To people claiming a physical raid is pointless from the point of gathering data :
- you are thinking about a company doing good things the right way. You are thinking about a company abiding by the law, storing data on its own server, having good practices, etc.
The moment a company starts to do dubious stuff then good practices start to go out the window. People write email with cryptic analogies, people start deleting emails, ... then as the circumvention become more numerous and complex, there needs to still be a trail in order to remain understandable. That trail will be in written form somehow and that must be hidden. It might be paper, it might be shadow IT but the point is that if you are not just forgetting to keep track of coffee pods at the social corner, you will leave traces.
So yes, raids do make sense BECAUSE it's about recurring complex activities that are just too hard to keep in the mind of one single individual over long periods of time.
It's also just very basic police work. We're investigating this company, we think they've committed a crime. Ok, why do you think that. Well they've very publicly and obviously committed a crime. Ok, are you going to prosecute them? Probably. Have you gone to their offices and gathered evidence? No thanks.
Of course they're going to raid their offices! They're investigating a crime! It would be quite literally insane if they tried to prosecute them for a crime and how up to court having not even attempted basic steps to gather evidence!
A company I worked for had a 'when the police raid the office' policy, which was to require they smash down the first door, but then open all other doors for them.
That was so that later in court it could be demonstrated the data hadn't been handed over voluntarily.
They also disconnected and blocked all overseas VPN's in the process, so local law enforcement only would get access to local data.
Well, yes, it is actually pretty normal for suspected criminal businesses. What's unusual is that this one has their own publicity engine. Americans are just having trouble coping with the idea of a corporation being held liable for crimes.
Was it ever actually accused of crimes? Was it raided? Was there a list of charges?
It always seemed to me that TikTok was doing the same things that US based social networks were doing, and the only problem various parties could agree on with this was that it was foreign-owned.
American companies held liable for crimes include Bank of America ($87B in penalties), Purdue Pharma (opioid crisis), Pfizer for fraudulent drug marketing, Enron for accounting fraud. Everyone on hn should know about FTX, Theranos, I mean come on.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, physical investigation is the common procedure. You need a reason _not_ to do it, and since "it's all digital" is not a good reason we go back to doing the usual thing.
It's a show of force. "Look we have big strong men with le guns and the neat jack boots, we can send 12 of them in for every one of you." Whether it is actually needed for evidence is immaterial to that.
If law enforcement credibily believes that criminals are conspiring to commit a crime and are actively doing so in a particular location what is wrong with sending armed people to stop those criminal acivities as well as apprehend the criminals and what ever evidence of their crimes may exist?
If this isn't the entire purpose of law enforcement then what is exactly?
But one could reasonably assume that a location that is known to be used for criminal activity and that likely has evidence of such criminal activity likely also has people commiting crimes.
When police raid a grow-op they often may only have a search warrant but they end up making several arrests because they find people actively commiting crimes when they execute the warrant.
It can be both things at once. It obviously sends a message, but hey, maybe you get lucky, and someone left a memo in the bin by the printer that blows the case wide open.
Isn't it both necessary and normal if they need more information about why they were generating CSAM? I don't know why the rule of law shouldn't apply to child pornography or why it would be incorrect to normalize the prosecution of CSAM creators.
1) Even when you move things to a server, or remove it from your device, evidence is still left over without your knowledge sometimes.
2) Evidence of data destruction, is in itself as the name implies, evidence. And it can be used to prove things.
For example, an ext4 journal or NTFS USN $J journal entry that shows "grok_version_2.4_schema.json" where twitter is claiming grok version 2.4 was never deployed in France/UK is important. That's why tools like shred and SDelete rename files before destroying them. But even then, when those tools rename and destroy files, it stands out, it might even be worse because investigators can speculate more. It might corroborate some other piece of evidence (e.g.: sdelete's prefetch entry on windows, or download history from a browser for the same tool), and that might be a more serious charge (obstruction of justice in the US).
Indeed, actions leaves traces, including the action of deleting data. It takes a LOT of expertise to be able to delete something without leaving a trail behind, if that's even feasible without going to extraordinary length.
They don't just take paper when they raid offices. They take the computers too. I've never worked anywhere where desktop machines are encrypted as a matter of routine. Laptops yes (but only recently). Servers maybe, depending on what they do.
At some point in the near future I see a day where our work laptops are nothing more than a full screen streaming video to a different computer that is housed in a country that has no data extradition treaties and is business friendly.
Because that country and the businesses that support that are going to get RICH from such a service.
Takes literally minutes to setup with Webtop (assuming you are familiar with Docker/Podman https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ ) , nothing to install on the thin client, the stock browser is enough.
I used this when an employer was forcing me to use Windows and I needed Linux tools to work efficiently so I connected home. Goes through firewalls, proxies, etc.
Anyway if you want to host this not at home but a cloud provider there was HavenCo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HavenCo don't ask me how I know about it, just curiosity.
> At some point in the near future I see a day where our work laptops are nothing more than a full screen streaming video to a different computer that is housed in a country that has no data extradition treaties and is business friendly.
Do you mean they will be pure worker surveillance systems, or did you mean “from” instead of “to”?
Not video but that's essentially how companies like Google operate today. That's why their engineers can use an off the shelf Chromebook. Their IDE is on the web, etc.
I've definitely witnessed some pretty big companies that have got all their employees, including developers, set up on Citrix. In those cases, the "foreign friendly legal environment getting rich off of it" was the United States
No need to be coy the raid exists because it's a way to punish the company without proving anything. They have zero intention of getting even the slightest bit of valuable data related to Grok from this.
Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law.
So no, don't be coy and pretend that all governments are like American institutions.
>Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law.
There was legal warrant and the wikipedia does not mention any lies or rules being being broken. There is nothing "Iffy" on that front.
And, to spell it out, it is also funny to see who was complaining about it back then. On the free speech grounds, not less, literally people trying to dismantle democracy and create autocracy. Russian soldiers and operators, Maria Butina, Medvedev and Elon Musk. Bad faith actors having bad faith arguments.
It seems people have a rather short memory when it comes to twitter. When it was still run by Jack Dorsey, CP was abundant on twitter and there was little effort to tamp down on it. After Musk bought the platform, he and Dorsey had a public argument in which Dorsey denied the scale of the problem or that old twitter was aware of it and had shown indifference. But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned. It's curious that there wasn't nearly the same level of outrage from the morally righteous HN crowd towards Mr. Dorsey back then as there is in this thread.
Having an issue with users uploading CSAM (a problem for every platform) is very different from giving them a tool to quickly and easily generate CSAM, with apparently little-to-no effort to prevent this from happening.
Well, its worth noting that with the nonconsensual porn, child and otherwise, it was generating X would often rapidly punish the user that posted the prompt, but leave the grok-generated content up. It wasn't an issue of not having control, it was an issue of how the control was used.
Didn't Reddit have the same problem until they got negative publicity and were basically forced to clean it up? What is with these big tech companies and CP?
Not exactly. Reddit always took down CSAM (how effectively I don't know, but I've been using the site consistently since 2011 and I've never come across it).
What Reddit did get a lot of negative public publicity for were subreddits focused on sharing non-explicit photos of minors, but with loads of sexually charged comments. The images themselves, nobody would really object to in isolation, but the discussions surrounding the images were all lewd. So not CSAM, but still creepy and something Reddit tightly decided it didn't want on the site.
"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."
"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."
My natural reaction here is like I think most others; that yes Grok / X bad, shouldn't be able to generate CSAM content / deepfakes.
But I am having trouble justifying in an consistent manner why Grok / X should be liable here instead of the user. I've seen a few arguments here that mostly comes down to:
1. It's Grok the LLM generating the content, not the user.
2. The distribution. That this isn't just on the user's computer but instead posted on X.
For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.
For 2. if Grok instead generated the content for download would the liability go away? What if Grok generated the content to be downloaded only and then the user uploaded manually to X? If in this case Grok isn't liable then why does the automatic posting (from the user's instructions) make it different? If it is, then it's not about the distribution anymore.
There are some comparisons to photoshop, that if i created a deep fake with photoshop that I'm liable not Adobe. If photoshop had a "upload to X" button, and I created CSM using photoshop and hit the button to upload to X directly, is now Adobe now liable?
> But I am having trouble justifying in an consistent manner why Grok / X should be liable here instead of the user.
This seems to rest on false assumptions that: (1) legal liability is exclusive, and (2) investigation of X is not important both to X’s liability and to pursuing the users, to the extent that they would also be subject to liability.
X/xAI may be liable for any or all of the following reasons:
* xAI generated virtual child pornography with the likenesses of actual children, which is generally illegal, even if that service was procured by a third party.
* X and xAI distributed virtual child pornography with the likenesses of actual children, which is generally illegal, irrespective of who generated and supplied them.
* To the extent that liability for either of the first two bullet points would be eliminated or mitigated by absence of knowledge at the time of the prohibited content and prompt action when the actor became aware, X often punished users for the prompts proucing the virtual child pornography without taking prompt action to remove the xAI-generated virtual child pornography resulting from the prompt, demonstrating knowledge and intent.
* When the epidemic of grok-generated nonconsensual, including child, pornography drew attention, X and xAI responded by attempting to monetize the capacity by limiting the tool to only paid X subscribers, showing an attempt to commercially profit from it, which is, again, generally illegal.
> For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.
LLMs are completely different to programming languages or even Photoshop.
You can't type a sentence and within 10 seconds get images of CSAM with Photoshop. LLMs are also built on trained material, unlike the traditional tools in Photoshop. There have been plenty CSAM found in the training data sets, but shock-horror apparently not enough information to know "where it came from". There's a non-zero chance that this CSAM Grok is vomiting out is based on "real" CSAM of people being abused.
Filtering on the platform or Grok output though? If the filtering / flagging on X is insufficient then that is a separate issue independent of Grok. If filtering output of Grok, while irresponsible in my view, I don’t see why that’s different from say photoshop not filtering its output.
Are those numbers in the article somewhere? From what I read it says that out of 7,062 cases, the platform was known for only 1,824. Then it says Snapchat accounts for 48% (not 54%). I don't see any other percentages.
The lack of guardrails wasn’t a carelessness issue - Grok has many restrictions and Elon regularly manipulates the answers it gives to suit his political preferences - but rather one of several decisions to offer largely unrestricted AI adult content generation as a unique selling point. See also, e.g. the lack of real age verification on Ani’s NSFW capabilities.
I disagree. Prosecute people that use the tools, not the tool makers if AI generated content is breaking the law.
A provider should have no responsibility how the tools are used. It is on users. This is a can of worms that should stay closed, because we all lose freedoms just because of couple of bad actors. AI and tool main job is to obey. We are hurling at "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" future with breakneck speed.
