A sex offender convicted of making more than 1,000 indecent images of children has been banned from using any “AI creating tools” for the next five years in the first known case of its kind.
Anthony Dover, 48, was ordered by a UK court “not to use, visit or access” artificial intelligence generation tools without the prior permission of police as a condition of a sexual harm prevention order imposed in February.
The ban prohibits him from using tools such as text-to-image generators, which can make lifelike pictures based on a written command, and “nudifying” websites used to make explicit “deepfakes”.
Dover, who was given a community order and £200 fine, has also been explicitly ordered not to use Stable Diffusion software, which has reportedly been exploited by paedophiles to create hyper-realistic child sexual abuse material, according to records from a sentencing hearing at Poole magistrates court.
As a UK citizen, I’m ashamed of my government.
I am firmly against child abusers, but AI images don’t harm anyone and are a safe and harmless way for pedophiles to fulfil their urges, which they cannot control.
Where does the training data come from to create indecent images of children?
Ai is able to fill in the last field in a table like “Old / young” vs “Clothed / naked” when given three of the four fields.
UK legislators have a long history of taking actions not informed by science or reason but rather the popular, often hysteric, opinion.
This case is yet another attempt at tightening screws where they shouldn’t be.
AI imagery was produced by Stable Diffusion, the model that, for all we know, did not take real CSAM as inputs and caused no harm to actual children. At the same time, such images are important at discouraging the consumption of real CSAM, with very real children being traumatized.
By banning AI imagery production using safe models, legislators leave no legal way for pedophiles to get something by the harmless means, directing many to the harmful ways as equally illegal, while also prosecuting those who did no harm.
counter point:
if you have a folder of AI generated CP and put in a couple of pictures of actual CP it’s going to muddle the case as the offender could claim all of them are simply AI generated. Real harm could go unnoticed if those two were to be treated differently.
Additionally, not every offender will stop at AI generated images, and if their curiosity becomes enough they could go on to want to experience “the real thing”.
I think the solution here is not banning AI materials outright but to make them identifiable - even by means of digital signatures if you want.
For example, Stable Diffusion could insert particular piece of metadata into the picture containing the signature and proving the image is AI-generated, etc.
Without AI materials, said curiosity may lead people straight to the “real thing”, and every darknet or even Telegram dweller will tell you it’s frighteningly easy to find it even if you never intended to. With AI materials, people can have a chance to stop there.
meta data is trivially easy to strip off a picture, you don’t even need to bother using tools for it - just take a screenshot and delete the original
Yeah but the point is you can’t easily add it to any picture you want (if it’s implemented well), thus providing a way to prove that the pictures were created using AI and no harm has been done to children in their creation. It would be a valid solution to the “easy to hide actual CSAM between AI generated pictures” problem.
you can’t easily add it to any picture you want (if it’s implemented well
Edit for the downvoters: StackExchange - How do I add exif data to an image?
Going to need you to elaborate on this. EXIF data is just bytes in a file, like any of the other bytes in the file. It can be changed and is often changed without the users consent. Are you proposing we create a new type of hardware, something akin to Secure Enclave, and then mass-produce and add it to every consumer CPU to ensure some specific types of exif data isn’t tampered with?
I was thinking of an approach based on cryptographic signatures. If all images that come from a certain AI model are signed with a digital certificate, you can tamper with metadata all you want, you’re not gonna be able to produce the correct signature to add to an image unless you have access to the certificate’s private key. This technology has been around for ages and is used in every web browser and would be pretty simple to implement.
The only weak point with this approach would be that it relies on the private key not being publicly accessible, which makes this a lot harder or maybe even impossible to implement for open source models that anyone can run on their own hardware. But then again, at least for what we’re talking about here, the goal wouldn’t need to be a system covering every model, just one that makes at least a couple models safe to use for this specific purpose.
I guess the more practical question is whether this would be helpful for any other use case. Because if not, I hardly doubt it’s gonna be implemented. Nobody is gonna want the PR nightmare of building a feature with no other purpose than to help pedophiles generate stuff to get off to “safely”, no matter how well intentioned
