market, which is valid because that's what's happening right now.
Yeah. You got it.
And sure you can hop on vocitai and download a model or lora or lycoris or comfyui workflow or whatwver. But we're only at the beginning stages of ai.
Like. Face swapping is mainly done with with the inswapper. Onnx model which was pulled by insight face after it started making the rounds in the face swapping applicarion roop. It's all well and good for hobbyist face swapping image gen but it's a 128 bit model and low res. It kind of makes a blurry mess on larger images. Insight face has higher resolution models available but they're not public, and to my knowledge there aren't any viable alternative to this model that can match the same speed and accuracy. So everyone is out here playing with sticks and rocks while those who can pay have shoyn new things.
There are very valid concerns about the harmful potential of deep fakes and I can understand how the models creator didn't want to take responsibility for enabling that. But if, say, google wanted to use that or a similar closed source in house model to deep fake CASM for propaganda purposes or the same for political leaders, celebrities, not only does the public not have access to those models to understand how it's being done and identify artifacts of that process, they lack the ability to "fight back" in any meaningful way.
To be clear I don't think the above is, or is inevitably going to happen, but it highlights the asymmetric nature of ai that big tech wants. It doesn't even have to be such high stakes. If you wanted to, say, swap out your son's face for Luke Skywalker on the star wars movie for a Christmas present or something, that's something that would be challenging to do locally and convincingly without the right model, but not having access to that model you could instead be forced to pay an absurdly high price by a private company or denied entirely due to fear of copyright infringement, even though I'm relatively certain doing that and not releasing it publicly falls purely in the realm of fair use.
And then there's text, speech, audio generation. What happens if the tech gets good enough for someone to spend a few hours setting up some parameters for some pop songs with vocals, hits go, and generates music as consistently appealing as what we hear on the radio? And when no one else can access that tech? They're able to pay artists nothing and basically produce free content wed have to pay for. If the public had access to that same tech then artists would still have a role in making popular music, even if the landscape had shifted totally. Either way the music business as we know it dies, but there's one option where creative people can still make money independently without getting on big techs dick to do so.
It's a complicated issue and the ethics of it are fraught no matter where you look, but take one look at how cynically terrible all of googles products are getting and I think it's painfully obvious we can't trust them and their ilk with some access to this kind of tech.