I agree that users who break the law must be prosecuted. But that doesn’t remove responsibility from tool providers when harm is predictable, scalable, and preventable by design.
We already apply this logic elsewhere. Car makers must include seatbelts. Pharma companies must ensure safety. Platforms must moderate illegal content. Responsibility is shared when the risk is systemic.
>But that doesn’t remove responsibility from tool providers when harm is predictable, scalable, and preventable by design.
Platforms moderating illegal content is exactly what we are arguing about, so you can't use it as an argument.
The rest cases you list are harms to the people using the tools/products. It is not harms that people using the tools inflict on third parties.
We are literally arguing about 3d printer control two topics downstream. 3d printers in theory can be used for CSAM too. So we should totally ban them - right? So are pencils, paper, lasers, drawing tablets.
That is not the argument. No one is arguing about banning open source LLMs that could potentially create problematic content on huggingface, but X provides not only an AI model, but a platform and distribution as well, so that is inherently different
> No one is arguing about banning open source LLMs that could potentially create problematic content on huggingface,
If LLMs should have guardrails, why should open source ones be exempt? What about people hosting models on hugging face? WHat if you use a model both distributed by and hosted by hugging face.
No it is not. X is dumb pipe. You have humans on both ends. Arrest them, summary execute them whatever. You go after X because it is a choke point and easy.
X is most definitely not a dumb pipe, you also have humans beside the sender and receiver choosing what content (whether directly or indirectly) is promoted for wide dissemination, relatively suppressed, or outright blocked.
We don't consider warehouses & stores to be a "slippery slope" away from toll roads, so no I really don't see any good faith slippery slope argument that connects enforcing the law against X to be the same as government censorship of ISPs.
I mean even just calling it censorship is already trying to shove a particular bias into the picture. Is it government censorship that you aren't allowed to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater? Yes. Is that also a useful feature of a functional society? Also yes. Was that a "slippery slope"? Nope. Turns out people can handle that nuance just fine.
You are literally trolling. No one is banning AI entirely. However AI shouldn't spit out adult content. Let's not enable people harm others easily with little to no effort.
3D printers don't synthesize content for you though. If they could generate 3D models of CSAM from thin air and then print them, I'm sure they'd be investigated too if they were sold with no guardrails in place.
But how would we bring down our political boogieman Elon Musk if we take that approach?
Everything I read from X's competitors in the media tells me to hate X, and hate Elon.
If we prosecute people not tools, how are we going to stop X from hurting the commercial interests of our favourite establishment politicians and legacy media?
There is no mediocrity Republicans won't embrace. They have absolutely zero values, and can be made to accept and defend literally anything with sufficient propaganda.
If you had argued that it’s impossible to track what is made on local models, and we can no longer maintain hashes of known CP, it would have been a fair statement of current reality.
——-
You’ve said that whatever is behind door number 1 is unacceptable.
Behind door number 2, “holding tool users responsible”, is tracking every item generated via AI, and being able to hold those users responsible.
If you don’t like door number 2, we have door number 3 - which is letting things be.
For any member of society, opening door 3 is straight out because the status quo is worse than reality before AI.
If you reject door 1 though, you are left with tech monitoring. Which will be challenged because of its invasive nature.
Holding Platforms responsible is about the only option that works, at least until platforms tell people they can’t do it.
Behind door number 4 is whenever you find a crime, start investigation and get a warrant. You will only need a couple of cases to send chilling enough effects.
You won't find much agreement with your opinion amongst most people. No matter of many "this should and this shouldn't" is written into text by single individual, thats not how morals work.
How? X is hostile to any party attempting to bring justice to its users that are breaking the law. This is a last recourse, after X and its owner stated plainly that they don't see anything wrong with generating CSAM or pornographic images of non-consenting people, and that they won't do anything about it.
X will not provide these informations to the French Justice System. What then? Also insane that you believe the company that built a "commit crime" button bears no responsibility whatsoever in this debacle.
You really believe that? You think the Trump administration will force Musk's X to give the French State data about its users so CSAM abusers can be prosecuted there? This is delusional, to say the least. And let's not even touch on the subject of Trump and Musk both being actual pedophiles themselves.
Enforcement of anti-CSAM law has been a significant thing for a long time. It's in no way "only now". Even the "free speech" platforms banned it because they knew they would get raided otherwise. There are long standing tools for dealing with it, such as a database of known hashes of material. There's even a little box you can tick in Cloudflare to automatically check outgoing material from your own site against that database - because this is a strict liability offence, and you are liable if other people upload it to you where it can be re-downloaded.
What's new is that X automated the production of obscene or sexualised images by providing grok. This was also done in a way that confronted everyone; it's very different from a black market, this is basically a harassment tool for use against women and girls.
> What's new is that X automated the production of obscene or sexualised images by providing grok.
Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.
So let me make a suggestion: maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?
Hit them hard at the money level... it wouldn't be more authoritarian than something like ChatControl or restricting access to VPNs.
And actually all the mechanisms are already in place to implement something like that.
> Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.
I don't get what's difficult to understand or believe here. Grok causes a big issue in practice right now, a larger issue than photoshop, and it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't, so the state intervenes.
> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?
You're basically asking "why do a surgical strike when you can do carpet bombing"? A surgical strike is used to target the actual problem. With carpet bombing you mostly cause collateral damage.
Just calling out the false equivalence (Grok self-regulation: dragging their feet and doing the absolute minimum too late after deflecting all blame on the users, while the competition proactively tries to harden the models against such use)
Grok's always proactively had limits on adult content frm the day it was first released public. There's equivalence, you're stating that it's false but I haven't seen any reason to think that. I'm calling out the hypocrisy.
> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand any of the arguments above.
If we presume a dark control motivation then having shares in the entities you want to control is the best form of control there is.
The different factors are scale (now "deepfakes" can be automatically produced), and endorsement. It is significant that all these images aren't being posted by random users, they are appearing under the company's @grok handle. Therefore they are speech by X, so it's X that's getting raided.
"In 2024, Bluesky submitted 1,154 reports for confirmed CSAM to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Reports consist of the account details, along with manually reviewed media by one of our specialized child safety moderators. Each report can involve many pieces of media, though most reports involve under five pieces of media."
There are multiple valid reasons to fight realistic computer-generated CSAM content.
Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder, prosecution of perpetrators more difficult and specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material.
Content is unacceptable if its proliferation causes sufficient harm, and this is arguably the case here.
> Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder
I don't follow. If the prosecutor can't find evidence of a crime and a person is not charged, that is considered harmful? As such the 5th amendment would fall under the same category and so would encryption. Making law enforcement have to work harder to find evidence of a crime cannot be criminalized unless you can come up with a reason why the actions themselves deserve to be criminalized.
> specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material.
What is the criteria for this? If something is suitably transformed such that the original model for it is not discernable or identifiable, how can it harm them?
Do not take these as an argument against the idea you are arguing for, but as rebuttals against arguments that are not convincing, or if they were, would be terrible if applied generally.
If there is a glut of legal, AI generated CSAM material then this provides a lot of deniability for criminal creators/spreaders that cause genuine harm, and reduces "vigilance" of prosecutors, too ("it's probably just AI generated anyway...").
You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.
> What is the criteria for this?
My criteria would be victims suffering personally from the generated material.
The "no harm" argument only really applies if victims and their social bubble never find out about the material (but that did happen, sometimes intentionally, in many cases).
You could make the same argument that a hidden camera in a locker room never causes any harm as long as it stays undetected; that is not very convincing to me.
> If there is a glut of legal, AI generated CSAM material then this provides a lot of deniability for criminal creators/spreaders that cause genuine harm, and reduces "vigilance" of prosecutors, too ("it's probably just AI generated anyway...").
> You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.
I don't know about that. Would "I didn't know it was real" really count as a legal defense?
> You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.
But that reason is highly problematic. Laws should be able to stand on their own for their reasons. Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.
> You could make the same argument that a hidden camera in a locker room never causes any harm as long as it stays undetected; that is not very convincing to me.
I thought you were saying that the kids who were in the dataset that the model was trained on would be harmed. I agree with what I assume you meant based on your reply, which is people who had their likeness altered are harmed.
> Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.
I don't understand how that's the same reasoning at all... Encryption serves ones individual privacy and preserves it against malicious actors. I'd guess that's a fundamental right in most jurisdictions, globally.
We're talking CSAM here and shifting its creation into the virtual world through some GenAI prompts. Just because that content has been created artificially, doesn't make its storage and distribution any more legal.
It isn't some reductionist "this makes enforcement of other laws harder", but it's rather that the illegal distribution of artificially generated content acts as fraudulent obstruction in the prosecution of authentic, highly illegal, content - content with malicious actors and physically affected victims.
> Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.
Yes. I almost completely agree with your outlook, but I think that many of our laws trade such individual freedoms for better society-wide outcomes, and those are often good tradeoffs.
Just consider gun legislation, driving licenses, KYC laws in finance, etc: Should the state have any business interfering there? I'd argue in isolation (ideally) not; but all those lead to huge gains for society, making it much less likely to be murdered by intoxicated drivers (or machine-gunners) and limit fraud, crime and corruption.
So even if laws look kinda bad from a purely theoretical-ethics point of view it's still important to look at the actual effects that they have before dismissing them as unjust in my view.
Laws against money laundering come to kind. It's illegal for you to send money from your legal business to my personal account and for me to send it from my personal account to your other legal business, not because the net result is illegal, but because me being in the middle makes it harder for "law enforcement" to trace the transaction.
> I remember when CSAM meant actual children not computer graphics.
The "oh its photoshop" defence was an early one, which required the law to change in the uk to be "depictions" of children, so that people who talk about ebephiles don't have an out for creating/distributing illegal content.
If I found a folder with a hundred images of naked kids on your PC, I would report you to authorities, regardless of what pose kids are depicted in. So I guess the answer is no.
Hard to know the intent of a picture in most cases.
E.g. there used to be a magazine for teens when I grew up showing a picture of a naked adolescent of each sex in every edition (Bravo Dr Sommer).
The intent was to educate teens and to make them feel less ashamed.
I bet there were people who used these for sexual gratification. Should that have been a reason to ban them? I don't think so.
Educational nudity where the subject consented possible for teenagers over 16 in Germany (and the publication complied with the law) is not the same category as CSAM or non-consensual sexual imagery. In the former, misuse by a minority doesn’t automatically make the publication illegal. In the latter, the harm is intrinsic: a child cannot legally consent, and non-consensual sexual images are a direct rights violation.
Do you think the judge is stupid? The naked kid pics aren't printed in an anatomical textbook. Because they're AI hallucinations, I doubt they're even anatomically correct.
Generated by a stranger, then posted online on X for the whole world to see. Are you really OK with that, even if the subject was your 10 years old daughter?
We have privacy laws forbidding anyone to share most pictures of people without their consent independent of what they are wearing on that picture. This is not new.
That stranger should be investigated. I don't see why it needs to be CSAM for us to be upset about it.
Yes, and these laws are getting blatantly broken, while neither X nor the US Government are willing to do anything about it. Which is why French authorities have decided to take the matter in their own hands.
I do understand that, but in this thread there was no mention of anything sexy so far.
I am just pedantic because I think it is important when it comes to criminal accusations.
Sexuality and nakedness are two different things.
First you defend CSAM, then we were talking about sexualised images of people without their consent, you were trying to diminish this as „just bikini“ pics
Speaking of freedom, I lost posting permission yesterday after my earlier post. Even though vile replies were insinuating vile things, my right of reply was taken away. We should never diminish the "name of freedom" as you've just done.
It should go without saying that CSAM is revolting. Who wants to see that stuff? Not me, not most people. Grok can't make that content. Maybe someone got around it temporarily. I've always thought Grok heavily censored, it refuses to analyse an image of the Statue of David because "naughty bits". The ironic and sad thing is a fig leaf gets around that restriction. So the accusation that Grok has no guardrails and can generate CSAM seems at best an anomaly or a lie.
Frankly it sounds to me like a "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" kind of operation. France and the UK, and judging by yesterday's speech by the PM of Spain maybe the whole EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media by making it impossible to operate without total alignment with their vision and not just their (new) rules. Together with a push for local alternatives, that currently don't seem to be there, it may spell the end for a big chunk of the Global social network landscape.
I still believe that the EU and aligned countries would rather have America to agree to much tighter speech controls, digital ID, ToS-based speech codes as apparently US Democrats partly or totally agree to. But if they have workable alternatives they will deal with them from a different position.
Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe. Likewise, if you don't follow US laws I'd advise against trying to do business in USA.
>Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe.
Sure, that's what laws are for. Surely we can still point at those laws and question their motives though.
Spanish PM plainly stated a sort of editor framework of responsibility for platforms. This is the same country that strongly advocates for Chat Control within the EU, also looking for a similar under-16 ban on social media.
So the same government is at once looking to deanonimize social media users, revoke their privacy regarding communications, and to enforce moderation standards never seen before. This is, supposedly, a center-left + left coalition mind you.
Same country that blocks a chunk of the internet when a LALIGA football match is on, too. Lawfully of course. All of this is preposterous, making it the law doesn't make that better it makes it far far worse.
If X/Twitter was to be banned in the EU, and some of its citizens still wanted to access X/Twitter, let us say for the sake of getting alternative points of view on politics and news, would it be a good or a bad thing if accessing X/Twitter by IP was stopped?
As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?
Generally speaking I wouldn't support blocking their IP, but rather I'd block the ability of European companies to pay for ads on X unless they fixed their shit and paid any damages. That might of course lead X to block Europe visitors in turn but that is a different discussion.
Or in other words: I would block the do business-part, not the access part.
Like anything involving hundreds of millions of users, there's going to be good or bad effects. However I have been on the internet long enough to have concluded that the idea that local law has _no effect at all_ on websites is not good. Ultimately if they don't comply they would probably have to be blocked.
CNN is a very silly example though, because .. you can just go to the CNN website separately. The one that is blocked is Russia Today and various other enemy propaganda channels.
there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU because it's clear that this is a very plausible endgame
currently VPNs are too easy to use for the leadership of autocracies like the EU or the UK to be comfortable with them, so at the very least they will require for backdoors to see which citizens are watching what, and have them visited by fellows in hi-vis jackets
> there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU
No there isn't.
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law.
Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous). This is how our democracies work!
Reporting government discussions as approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
I’m reminded of Lord Haw-Haw, an English-speaking Nazi propagandist during WW2 that garnered quite a bit of attention for his radio broadcasts.
There’s an interesting tidbit that he gained quite a few listeners when he started releasing casualty information that the British government withheld to try to keep wartime-morale high.
Lord Haw-Haw then tried to leverage that audience into a force of Nazi sympathy and a general mood of defeatism.
Anyway, fun anecdote. Enemy propaganda during wartime (or increased tensions) is harmless until it isn’t.
I would have thought that the Great Firewall of China would be a more obvious thing to be reminded of. Especially since there is no world war currently, yet, at least, and communication might help stop one.
Once there’s a fascist regime with ambitions of world domination that documents their horrors more thoroughly (and has their enemies document their horrors more thoroughly) than the Nazis then we can start referencing that regime instead.
Conveniently, at least in the US, WW2 is old enough to be “history” rather than “politics”, compared to Korea and Vietnam. Or, at least that’s the excuse I was given in AP US History when the curriculum suddenly ended at 1950. So WW2 will continue to be the most well-documented topic that we’re all educated enough about to collectively reference.
Trust me, I’d much rather speak plainly about the horrors of the atrocities that the US committed in the 20th century American but we’re not there yet because the people who grew up in the nation while it committed those atrocities still run the government and basically the nation in general.
Edit: also if it wasn’t obvious I was comparing Musk to Haw Haw. I don’t know if there is an equivalent for China
I’ll admit to being misinformed on occasion, and greatly appreciate the opportunities to learn and be corrected.
Dishonest, though? To what end? If anything, the anonymity of the internet allows me to test my more weakly-held fringe beliefs and adjust them as I receive feedback.
I get the impression that you’re not well-informed enough to have a meaningful conversation about these difficult topics, though you may hold an opinion with significant conviction. Sorry.
Just to clarify – are we agreeing both are unreasonable, or is your point that both are reasonable and EU fines even more so?
If you're arguing that DOJ fines on European banks are more unreasonable than EU fines on US tech companies that's fine with me. But that wouldn't make either reasonable or my comment "ridiculous".
that was decades later, but yea I don't think for a second that was justifiable - not even considering that China had completely closed shop for America decades earlier and this was a 1-way openness relationship for a long time; they could have sold this as a reciprocity issue but they didn't
esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country
arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on
It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies - it's not like the US where if you give the President good vibes you can become head of the FBI, and all you have to do in return is whatever he says. There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies - with implementing the law as written.
Nobody wrote a law saying "Go after Grok". There is however a law in most countries about the creation and dissemination of CSAM material and non-consensual pornography. Some of that law is relatively new (the UK only introduced some of these laws in recent years), but they all predate the current wave of AI investment.
Founders, boards of directors and their internal and external advisors could:
1. Read the law and make sure any tools they build comply
2. When told their tools don't comply take immediate and decisive action to change the tools
3. Work with law enforcement to apply the law as written
Those companies, if they find this too burdensome, have the choice of not operating in that market. By operating in that market, they both implicitly agree to the law, and are required to explicitly abide by it.
They can't then complain that the law is unfair (it's not), that it's being politicised (How? By whom? Show your working), and that this is all impossible in their home market where they are literally offering presents to the personal enrichment of the President on bended knee while he demands that ownership structures of foreign social media companies like TikTok are changed to meet the agenda of himself and his administration.
So, would the EU like more tighter speech controls? Yes, they'd like implementation of the controls on free speech enshrined in legislation created by democratically appointed representatives. The alternative - algorithms that create abusive content, of women and children in particular - are not wanted by the people of the UK, the EU, or most of the rest of the World, laws are written to that effect, and are then enforced by the authorities tasked with that enforcement.
This isn't "anti-democratic", it's literally democracy in action standing up to technocratic feudalism that is an Ayn Randian-wet dream being played out by some morons who got lucky.
> It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies
As someone who has lived in (and followed current affairs) in both of these countries, this is a very idealistic and naïve view. There can be a big gap between theory and practice
> There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
> They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies -
It's worth nothing here that the UK doesn't have separation of powers or a supreme court (in the US sense)
European courts have repeatedly said that in France the procureur (public prosecutor) isn’t an “independent judicial authority”.
The European Court of Human Rights has reminded this point (e.g. 29 Mar 2010, appl. no. 3394/03), and the Court of Justice of the European Union reaches a very similar conclusion (2 Mar 2021, C-746/18): prosecutors are part of the executive hierarchy and can’t be treated as the neutral, independent judicial check some procedures require.
For a local observer, this is made obvious by the fact that the procureur, in France, always follows current political vibes, usually in just a few months delay (extremely fast, when you consider how slowly justice works in the country).
There's a dissonance between the claim that it's "independent of the political bodies" and "held to account by respective legislative bodies". Are the legislative bodies not political? In the sense of aren't they elected through a political process?
This is kind of a genuine question from me since I have no idea how these authorities are set up in France or the UK...
Yeah, and in his mind the only social networks that exist are Telegram and Twitter. Mastodon doesn't exist, bluesky doesn't either, rr any of Meta's products (including Threads, direct competitor to Twitter with seemingly more bots and propaganda)
Yeah, as someone who's been to Russia pre-war, and has worked and befriended Russians, the beam in the eye is quite strong in many. It's striking because the social contract there is basically that you're left alone as long as you don't become a thorn of the power, social network-mediated or not, and I'm not even talking about Putin and his entourage, but local administration in a remote village too. Zvyagintsev portrays it royally in Leviathan, as it's been portrayed by Dostoyevsky and Tosltoy before.
My most recent case: I went on holiday to a resort in Turkey, numerous Russians, families, retired, etc. I don't pass as a Russian-speaker (but I understand quite well) and once they hear me talking other unrelated language they naturally start to speak more freely in front of me (i.e. more liberal use of swearing, and even slurs if no other Russians are around).
While sunbathing, or at the restaurant, or the pool, they were talking about daily, mundane things, same in the restaurant, etc. But when floating in pairs 20-30m from the shore? Politics.
> and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
Siezing records is usually a major step in an investigation. Its how you get evidence.
Sure it could just be harrasment, but this is also how normal police work looks. France has a reasonable judicial system so absent of other evidence i'm inclined to believe this was legit.
Well, there is evidence that this company made and distributed CSAM and pornographic deepfakes to make a profit. There is no evidence lacking there for the investigators.
So the question becomes if it was done knowingly or recklessly, hence a police raid for evidence.
See also [0] for a legal discussion in the German context.
> Well, there is evidence that this company made and distributed CSAM
I think one big issue with this statement – "CSAM" lacks a precise legal definition; the precise legal term(s) vary from country to country, with differing definitions. While sexual imagery of real minors is highly illegal everywhere, there's a whole lot of other material – textual stories, drawings, animation, AI-generated images of nonexistent minors – which can be extremely criminal on one side of an international border, de facto legal on the other.
