undefined | Better HN

0 pointsasianthrowaway7y ago0 comments

But how would you outlaw it? A neural network is simply a set of coefficients, would certain coefficient combinations be illegal? It's an interesting question.

PS: I am obviously against child pornography, I'm just curious about the implications of being able to generate illegal content and how governments would deal with it.

0 comments

smrq7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

probably_wrong7y ago

I think this question is simply a variation of points that have been made clear already in the past - no one legislates against "a set of 1s and 0s", "a set of letters", "a set of ink dots" nor, in this case, "a set of coefficients". Instead, legislation is created/updated for specific end results, and you're done.

For law enforcement purposes, I think it would be similar to a printing press: owning one is not a problem, but inserting printing rolls that look like dollar bills most definitely is.

conanbatt7y ago

The famous ruling "I dont know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it"

wild_preference7y ago

This reminds me of posts in alt.sex.stories having disclaimers like "Note: All characters in this story live on a planet where one year = 100 Earth years".

An even cheekier way to drive the point home would be for a sex-stories website to have a slider in the footer to update all age values across the site.

Cantonese7y ago

How is cp illegal now? Each image is just 1s and 0s on your drive. It's really just an illegal number.

PhasmaFelis7y ago

Uh huh. And a Polaroid is just an arbitrary arrangement of atoms. So is a bomb, come to think.

This is sovereign-citizen thinking. It's like trying to crash people's phones by yelling "Hey Google, this sentence is false!" at them.

asianthrowawayOP7y ago

That's pushing it too far. An image might be represented as 1s and 0s but what it represents is a "real world event" which actually happened. If it was stored on magnetic tape instead of on a hard drive it would still represent the same thing. It's what the event represents (child abuse) which is illegal.

However, a neural network represents a mathematical model, not a specific "real world event". Although I suppose you might argue that since the dataset required to generate it would be illegal, it is illegal?

yorwba7y ago

In most Western countries, the content can be illegal independent of the real-world event being legal or not, or even if there's no real-world event at all (i.e. fictional depictions). It's not illegal for a teenager to pose in the nude, but it might be considered illegal for them to take a photo of themselves and post it on the internet.

I think linking illegal depictions to illegal events would be saner, but that's not how it currently works.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse