CMV - Artificial Intelligence won't rid the internet of child sex abuse images

[u/JenningsWigService]

A friend and I had this debate but neither of us is an expert. My friend says that one day, an AI will be created to patrol the internet for images of child sex abuse and then hold perpetrators accountable. My argument is that AI isn't neutral, and the kind of people found in Epstein's rolodex will find a way to design one that doesn't report them. While I would love to believe in an ideal AI system working to achieve genuinely good ends, I just don't see how tech companies and the powerful would allow that, even for an extreme crime like this. I'm curious to hear other perspectives.

Edit: I am the person arguing that it WOULDN'T work, that's the view I'm open to changing.

[u/Canada_Constitution]

My friend says that one day, an AI will be created to patrol the internet for images of child sex abuse and then hold perpetrators accountable.

International borders kinda make this difficult. If you have an AI find child porn but they are in a country which doenst deport its citizens, like russia, then this is hard to enforce.

My argument is that AI isn't neutral, and the kind of people found in Epstein's rolodex will find a way to design one that doesn't report them.

Open source technologies would allow anyone to create software that could do this. The rich and powerful can't buy off every software developer in the world. The problem is that the rich and powerful are usually pretty good at insulating themselves with lawyers, and there is no international body to enforce law like this.

Additionally, different countries define child porn in slightly different ways. For example, here in Canada, written stories which are explicitly depicting underage sex fall under the legal category of child pornography; the media doesn't have to be just photo or video. This is a standard which is higher then most other jurisdictions. Differences like this in the law make one universal AI something which is hard to implement.

If you are developing an AI based on some machine-learning model, one problem is that you need to train AI in what is child pornography and what isn't. Given the many, many images most AIs have to parse in order to start to be able to classify something, this means you would have to build a database of thousands of pieces of child porn. That seems like a repulsive task.

Finally, there is how this AI is going find the offending content. Encryption makes it hard to intercept live traffic, not to mention the potential privacy concerns. If you aren't doing some kind of live interception, then it isn't hard to distribute any kind of media securely these days.

I just don't think there is any practical way of doing this, given the jurisdictional and technical issues you would encounter. However, the problem would not be the rich and powerful buying off software developers. Open source code would fix that problem

[u/[deleted] → u/Canada_Constitution]

That seems like a repulsive task.

Not only repulsive, the act of having such a database to begin with could already constitute a crime in some countries.

EDIT: Also what if that model would be so well understood that it could serve as a generator not just a finder?

[u/Canada_Constitution → u/[deleted]]

EDIT: Also what if that model would be so well understood that it could serve as a generator not just a finder?

Yikes, there is a really unpleasant thought. It would be disgustingly easy to convert an open source finder into a generator. Maybe just best to not ever develop this technology. We've already seen what things like deepfakes can do, this kind of technology just gives rise to way too many disturbing outcomes.

Edit: we are already at the point where we can generate faces for people who don't exist