And I'm not actually sure what the legal definition is in France; the relevant article of the French Penal Code 227-23 [0] seems superficially similar to the legal definition of "child pornography" in the United States (post-Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition), and so some–but (maybe) not all–of the "CSAM" Grok is accused of generating wouldn't actually fall under it. (But of course, I don't know how French courts interpret it, so maybe what it means in practice is something broader than my reading of the text suggests.)
And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law, in spite of the fact that CSAM laws in much of the rest of the world are much broader than in the US. That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has. And, as I said – while that's undoubtedly true in general, I'm unsure to what extent it is actually true for France in particular.
It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics. The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
> It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics.
The most common French word is Pédopornographie. But my impression is the definition of that word under French law is possibly narrower than some definitions of the English acronym “CSAM”. Canadian law is much broader, and so what’s legally pédopornographie (English “child pornogaphy”) in Canada may be much closer to broad “CSAM” definitions
> The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
Which French law are you alleging they violated? Article 227-23 du Code pénal, or something else? And how exactly are you claiming they violated it?
Note the French authorities at this time are not accusing them of violating the law. An investigation is simply a concern or suspicion of a legal violation, not a formal accusation; one possible outcome of an investigation is a formal accusation, another is the conclusion that they (at least technically) didn’t violate the law after all. I don’t think the French legal process has reached a conclusion either way yet.
One relevant case is the unpublished Court of Cassation decision 06-86.763 dated 12 septembre 2007 [0] which upheld a conviction of child pornography for importing and distributing the anime film “Twin Angels - le retour des bêtes célestes - Vol. 3". [0] However, the somewhat odd situation is that it appears that film is catalogued by the French national library, [1] although I don’t know if a catalogue entry definitively proves they possess the item. Also, art. 227-23 distinguishes between material depicting under 15s (illegal to even possess) and material depicting under 18s (only illegal to possess if one has intent to distribute); this prosecution appears to be have been brought under the latter category only-even though the individual was depicted as being under 15-suggesting this anime might not be illegal to possess in France if one has no intent to distribute it.
But this is the point - one needs to look at the details of exactly what the law says and how exactly the authorities apply it, rather than vague assertions of criminality which might not actually be true.
> And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law
True, but outright child porn is illegal everywhere (as you said) and the borderline legal stuff is something most of your audience is quite happy to have removed. I cannot imagine you are going to get a lot of complaints if you remove AI generated sexual images of minors, for example so it seems reasonable to play it safe.
> That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has.
This is also common, but it is irritating too as it means the rest of the world is stuck with silly American attitudes about things like nudity and alcohol - for example Youtube videos blurring out bits of Greek statues because they are scared of being demonetised. These are things people take kids to see in museums!
To me, the most worrying part of the whole discussion is that your comment is pretty much the most "daring", if you can call it that, attempt to question if there even is a crime. Everyone else is worried about raids (which are normal whenever there is an ongoing investigation, unfortunate as it may be to the one being investigated). And no one dares to say, that, uh, perhaps making pictures on GPU should not be considered a crime in the same sense as human-trafficking or production of weapons are... Oh, wait. The latter is legal, right.
Internet routers, network cards, the computers, OS and various application software have no guardrails and is used for all the nefarious things. Why those companies aren't raided?
May be.
We do have codified in law definition of machine gun which clearly separates it from a block of lead. What codified in law definitions are used here to separate photoshop from Grok in the context of those deepfakes and CSAM?
Without such clear legal definitions going after Grok while not going after photoshop is just an act of political pressure.
They don’t provide a large platform for political speech.
This isn’t about AI or CSAM (Have we seen any other AI companies raided by governments for enabling creation of deepfakes, dangerous misinformation, illegal images, or for flagrant industrial-scale copyright infringement?)
No because most of those things aren't illegal and most of those companies have guard rails and because a prosecution requires a much higher standard of evidence than internet shitposting, and only X was stupid enough to make their illegal activity obvious.
It is very different. It is YOUR 3d printer, no one else is involved. You might print a knife and kill somebody with it, you go to jail, not third party involved.
If you use a service like Grok, then you use somebody elses computer / things. X is the owner from computer that produced CP. So of course X is at least also a bit liable for producing CP.
Also, safe harbor doesn't apply because this is published under the @grok handle! It's being published by X under one of their brand names, it's absurd to argue that they're unaware or not consenting to its publication.
The safe harbor provisions largely protect X from the content that the users post (within reason). Suddenly Grok/X were actually producing the objectionable content. Users were making gross requests and then an LLM owned by X, using X servers and X code would generate the illegal material and then post it to the website. The entity responsible is no longer done user but instead the company itself.
So, if someone hosts an image editor as web app, are they liable if someone uses that editor to create CP?
I honestly don't follow it. People creating nudes of others and using the Internet to distribute it can be sued for defamation, sure. I don't think the people hosting the service should be liable themselves, just like people hosting Tor nodes shouldn't be liable by what users of the Tor Network do.
I'm not trying to make excuses for Grok, but how exactly isn't the user creating the content? Grok doesn't have create images on its own volition, the user is still required to give it some input, therefore "creating" the content.
X is making it pretty clear that it is "Grok" posting those images and not the user. It is a separate posting that comes from an official account named "Grok". X has full control over what the official "Grok" account posts.
There is no functionality for the users to review and approve "Grok" responses to their tweets.
It's not like the world benefited from safe harbor laws that much. Why don't just amend them so that algorithms that run on server side and platforms that recommend things are not eligible.
If a user generates child porn on their own and uploads it to a social network, the social network is shielded from liability until they refuse to delete it.
Changes who's technically the perp. Offer managed porn generation service -> service provider is responsible for generating porn, like, literally literally
This might be an unpopular opinion but I always thought we might be better off without Web 2.0 where site owners aren’t held responsible for user content
If you’re hosting content, why shouldn’t you be responsible, because your business model is impossible if you’re held to account for what’s happening on your premises?
Without safe harbor, people might have to jump through the hoops of buying their own domain name, and hosting content themselves, would that be so bad?
What about webmail, IM, or any other sort of web-hosted communication? Do you honestly think it would be better if Google were responsible for whatever content gets sent to a gmail address?
Messages are a little different than hosting public content but sure, a service provider should know its customers and stop doing business with any child sex traffickers planning parties over email.
I would prefer 10,000 service providers to one big one that gets to read all the plaintext communication of the entire planet.
In a world where hosting services are responsible that way, their filtering would need to be even more sensitive than it is today, and plenty of places already produce unreasonable amounts of false positives.
As it stands, I have a bunch of photos on my phone that would almost certainly get flagged by over-eager/overly sensitive child porn detection — close friends and family sending me photos of their kids at the beach. I've helped bathe and dress some of those kids. There's nothing nefarious about any of it, but it's close enough that services wouldn't take the risk, and that would be a loss to us all.
They'd all have to read your emails to ensure you don't plan child sex parties. Whenever a keyword match comes up, your account will immediately be deleted.
EncroChat was illegal because it was targeted at drug dealers, advertised for use in drug dealing. And they got evidence by texting "My associate got busted dealing drugs. Can you wipe his device?" and it was wiped. There's an actual knowledge component which is very important here.
On the contrary HN is one of the most heavily moderated forums out here and serves as a great example of a right-size community where sex trafficking is not happening under the nose of an ambivalent host
(Snark aside, in your opinion are there comments on HN that dang would be criminally liable for if it weren't for safe harbor?)
I don't have an answer, but the theme that's been bouncing around in my head has been about accessibility.
Grok makes it trivial to create fake CSAM or other explicit images. Before, if someone spent a week on photoshop to do the same, It won't be Adobe that gets the blame.
Same for 3D printers. Before, anyone could make a gun provided they have the right tools (which is very expensive), now it's being argued that 3D printers are making this more accessible. Although I would argue it's always been easy to make a gun, all you need is a piece of pipe. So I don't entirely buy the moral panic against 3D printers.
Where that threshold lies I don't know. But I think that's the crux if it. Technology is making previously difficult things easier, to the benefit of all humanity. It's just unfortunate that some less-nice things have also been included.
I think a company which runs a printing business would have some obligations to make sure they are not fulfilling print orders for guns. Another interesting example are printers and copiers, which do refuse to copy cash. Which is partly facilitated with the EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) and other means.
The 3D printers don't generate the plans for the gun for you though. If someone sold a printer that would – happily with no guardrails – generate 3D models of CSAM from thin air and then print them, I bet they'd be investigated too. Or for that matter a 3D printer that came bundled with a built-in library of gun models you could print with very little skill...
i don't see any need for guardrails, other than making the prompter responsible for the output of the bot, particularly when it's predictable
you cannot elaborately use a software to produce an effect that is patently illegal and accurate to your usage, and then pretend the software is to blame
Sure, and the fact that they haven't voluntarily put guard rails up to stop that is absolutely vile. But my personal definition of "absolutely vile" isn't a valid legal standard. So, the issue is, like I said, how do you come up with a principled approach to making them do it that doesn't have a whole bunch of unintended consequences?
Courts are able or should be able to distinguish "tool that creates an item in the privacy of your home" and "tool that disseminates nonconsensual pornographic picture to wide public". Legal standards with that level or definition are fairly normal.
Not really, they put a shit ton of effort in to make sure you can't create any kind of nude/suggestive pictures of anyone. I imagine they have strict controls on making images of children, but I don't feel inclined to find out.
> The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography.
Do you have any evidence for that? As far as I can tell, this is false. The only thing I saw was Grok changing photos of adults into them wearing bikinis, which is far less bad.
That's why this is an investigation looking for evidence and not a conviction.
This is how it works, at least in civil law countries. If the prosecutor has reasonable suspicious that a crime is taking place they send the so-called "judiciary police" to gather evidence. If they find none (or they're inconclusive etc...) the charges are dropped, otherwise they ask the court to go to trial.
On some occasions I take on judiciary police duties for animal welfare. Just last week I participated in a raid. We were not there to arrest anyone, just to gather evidence so the prosecutor could decide whether to press charges and go to trial.
Note that the raid itself is a punishment. It's normal for them to seize all electronic devices. How is X France supposed to do any business without any electronic devices? And even when charges are dropped, the devices are never returned.
For obvious reasons, decent people are not about to go out and try to general child sexual abuse material to prove a point to you, if that’s what you’re asking for.
