Fitzgerald’s is a rare case where an official employed by the state’s top law enforcement and legal office has been accused of making and distributing AI CSAM, although some cops have been arrested for the crime. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania cop was arrested for making AI porn from photos on driver’s licenses, and more recently in Korea, a police officer was arrested for making AI porn, including CSAM, The Korea Times reported.
In New Jersey, the deputy attorney general has been charged with possession of CSAM, dissemination of photos or film of CSAM, and “criminal use of a communication facility,” detectives said.
All of this can be done on a graphics card from 3 generations ago locally though - it’s like Photoshop you know, people can use Photoshop to make revenge porn but Photoshop isn’t illegal, using it to make revenge porn is illegal.
It’s only illegal if the law is actually enforced. Thankfully, due to MeToo, revenge porn gets way more of a response from the law than it did.
That is not currently the case in any meaningful way with image generators being used to make CSAM, which is why it’s important that the companies themselves be held liable. Grok still lets you do this if you buy a sub. Copilot lets you do this and Microsoft knows it, per recent leaks from their prompt reviewers. Meta runs ads for CSAM on Facebook.
In this case, multiple tech companies are knowingly enabling these crimes without a peep from the law to stop them. (At least in the US.)
They just busted a senior law enforcement official for this btw we are commenting on a post about an article about it. I doubt they were using a frontier API
I don’t think you’re understanding what they’re trying to say.
You don’t need to use Grok/Claude/Copilot/Gemini/ChatGPT/etc. at all. Hugging Face currently lists 111,953 text-to-image and 2,893 text-to-video models available.
You can run an image or video generator model at home on your own hardware you currently have. This technology doesn’t require a $10k rig to run. The massive data centers are only necessary for the Software as a Service providers like ChatGPT to operate their systems as fast as possible to tens of thousands of users, with dozens of agents processing multiple steps and reasoning to accomplish a task. One person making one image doesn’t need much.
While the SaaS options definitely need to get better at detecting and blocking usage like CSAM… those services are by no means required. You can do this on any gaming system made in the last 5 years easily, and older if you’re willing to wait longer for the result.
Thank you for the added info, and I totally get that there are workarounds for more diligent predators.
That doesn’t change the fact that the frontier AI companies knowingly making this easy and accessible for sick people is still unacceptable and real accountability is necessary.
Okay, but can we not get local models banned, please? This is what openai and company are gonna use to say we have to pay them if we want AI.
Banning open source is never a useful option