However I think for Europe the regular sexual content moderation (even in text chat) is way over the top. I know the US is very prudish but here most people aren't.
If you mention something erotic to a mainstream AI it will immediately close down which is super annoying because it blocks using it for such discussion topics. It feels a bit like foreign morals are being forced upon us.
Limits on topics that aren't illegal should be selectable by the user. Not baked in hard to the most restricted standards. Similar to the way I can switch off safe search in Google.
However CSAM generation should obviously be blocked and it's very illegal here too.
One should search Huggingface for role-playing models to have a decent level of erotic content, but even that does not guarantee you a pleasant experience.
> It feels a bit like foreign morals are being forced upon us.
Welcome to the rest of the world, where US morals have been forced upon us for decades. You should probably get used to it.
If you think people here think that models should enable CSAM you're out of your mind. There is such thing as reasonable safety, it not all or nothing. You also don't understand the diversity of opinion here.
More broadly, if you don't reasonable regulate your own models and related work, then it attracts government regulation.
> If you think people here think that models should enable CSAM you're out of your mind.
Intentional creation of “virtual” CSAM should be prosecuted aggressively. Note that that’s not the same thing as “models capable of producing CSAM”. I very much draw the line in terms of intent and/or result, not capability.
> There is such thing as reasonable safety, it not all or nothing. You also don't understand the diversity of opinion here.
I agree, but believe we are quite far away from “reasonable safety”, and far away from “reasonable safeguards”. I can get GPT-5 to try to talk me into committing suicide more easily than I can get it to translate objectionable text written in a language I don’t know.
Not by this article, for sure.
"The service prohibits pornography involving real people’s likenesses and sexual content involving minors, which is illegal to create or distribute.
Still, users have prompted Grok to digitally remove clothing from photos — mostly of women — so the subjects appeared to be wearing only underwear or bikinis."
Not possible.
To which governments, courts, and populations likely respond "We don't care if you can't go to market. We don't want models that do this. Solve it or don't offer your services here."
Also… I think they probably could solve this. AI image analysis is a thing. AI that estimate age from an image has been a thing for ages. It's not like the idea of throwing the entire internet worth of images at a training sessions just to make a single "allowed/forbidden" filter is even ridiculous compared to the scale of all the other things going on right now.
No, they likely won't. AI has become far too big to fail at this point. So much money has been invested in it that speculation on AI alone is holding back a global economic collapse. Governments and companies have invested in AI so deeply that all failure modes have become existential.
If models can't be contained, controlled or properly regulated then they simply won't be contained, controlled or properly regulated.
We'll attempt it, of course, but the limits of what the law deems acceptable will be entirely defined by what is necessary for AI to succeed, because at this point it must. There's no turning back.
Not in Europe it hasn't, and definitely not for specifically image generation, where it seems to be filling the same role as clipart, stock photos, and style transfer that can be done in other ways.
Image editing is the latest hotness in GenAI image models, but knowledge of this doesn't seem to have percolated very far around the economy, only with weird toys like this one currently causing drama.
> If models can't be contained, controlled or properly regulated then they simply won't be contained, controlled or properly regulated.
I wish I could've shown this kind of message to people 3.5 years ago, or even 2 years ago, saying that AI will never take over because we can always just switch it off.
Mind you, for 2 years ago I did, and they still didn't like it.
Things that cannot happen will not happen. "AI" (aka LLMs dressed up as AGI by giga-scalr scammers) is never going to work as hyped. What I expect to see in the collision is an attempt to leverage corporate fear and greed into wealth-extractive social control. Hopefully it burns to the ground.
This might be true for the glorified search engine type of AI that everyone is familiar with, but not for image generation. It's a novelty at best, something people try a couple times and then forget about.
But plenty enough people do want them. Grok is meeting demand.
Collectively, probably more. Grok? Not unless you count each frame of a video, I think.
> If getting it wrong for even one of those images is enough to get the entire model banned then it probably isn't possible and this de facto outlaws all image models.
If the threshold is one in a billion… well, the risk is for adversarial outcomes, so you can't just toss a billion attempts at it and see what pops out, but a billion images, if it's anything like Stable Diffusion you can stop early, and my experiments with SD suggested the energy cost even for a full generation is only $0.0001/image*, so a billion is merely $100k.
Given the current limits of GenAI tools, simply not including unclothed or scantily clad people in the training set would prevent this. I mean, I guess you could leave topless bodybuilders in there, then all these pics would look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, almost everyone would laugh and not care.
> That may precisely be the point of this tbh.
Perhaps. But I don't think we need that excuse if this was the goal, and I am not convinced this is the goal in the EU for other reasons besides.
* https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2022/10/09-19.33.04.html
It's like cyber insurance requirements - for better or worse, you need to show that you have been audited, not prove you are actually safe.
> Not possible.
Note that the description of the accusation earlier in the article is:
> The French government accused Grok on Friday of generating “clearly illegal” sexual content on X without people’s consent, flagging the matter as potentially violating the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
It may be impossible to perfectly regulate what content the model can create, it is quite practical for the Grok product to enforce consent of the user whose content is being operated on before content can be generated based on it and, after the context is generated, before it can be viewed by or distributed to anyone else.
No, because it cannot even ID that user.
AI image editors attached to social media networks with a design that allows producing AI edits (including, but not limited to, nonconsensual intimate images and child pornography) of other user’s media without consent are not a national defense issue, and, even to the extent that AI arguably is a national defense issue, those particular applications can be curtailed entirely by a nation without any adverse impact on national defense.
You can distort any issue by zooming out to orbital level and ignoring the salient details.
I don't think the ability for citizens to make deep fake porn of whoever they want is the same as a country not investing in practical defensive applications of AI.
You don't have the right to act in violation of the law merely because it's the only way to make a buck.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes "democracy" isn't just a buzzword.
X.com has been blocked by poorer nations than France (specifically, Brazil) for not following local law.
And if you want to change the law to allow the business, go for it. But until then, we must follow the law.