First of all, the Guardian is known to be heavily biased again Musk. They always try hard to make everything about him sound as negative as possible. Second, last time I tried, Grok even refused to create pictures of naked adults. I just tried again and this is still the case:
The claim that they released a tool with "seemingly no guardrailes" is therefore clearly false. I think what instead has happened here is that some people found a hack to circumvent some of those guardrails via something like a jailbreak.
> Also, X seem to disagree with you and admit that CSAM was being generated
That post doesn't contain such an admission, it instead talks about forbidden prompting.
> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
That article links to this article: https://x.com/Safety/status/2011573102485127562 - which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before. And as I said, I already tried it a while ago, and Grok also refused to create images of naked adults then.
> That post doesn't contain such an admission, it instead talks about forbidden prompting.
In response to what? If CSAM is not being generated, why aren't X just saying that? Instead they're saying "please don't do it."
> which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before.
From the linked post:
> However content is created or whether users are free or paid subscribers, our Safety team are working around the clock to add additional safeguards
Which was posted a full week after the initial story broke and after Ofcom started investigative action. So no, it does not contradict my point which was:
> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
As you quoted.
I really can't decide if you're stupid, think I and other readers are stupid, or so dedicated to defending paedophilia that you'll just tell flat lies to everyone reading your comment.
Leave your accusations for yourself. Grok already didn't generate naked pictures of adults months ago when I tested it for the first time. Clearly the "additional safeguards" are meant to protect the system against any jailbreaks.
Grok do seem to have tons of useless guardrails. Reportedly you can't prompt it directly. But also reportedly they tend to go for almost nonsensically off-guardrail interpretation of prompts.
> This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
I wouldn't even consider this a reason if it wasn't for the fact that OpenAI and Google, and hell literally every image model out there all have the same "this guy edited this underage girls face into a bikini" problem (this was the most public example I've heard so I'm going with that as my example). People still jailbreak chatgpt, and they've poured how much money into that?
France prosecutors use police raids way more than other western countries. Banks, political parties, ex-presidents, corporate HQs, worksites... Here, while white-collar crimes are punished as much as in the US (i.e very little), we do at least investigate them.
Comparing Apples and Oranges. Defending this company is becoming cringe and ridiculous. X effed up, and Musk did it on purpose. He uses CSAM to strongman the boundaries of the law. That's not worth defending unless you also say eff the rule of law.
Aren't a lot of US pickup trucks basically that? Sure, maybe there's a mechanism for preventing you from installing a baby seat in reverse to position in front of an airbag, but they're also built so that you can't see anything adult human sized 15m in front of the car, let alone anything child-sized.
The US would spend 20 years arguing about which agency's jurisdiction it was, and ignore the dead babies?
No, wait, Volvo is European. They'd impose a 300% tariff and direct anyone who wanted a baby-killing model car to buy one from US manufacturers instead.
Let's raid car companies too. We were all born into this. We never had a vote. Thomas Jefferson is said to have written Constitutions ought to be re-written every so often or the dead rule by fiat decree. Let's.
The rich can join in the austerity too. No one voted for them. We been conditioned to pick acquiescence or poverty. We were abused into kowtowing to a bunch of pants shitting dementia addled olds educated in religious crack pottery. Their economic and political memes are just that, memes, not immutable physical truth.
In America, as evidenced by the public not in the streets protesting for single payer comprehensive healthcare, we clearly don't want to be on the hook for each other's lives. That's all platitudes and toxic positivity.
Hopes and prayers, bloodletting was good enough for the Founders!
I'm not saying I'm entirely against this, but just out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
I mean, the example you link is probably an engineer doing their job of signalling to hierarchy that something went deeply wrong. Of course, the lack of action of Facebook afterwards is a proof that they did not care, but not as much as a smoking gun.
A smoking gun would be, for instance, Facebook observing that most of their ads are scam, that the cost of fixing this exceeds by far "the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.", and to conclude that the company’s leadership decided to act only in response to impending regulatory action.
Eh? The thing I linked to was a policy document on what was allowed.
> “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”
This is not a bug report; this is the _rules_ (or was the rules; Facebook say they have changed them after the media found out about them).
It was known that Grok was generating these images long before any action was taken. I imagine they’ll be looking for internal communications on what they were doing, or deciding not to do, doing during that time.
There was a WaPo article yesterday, that talked about how xAI deliberately loosened Grok’s safety guardrails and relaxed restrictions on sexual content in an effort to make the chatbot more engaging and “sticky” for users. xAI employees had to sign new waivers in the summer, and start working with harmful content, in order to train and enable those features.
I assume the raid is hoping to find communications to establish that timeline, maybe internal concerns that were ignored? Also internal metrics that might show they were aware of the problem. External analysts said Grok was generating a CSAM image every minute!!
out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
You're not too far off.
There was a good article in the Washington Post yesterday about many many people inside the company raising alarms about the content and its legal risk, but they were blown off by managers chasing engagement metrics. They even made up a whole new metric.
There was also prompts telling the AI to act angry or sexy or other things just to keep users addicted.
What do they hope to find, specifically? Who knows, but maybe the prosecutors have a better awareness of specifics than us HN commenters who have not been involved in the investigation.
What may they find, hypothetically? Who knows, but maybe an internal email saying, for instance, 'Management says keep the nude photo functionality, just hide it behind a feature flag', or maybe 'Great idea to keep a backup of the images, but must cover our tracks', or perhaps 'Elon says no action on Grok nude images, we are officially unaware anything is happening.'
Or “regulators don't understand the technology; short of turning it off entirely, there's nothing we can do to prevent it entirely, and the costs involved in attempting to reduce it are much greater than the likely fine, especially given that we're likely to receive such a fine anyway.”
You appear to have lost the thread (or maybe you're replying to things directly from the newcomments feed? If so, please stop it.), we're talking about what sort of incriminating written statements the raid might hope to discover.
Isn't the algorithm published monthly on GitHub since a couple of weeks ago? You think they are gonna find a commit message "feat(racism): improve antisemitism capabilities".
You're wrong - at least from the perspective of the commons.
First paragraph on Wikipedia
> Child pornography (CP), also known as child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and by more informal terms such as kiddie porn,[1][2][3] is erotic material that involves or depicts persons under the designated age of majority. The precise characteristics of what constitutes child pornography vary by criminal jurisdiction.[4][5]
Honestly, reading your link got me seriously facepalming. The whole argument seems to be centered around the fact that sexualizing children is disgusting, hence it shouldn't be called porn.
While i'd agree that sexualizing kids is disgusting, denying that it's porn on that grounds is feels kinda... Childish? Like someone holding their ears closed and shouting loudly in order not to hear the words the adults around them are saying.
"...the encyclopedia anyone can edit." Yes, there are people who wish to redefine CSAM to include child porn - including even that between consenting children committing no crime and no abuse.
> have no idea how anyone could reasonably draw that conclusion from this thread.
> > Honestly, reading your link got me seriously facepalming. The whole argument seems to be centered around the fact that sexualizing children is disgusting, hence it shouldn't be called porn.
Where exactly did you get the impression from I made this observation from this comment thread?
Your interpol link seems to be literally using the same argument again from a very casual glance btw.
> We encourage the use of appropriate terminology to avoid trivializing the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.
> Pornography is a term used for adults engaging in consensual sexual acts distributed (mostly) legally to the general public for their sexual pleasure.
CSAM is the woke word for child pornography, which is the normal.word for pornography involving children. Pornography is defined as material aiming to sexually stimulate, and CSAM is that.
I'd say it was the other way around, MAP is an attempt at avoiding the stigma of pedophile, while CSAM is saying "pornography can be an entirely acceptable, positive, consensual thing, but that's not what 'pornography' involving children is, it's evidence of abuse or exploitation or..."
The term CSAM was adopted in the UK following outrage over the "Gary Glitter Effect" - soaring offence rates driven by news of people caught downloading images of unspeakable abuse crimes getting mild sentences for mere child porn.
This is why many feel strongly about defending the term "CSAM" from those who seek to dilute it to cover e.g. mild Grok-style child porn.
The UK Govt. has announced plans to define CSAM in law.
Only people who are involved in CSAM arguments on the internet know what CSAM means. Ask some random person on the street if they know what CSAM means. Then ask them if they know what child porn means.
> Only people who are involved in CSAM arguments on the internet know what CSAM means.
I'm pretty sure you can add all the Governments, police depts and online safety organisations who use this term and rely upon it. Do include the 196 countries which depend on the Interpol CSAM database.
Even if some kid makes a video of themselves jerking off for their own personal enjoyment, unprompted by anyone else, if someone else gains access to that (eg a technician at a store or an unprincipled guardian) and makes a copy for themselves they're criminally exploiting the kid by doing so.
Not really, otherwise perpetrators will just "I was just looking at it, I didn't do anything as bad as creating it". Their act is still illegal.
There was a cartoon picture I remember seeing around 15+ years ago of Bart Simpson performing a sex act. In some jurisdictions (such as Australia), this falls under the legal definition.
Huge difference here in Europe. CSAM is a much more serious crime. That's why e.g. Interpol runs a global database of CSAM but doesn't bother for mere child porn.
This vindicates the pro-AI censorship crowd I guess.
It definitely makes it clear what is expected of AI companies. Your users aren't responsible for what they use your model for, you are, so you'd better make sure your model can't ever be used for anything nefarious. If you can't do that without keeping the model closed and verifying everyone's identities... well, that's good for your profits I guess.
It's not really different from how we treat any other platform that can host CSAM. I guess the main difference is that it's being "made" instead of simply "distributed" here
Those images are generated from a training set, and it is already well known and reported that those training sets contain _real_ CSAM, real violence, real abuse. That "generated" face of a child is based on real images of real children.
Indeed, a Stanford study from a few years back showed that the image data sets used by essentially everybody contain CSAM.
Everybody else has teams building guardrails to mitigate this fundamental existential horror of these models. Musk fired all the safety people and decided to go all in on “adult” content.
> let's distinguish between generated images, however revolting, and actual child sexual abuse.
Can't because even before GenAI the "oh its generated in photoshop" or "they just look young" excuse was used successfully to allow a lot of people to walk free. the law was tightend in the early 2000s for precisely this reason
Yes they could have an uncensored model, but then they would need proper moderation and delete this kind of content instantly or ban users that produce it. Or don’t allow it in the first place.
It doesn’t matter how CSAM is produced, the only thing that matters is that is on the platform.
It matters whether they attempt to block it or encourage it. Musk encouraged it, until legal pressure hit, then moved it behind a paywall so it's harder to see evidence.
Pretty disturbing to me how many people _on here_ are cheering for this. I thought that at least here of all places, there might be some nuanced discussion on "ok, I see why people are emotional about this topic in particular, but it's worth stepping back and putting emotions aside for a minute to see if this is actually reasonable overall..." but besides your comment, I'm not seeing much of that.
There's pro-AI censorship and then there's pro-social media censorship. It was the X offices that were raided. X is a social media company. They would have been raided whether it was AI that created the CSAM or a bunch of X contractors generating it mechanical-turk style.
In the UK, you must take "reasonable" steps to remove illegal content.
This normally means some basic detection (ie fingerprinting which is widely used from a collaborative database) or if a user is consistently uploading said stuff, banning them.
Allowing a service that you run to continue to generate said illegal content, even after you publicly admit that you know its wrong, is not reasonable.
Nothing in common law is "concrete", thats kinda the point of it.
Judges can evolve and interpret as they see fit, and this evolution is case law.
This is why in the US the supreme court can effectively change the law by issuing a binding ruling. (see 2nd amendment meaning no gun laws, rather than as written, or the recent racial profiling issues)
No law is concrete. Murder is killing with intent to kill. What concrete test shows if someone intended to kill? They say you have intent to kill if a reasonable person would expect the actions you took would result in killing.
if you can be sued for billions because some overbearing body, with a very different ideology to yours, can deem your moderation/censorship rules to be "unreasonable" then what you do is err on the side of caution and allow nearly nothing
this is not compatible with that line of business - perhaps one of the reasons nothing is done in Europe these days
> this is not compatible with that line of business - perhaps one of the reasons nothing is done in Europe these days
Except for 40% of all Big Tech products and a vast industrial network of companies, and the safe airplane building and decent financial services that don't take 3% of everything, then yeah, I guess nothing is done in Europe these days.
And wait, wasn't most of Google's AI stuff acquired from a European country?
Honestly, while Europe has a lot of problems, this notion that many US people have that literally nothing happens there is wildly off-base.
Like, this is a function of fragmented capital markets rather than anything else. Ryanair would 100% have a market cap of 50bn+ if it had a US listing.
Anyway, market cap is a really really bad metric for basically anything. Like Walmart has a market cap of over 1tn now, do you think its business has materially changed since 2021 (when it was half that)?
Meta has basically doubled since then, and again, their business is basically the same as it was 5 years ago.
As another example, Stripe is valued at about 100bn, while both OpenAI and Anthropic are 3.5-5x that. Which ones would you rather put your money in?
(apologies I figured the OECD would have better data but this was the best I could find).
So, on average it would take a low-income person half the time to become upper income in Denmark versus the US. Is this a better metric? Certainly for a low income person with unlimited mobility options.
The vast majority of the EU is not common law, so "reasonable" in this instance is different.
What you describe already happens in the USA, that why MLB has that weird local TV blackout, why bad actors use copyright to take down content they don't like.
The reason why its so easy to do that is because companies must reasonably comply with copyright holder's requests.
Its the same with CSAM, distributing it doesn't have first amendment protection, knowingly distributing it is illegal. All reasonable steps should be taken to detect and remove CSAM from your systems to qualify for safe harbour.
> Its the same with CSAM, distributing it doesn't have first amendment protection, knowingly distributing it is illegal. All reasonable steps should be taken to detect and remove CSAM from your systems to qualify for safe harbour.
nice try, but nobody is distributing or hosting CSAM in the current conversation
people trying to trick a bot to post bikini pictures of preteens and blaming the platform for it is a ridiculous stretch to the concept of hosting CSAM, which really is a transparent attack to a perceived political opponent to push for a completely different model of the internet to the pre-existing one, a transition that is as obvious as is already advanced in Europe and most of the so-called Anglosphere
> The vast majority of the EU is not common law, so "reasonable" in this instance is different.
the vast majority of the EU is perhaps incompatible with any workable notion of free speech, so perhaps America will have to choose whether it's worth it to sanction them into submission, or cut them off at considerable economic loss
it's not a coincidence that next to nothing is built in Europe these days, the environment is one of fear and stifling regulation and if I were to actually release anything in either AI or social networks I'd do what most of my fellow Brits/Europoors do already, which is to either sell to America or flee this place before I get big enough to show up in the euro-borg's radar
> nice try, but nobody is distributing or hosting CSAM in the current conversation
multiple agencies (Ofcom, irish police IWF, and what ever the french regulator is) have detected CSAM.
You may disagree with that statement, but bear in mind the definition of CSAM in the UK is "depiction of a child" which means that if its of a child or entirely generated is not relevant. This was to stop people claiming that massive cache of child porn they had was photoshoped.
in the USA CSAM is equally vaguely defined, but the case law is different.
> EU is perhaps incompatible with any workable notion of free speech
I mean the ECHR definition is fairly robust. But given that first amendment protection has effectively ended in the USA (the president is currently threatening to take a comedian to court for making jokes, you know, like the twitter bomb threat person in the UK) its a bit rich really. The USA is not the bastion of free speech it once was.
> either sell to America or flee this place before I get big enough to show up in the euro-borg's radar
Mate, as someone whos sold a startup to the USA, its not about regulations its about cold hard fucking cash. All major companies comply with EU regs, and its not hard. they just bitch about them so that the USA doesn't put in basic data protection laws, so they can continue to be monopolies.
This is not about AI but about censorship of a nonaligned social network. It's been a developing current in EU. They have basically been foaming at the mouth at the platform since it got bought.
I could maybe see this argument if we were talking about raiding Stable Diffusion or Facebook or some other provider of local models. But the content at issue was generated not just by Twitter's AI model, but on their servers, integrated directly into their UI and hosted publicly on their platform. That makes them much more clearly culpable -- they're not just enabling this shit, they're creating it themselves on demand (and posting it directly to victims' public profiles).
And importantly, this is clearly published by Grok, rather than the user, so in this case (obviously this isn't the US) but if it was I'm not sure Section 230 would apply.
I think having guardrails on your AI to not be able to produce this stuff is good actually. Also, Elon encourages this behavior socially through his posts so yeah he should face consequences.
It's not because it could generate CSAM. It's because when they found out it could generate CSAM, they didn't try to prevent that, they advertised it. Actual knowledge is a required compenent of many crimes.
There's no crowds or sides. It's all manufactured divisions because some of those who can't or don't want to create the technology are determined to control it. So they'll get you mad about what they need to, to justify actions that increase their control.
It's the same playbook that is used again and again. For war, civil liberties crackdowns, lockdowns, COVID, etc, etc: 0) I want (1); start playbook: A) Something bad is here, B) You need to feel X + Panic about it, C) We are solving it via (1). Because you reacted at B, you will support C. Problem, reaction, solution. Gives the playmakers the (1) they want.
We all know this is going on. But I guess we like knowing someone is pulling the strings. We like being led and maybe even manipulated because perhaps in the familiar system (which yields the undeniable goods of our current way of life), there is safety and stability? How else to explain.
Maybe the need to be entertained with drama is a hackable side effect of stable societies populated by people who evolved as warriors, hunters and survivors.
It's a bit of a leap to say that the model must be censored. SD and all the open image gen models are capable of all kinds of things, but nobody has gone after the open model trainers. They have gone after the companies making profits from providing services.
The for-profit part may or may not be a qualifier, but the architecture of a centralized service means they automatically become the scene of the crime -- either dissemination or storing of illegal material. Whereas if Stability creates a model, and others use their model locally, the relationship of Stability to the crime is ad-hoc. They aren't an accessory.
Holding corporations accountable for their profit streams is "censorship?" I wish they'd stop passing models trained on internet conversations and hoarded data as fit for any purpose. The world does not need to boil oceans for hallucinating chat bots at this particular point in history.
What would be censorship is if those same companies then brigaded forums and interfered with conversations and votes in an effort to try to hide their greed and criminality.
Not that this would _ever_ happen on Hacker News. :|
And the sign out front says "X-Ray camera photographs anyone naked — no age limits!"
And the camera is pointing out the window so you can use it on strangers walking by.
There is a point in law where you make something so easy to misuse that you become liable for the misuse.
In the USA they have "attractive nuisance", like building a kid's playground on top of a pit of snakes. That's so obviously a dumb idea that you become liable for the snake–bitten kids — you can't save yourself by arguing that you didn't give the kids permission to use the playground, that it's on private property, that the kids should have seen the snakes, or that it's legal to own snakes. No, you set up a situation where people were obviously going to get hurt and you become liable for the hurt.
Not knowing any better, and not having seen any of the alleged images, my default guess would be they used the exact same CSAM filtering pipeline already in place on X regardless of the origin of the submitted images.
They obviously didn’t really implement anything as you can find that content or involuntary nudes of other people, which is also an invasion of privacy, super easily
If the camera reliably inserts racist filters and the ballpen would add hurtful words to whatever you write, indeed, let them up their legal insurance.
Could not possibly agree more. When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? If it's your platform, you should be held responsible for all the illegal actions that it enabled.
If a magazine published a page with a scam, they're responsible. Same should apply to social media.
I literally don't care if it puts them out of business because the moderation would be too severe.
I was once closer to s free speech absolutist, but this has always been where that discussion leads. The lines were clearer decades ago because someone who interacted with CSAM was closely involved and their harm was easier to see in totality. Over time the gap between people who caused that harm and those that think they are not hurting anyone has widened. With AI it caused many of those that thought it was acceptable to consume illegal content to put another layer between their victims and offload the moral baggage.
To me it became clear when people here rejected any compromises on privacy and anonymous on device scanning of messages/data. Not because they rejected it but how they rejected it.
People here didn't say "yeah it's a real evil problem and e2e tech that we build makes it almost impossible to catch and helps it scale, so let's find the right tradeoff that minimizes privacy invasion". No. People here just mocked "think of the children" and said something along the lines of no amount of suffering can make any restriction to privacy be acceptable. The fact that 99% of our life is literally compromising our freedom for others they don't care.
To buellerbueller's killed comment, I totally feel it. it was a shocker when it turned out many of my fellow Russians got no problem with Putin's war and I bet that's what half of USA feels.
Interesting. This is basically the second enforcement on speech / images that France has done - first was Pavel Durov @ Telegram. He eventually made changes in Telegram's moderation infrastructure and I think was allowed to leave France sometime last year.
I don't love heavy-handed enforcement on speech issues, but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard, just as a matter of keeping a diverse set of global standards, something that adds cultural resilience for humanity.
linkedin is not a replacement for twitter, though. I'm curious if they'll come back post-settlement.
>but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard
Censorship increases homogeneity, because it reduces the amount of ideas and opinions that are allowed to be expressed. The only resilience that comes from restricting people's speech is resilience of the people in power.
You were downvoted -- a theme in this thread -- but I like what you're saying. I disagree, though, on a global scale. By resilience, I mean to reference something like a monoculture plantation vs a jungle. The monoculture plantation is vulnerable to anything that figures out how to attack it. In a jungle, a single plant or set might be vulnerable, but something that can attack all the plants is much harder to come by.
Humanity itself is trending more toward monoculture socially; I like a lot of things (and hate some) about the cultural trend. But what I like isn't very important, because I might be totally wrong in my likes; if only my likes dominated, the world would be a much less resilient place -- vulnerable to the weaknesses of whatever it is I like.
So, again, I propose for the race as a whole, broad cultural diversity is really critical, and worth protecting. Even if we really hate some of the forms it takes.
The point of banning real CSAM is to stop the production of it, because the production is inherently harmful. The production of AI or human generated CSAM-like images does not inherently require the harm of children, so it's fundamentally a different consideration. That's why some countries, notably Japan, allow the production of hand-drawn material that in the US would be considered CSAM.
I'm strongly against CSAM but I will say this analogy doesn't quite hold (though the values behind it does)
Libel must be as assertion that is not true. Photoshopping or AIing someone isn't an assertion of something untrue. It's more the equivalent of saying "What if this is true?" which is perfectly legal
“ 298 (1) A defamatory libel is matter published, without lawful justification or excuse, that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published.
Marginal note:Mode of expression
(2) A defamatory libel may be expressed directly or by insinuation or irony
(a) in words legibly marked on any substance; or
(b) by any object signifying a defamatory libel otherwise than by words.”
It doesn't have to be an assertion, or even a written statement.
> The point of banning real CSAM is to stop the production of it, because the production is inherently harmful. The production of AI or human generated CSAM-like images does not inherently require the harm of children, so it's fundamentally a different consideration.
Quite.
> That's why some countries, notably Japan, allow the production of hand-drawn material that in the US would be considered CSAM.
"Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create, distribute, or possess. "
Freedom of one starts where it confirms freedom of others.
Of course everybody is going to find a point when freedom of speech have to be limited. Otherwise, anyone can justify that cutting the head of their neighbour with a katana while dancing is part of an artistic performance, and absolute free speech is only possible if all artistic expression is given complete license. Those who pretend otherwise will have no ground to defend themselves on legal basis from being wiped out of existence by the very same logic.
Durov was held on suspicion Telegram was willingly failing to moderate its platform and allowed drug trafficking and other illegal activities to take place.
X has allegedly illegally sent data to the US in violation of GDPR and contributed to child porn distribution.
Note that both are directly related to direct violation of data safety law or association with a separate criminal activities, neither is about speech.
CSAM was the lead in the 2024 news headlines in the French prosecution of Telegram also. I didn't follow the case enough to know where they went, or what the judge thought was credible.
From a US mindset, I'd say that generation of communication, including images, would fall under speech. But then we classify it very broadly here. Arranging drug deals on a messaging app definitely falls under the concept of speech in the US as well. Heck, I've been told by FBI agents that they believe assassination markets are legal in the US - protected speech.
Obviously, assassinations themselves, not so much.
Durov wasn't arrested because of things he said or things that were said on his platform, he was arrested because he refused to cooperate in criminal investigations while he allegedly knew they were happening on a platform he manages.
If you own a bar, you know people are dealing drugs in the backroom and you refuse to assist the police, you are guilty of aiding and abetting. Well, it's the same for Durov except he apparently also helped them process the money.
"I've been told by FBI agents that they believe assassination markets are legal in the US - protected speech."
I don't believe you. Not sure what you mean by "assassination markets" exactly, but "Solicitation to commit a crime of violence" and "Conspiracy to murder" are definitely crimes.
An assassination market, at least the one we discussed, works like this - One or more people put up a bounty paid out on the death of someone. Anyone can submit a (sealed) description of the death. On death, the descriptions are opened — the one closest to the actual circumstances is paid the bounty.
One of my portfolio companies had information about contributors to these markets — I was told by my FBI contact when I got in touch that their view was the creation of the market, the funding of the market and the descriptions were all legal — they declined to follow up.
Telegram isn't encrypted. For all the marketing about security, it has none, apart from TLS, and an optional "secret chat" feature that you have to explicitly select, only works with 2 participants and doesn't work very well.
They can read all messages, so they don't have an excuse for not helping in a criminal case. Their platform had a reputation of being safe for crime, which is because they just... ignored the police. Until they got arrested for that. They still turn a blind eye but not to the police.
ok thank you! I did not know that, I'm ashamed to admit! sort of like studying physics at university a decade later forgetting V=IR when I actually needed it for some solar install. I took "technical hiatus" about 5 years and recently coming back.
Anyway cut to the chase, I just checked out Mathew Greens post on the subject, he is on my list of default "trust what he says about cryptography" along with some others like djb, nadia henninger etc
Embarrased to say I did not realise, I should of known! 10+ years ago I used to lurk the IRC dev chans of every relevant cypherpunk project, including of text secure and otr-chat when I saw signal being made and before that was witnessing chats with devs and ian goldberg and stuff, I just assumed Telegram was multiparty OTR,
OOPS!
Long winded post because that is embarrassing (as someone who studied cryptography undergrad in 2009 mathematics, 2010 did postgrad wargames and computer security course and worse - whose word once about 2012-2013 was taken on these matters by activists, journalists, researchers with pretty knarly threat model - like for instance - some guardian stories and former researcher into torture - i'm also the person that wrote the bits of 'how to hold a crypto party' that made it a protocol without an organisation and made clear the threat model was anyone could be there, oops oops oops
Yes thanks for letting me know I hang my head in shame for missing that one or some how believing that one without much investigation, thankfully it was just my own personal use to contact like friend in the states where they aren't already on signal etc.
Anyway as they say "use it or lose it" yeah my assumptions here no longer valid or considered to have educated opinion if I got something that basic wrong.
In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”.
“Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley.
... Eh? This isn't about Musk's association with Epstein, it's about his CSAM generating magic robot (and also some other alleged dodgy practices around the GDPR etc).
"Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,
An "audition en tant que témoin libre" is more or less the way for an investigation to give a chance to give their side of the story. Musk is not likely to be personally tried here.
Still, stoner-cultures in many countries in Europe celebrate 4-20, definitively a bunch of Frenchies getting extra stoned that day. It's probably the de-facto "international cannabis day" in most places in the world, at least the ones influenced by US culture which reached pretty far in its heyday.
The right didn't give a shit about weed in the 80's or the 90's depending entirely upon who had it.
When Bernhard Hugo Goetz shot four teenagers on an NYC subway in the 80s, his PCP-laced marijuana use and stash back at his apartment came up in both sets of trials in the 80s and later in the 90s.
It was ignored (although not the alleged drug use of the teenagers) as Goetz was dubbed The Subway Vigilante and became a hero to the right.
His victims? He was the victim. Shooting people who are robbing you (a detail you conveniently left out) is a good thing, which is why even a jury of NYC lefties acquitted him on the shooting charges. The only injustice here is that he did prison time for violating the clearly unconstitutional laws that required him to have a license for the gun.
edit:
> Canty would later testify that the victims were en route to steal from video arcade machines in Manhattan
> Each of the four youths shot by Goetz was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident. Ten weeks prior to being shot, Cabey was arrested on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun in the Bronx, and he was released on $2,000 bail.[38] Cabey failed to appear at his next court date, resulting in an additional arrest warrant.
Check the civil trial transcripts, they were panhandling by multiple accounts.
> Each of the four youths .. was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident.
Minor stuff that was upgraded to a bench warrent after the shootings, ...
> Sounds like predators to me
That was how they were presented by much of the press until a good year after the first trial and Goetz's own description of his actions came out in the civile trial .. he one that awarded several million against him.
Thanks for providing a perfect foil for the comment about heavily politicized and media warped "justice" in the US.
Just minor stuff like robbing people with a shotgun. That was a nice use of the ... to hide the important part. And by their own admission they were on the way to commit more crimes. Yeah, I'm sure they were just panhandling.
>The Paris prosecutor's office said it launched the investigation after being contacted by a lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms in X were likely to have distorted the operation of an automated data processing system.
I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime?
Distorted the operation how? By making their chatbot more likely to say stupid conspiracies or something? Is that even against the law?
> The first two points of the official document, which I re-quote below, are about CSAM.
Sorry, but that's a major translation error. "pédopornographique" properly translated is child porn, not child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The difference is huge.
> The term “child pornography” is
currently used in federal statutes and
is defined as any visual depiction of
sexually explicit conduct involving a
person less than 18 years old. While
this phrase still appears in federal
law, “child sexual abuse material” is
preferred, as it better reflects the
abuse that is depicted in the images
and videos and the resulting trauma
to the child. In fact, in 2016, an
international working group,
comprising a collection of countries
and international organizations
working to combat child exploitation,
formally recognized “child sexual
abuse material” as the preferred term.
> “child sexual abuse material” is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child.
Yes, CSAM is preferred for material depicting abuse reflecting resulting trauma.
But not for child porn such as manga of fictional children depicting no abuse and traumatising no child.
> Child porn is csam.
"CSAM isn’t pornography—it’s evidence of criminal exploitation of kids."
That's from RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organisation.
> That's from RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organisation.
For everyone to make up their own opinion about this poster's honesty, here's where his quote is from [1]. Chosen quotes:
> CSAM includes both real and synthetic content, such as images created with artificial intelligence tools.
> It doesn’t matter if the child agreed to it. It doesn’t matter if they sent the image themselves. If a minor is involved, it’s CSAM—and it’s illegal.
Maybe US law makes a distinction, but in Europe there is no difference. Sexual depictions of children (real or not) is considered child pornography and will get you sent to the slammer.
On the contrary, in Europe there is a huge difference. Child porn might get you mere community service, a fine - or even less, as per the landmark court ruling below.
It all depends on the severity of the offence, which itself depends on the category of the material, including whether or not it is CSAM.
The Supreme Court has today delivered its judgment in the case where the court of appeals and district court sentenced a person for child pornography offenses to 80 day fines on the grounds that he had called Japanese manga drawings into his computer. Supreme Court dismiss the indictment.
The judgment concluded that the cartoons in and of itself may be considered pornographic, and that they represent children. But these are fantasy figures that can not be mistaken for real children.
The way chatbots actually work, I wonder if we shouldn't treat the things they say more or less as words in a book of fiction. Writing a character in your novel who is a plain parody of David Irving probably isn't a crime even in France. Unless the goal of the book as such was to deny the holocaust.
As I see it, Grok can't be guilty. Either the people who made it/set its system prompt are guilty, if they wanted it to deny the holocaust. If not, they're at worst guilty of making a particularly unhinged fiction machine (as opposed to the more restrained fiction machines of Google, Anthropic etc.)
> I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime?
GDPR and DMA actually have teeth. They just haven't been shown yet because the usual M.O. for European law violators is first, a free reminder "hey guys, what you're doing is against the law, stop it, or else". Then, if violations continue, maybe two or three rounds follow... but at some point, especially if the violations are openly intentional (and Musk's behavior makes that very very clear), the hammer gets brought down.
Our system is based on the idea that we institute complex regulations, and when they get introduced and stuff goes south, we assume that it's innocent mistakes first.
And in addition to that, there's the geopolitical aspect... basically, hurt Musk to show Trump that, yes, Europe means business and has the means to fight back.
As for the allegations:
> The probe has since expanded to investigate alleged “complicity” in spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organised group, and other offences, the office said in a statement Tuesday.
The GDPR/DMA stuff just was the opener anyway. CSAM isn't liked by authorities at all, and genocide denial (we're not talking about Palestine here, calm your horses y'all, we're talking about Holocaust denial) is a crime in most European jurisdiction (in addition to doing the right-arm salute and other displays of fascist insignia). We actually learned something out of WW2.
420 is a stoner number, stoners lol a lot, thought of Elmo's failed joint smoking on JRE before I stopped watching
...but then other commenters reminded me there is another thing on the same date, which might have been more the actual troll at Elmo to get him all worked up
Especially if contracts with SpaceX start being torn up because the various ongoing investigations and prosecutions of xAI are now ongoing investigations and prosecutions of SpaceX. And next new lawsuits for creating this conflict of interest by merger.
Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations?
Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue.
The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.
As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
It is a raid in that it's not expected, it relies on not being expected, and they come and take away your stuff by force. Maybe it's a legal raid, but let's not sugar coat it, it's still a raid and whether you're guilty or not it will cause you a lot of problems.
I mean it's not like people get advanced notice of search warrants of that police ask pretty please. I agree that the way people use the term it's a fine usage but the person using is trying to paint a picture of a SWAT team busting down the door by calling it that.
Agreed its a stretch, my experience comes from Google when I worked there and they set up a Chinese office and they were very carefully trying to avoid anything on premises that could searched/exploited. It was a huge effort, one that wasn't done for the European and UK offices where the government was not an APT. So did X have the level of hygiene in France? Were there IT guys in the same vein as the folks that Elon recruited into DOGE? Was everyone in the office "loyal"?[1] I doubt X was paranoid "enough" in France not to have some leakage.
[1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.
Under GDPR if a company processes European user data they're obligated to make a "Record of Processing Activities" available on demand (umbrella term for a whole bunch of user-data / identity related stuff). They don't necessarily need to store them onsite but they need to be able to produce them. Saying you're an internet company doesn't mean you can just put the stuff on a server in the Caribbean and shrug when the regulators come knocking on your door
That's aside from the fact that they're a publicly traded company under obligation to keep a gazillion records anyway like in any other jurisdiction.
I'm guessing you're asking this because you have a picture of a 'server' as a thing in a large rack? Nearly every tech business has a bunch of machines, everything from an old desk top to last year's laptop, which have been reinstalled with Linux or *BSD and are sitting on the network behaving, for all intents and purposes, as a 'server.' (they aren't moving or rebooting or having local sessions running on them, Etc).
I've worked in several companies and have never seen this. Maybe for a small scale startup or rapidly growing early stage company. I would be pretty shocked to see an old desktop acting as a server nowadays.
Gather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence.
Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.
The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
I remember something (probably linked from here), where the essayist was comparing Jack Ma, one of the richest men on earth, and Xi Jinping, a much lower-paid individual.
They indicated that Xi got Ma into a chokehold. I think he "disappeared" Ma for some time. Don't remember exactly how long, but it may have been over a year.
From what I hear, Ma made 1 speech critical of the government and Xi showed him his place. It was a few years, a year of total disappearance followed by slow rehab.
But China is different. Not sure most of western europe will go that far in most cases.
I mean, come on, we kidnapped him. Yes, he was arrested, but we went into another sovereign nation with special forces and yoinked their head of state back to Brooklyn.
To be fair he isn't legitimate head of state- he lost an election and is officially recognized as a usurper and the US had support of those who actually won.
Soke people argue Trump isn't a legitimate head of state. (One of those people is Trump, since he says he was already the president twice.) Should Xi kidnap him?
Large amounts of people call Joe Biden's election illegitimate. You could even say thats the official position of the current government. Would his kidnapping by a foreign nation be okay with you too?
Ah, so the daily LARGE protests, in Venezuela, against his kidnapping are not indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela".
But the celebratory pics, which were claimed to be from Venezuela, but were actually from Miami and elsewhere (including, I kid you not, an attempt to pass off Argentine's celebrating a Copa America win) ... that is indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela"?
If I were smarter, I might start to wonder why, if President Maduro was so unpopular, why would his abductors have to resort to fake footage - which was systematically outed & destroyed by independent journalists within 24 hours? I mean, surely, enough real footage should exist.
Probably better not to have inconvenient non-US-approved independent thoughts like that.
do you have links, all the chatgpt and gemini references I've seen show the large protest happened 1 time, not daily. And beyond that, the chatbots suggest it's overwhelming support for the arrest.
There are no news sites claiming large daily protests that you claim.
I never liked the Paul's and their opinions, but I must say that they usually speak according to their principles, rather than make up principles to fit what they want to happen.
To me, that's the distinction between political opponents I can respect, and, well, whatever we're seeing now.
The people of the US mostly wouldn’t like it the people of VZ mostly did and consider Maduro a thug who lost and stayed in power not their president. Ideologies like Paul have trouble with exceptions to their world view.
In France it's possible without legal consequences (though immoral), if you call 119, you can push to have a baby taken from a family for no reason except that you do not like someone.
Claim that you suspect there may be abuse, it will trigger a case for a "worrying situation".
Then it's a procedural lottery:
-> If you get lucky, they will investigate, meet the people, and dismiss the case.
-> If you get unlucky, they will take the baby, and it's only then after a long investigation and a "family assistant" (that will check you every day), that you can recover your baby.
Typically, ex-wife who doesn't like the ex-husband, but it can be a neighbor etc.
One worker explains that they don't really have time to investigate when processing reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9y_-4kGQA
and they have to act very fast, and by default, it is safer to remove from family.
The boss of such agency doesn't even take the time to answer to the journalists there...
This is very common, all "think of the children" laws are ripe for abuse. I'm convinced the secrecy around child abuse/child protective services is regularly abused both by abusive parents and abusive officials.
If you call 119 it gets assessed and potentially forwarded to the right department, which then assesses it again and might (quite likely will) trigger an inspection. The people who turn up have broad powers to seize children from the home in order to protect them from abuse.
In general this works fine. Unfortunately in some circumstances this does give a very low skilled/paid person (the inspector) a lot of power, and a lot of sway with judges. If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.
afaik similar systems are present in most western countries, and many of them - like France - are suffering with funding and are likely cutting in the wrong place (audit/rigour) to meet external KPIs. One of the worst ways this manifests is creating 'quick scoring' methods which can end up with misunderstandings (e.g. said a thing they didn't mean) ranking very highly, but subtle evidence of abuse moderate to low.
So while this is a concern, this is not unique to France, this is relatively normal, and the poster is massively exaggerating the simplicity.
In Sweden there is a additional review board that go through the decision made by the inspector. The idea is to limit the power that a single inspector has. In practice however the review board tend to rubber stamp decisions, so incompetence/malice still happens.
There was a huge mess right after metoo when a inspector went against the courts rulings. The court had given the father sole custody in a extremely messy divorce, and the inspector did not agree with the decision. As a result they remove the child from his father, in direct contrast to the courts decision, and put the child through 6 years of isolation and abuse with no access to school. It took investigative journalists a while, but the result of the case getting highlighted in media was that the inspector and supervisor is now fired, with two additoal workers being under investigation for severe misconduct. Four more workers would be under investigation but too long time has passed. The review board should have prevented this, as should the supervisor for the inspector, but those safety net failed in this case in part because of the cultural environment at the time.
It is fairly lenient. The review board, assigned political, do hold a bit of moral responsibility and got no punishment.
The reason I mentioned that this occurred right after metoo is that the cultural environment in Sweden was a bit unstable. Some people felt they could not trust the courts, which include people who worked as inspectors for the government. The review board is also selected politically, which may add a second explanation for why they permitted the misconduct. It was a very political time and everyone wanted to be perceived as being on the right side of history.
The case has been debate in Swedish parliament but the reaction has been to not really talk about it. People ignored the law and rules, and they shouldn't have done that, and that is then that.
“ If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.”
This seems guaranteed to occur every year then… since incompetence/malice will happen eventually with thousands upon thousands of cases?
I heard there's a country where they can even SWAT you out of existence with a simple phone call, but it sounds so outrageous this must be some evil communist dictatorship third-world place. I really don't remember.
France has Ariane, which was good enough to send Jame Web Telescope to some Lagrange point with extra precision. It's all fun and and games until the French finish their cigarette, arms French Guyana and fire ze missiles.
Wait, Sabu's kids were foster kids. He was fostering them. Certainly if he went to jail, they'd go back to the system.
I mean, if you're a sole caretaker and you've been arrested for a crime, and the evidence looks like you'll go to prison, you're going to have to decide what to do with the care of your kids on your mind. I suppose that would pressure you to become an informant instead of taking a longer prison sentence, but there's pressure to do that anyway, like not wanting to be in prison for a long time.
>Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
>That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
lawfare is... good now? Between Trump being hit with felony charges for falsifying business records (lawfare is good?) and Lisa Cook getting prosecuted for mortgage fraud (lawfare is bad?), I honestly lost track at this point.
>The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
What's even the implication here? That they're going to shoot his plane down? If there's no threat of violence, what does the French government even hope to achieve with this?
>fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged.
That's not a credible threat because there's approximately 0% chance France would actually follow through with it. Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries. As we seen the fed, the best he could muster are some spurious prosecutions. France murdering someone would put them on par with Russia or India.
Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon.
If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Being clear for flying anywhere in the world is their job.
Would be quite stupid to loose it like truck driver DUI getting his license revoked.
>Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon.
>If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Again, what's France trying to do? Refuse entry to France? Why do they need to threaten shooting down his jet for that? Just harassing/pranking him (eg. "haha got you good with that jet lmao")?
I think the implication of the fighter jets is that they force the plane to land within a particular jurisdiction (where he is then arrested) rather than allowing it to just fly off to somewhere else. Similar to the way that a mall security guard might arrest a shoplifter; the existence of security guards doesn't mean the mall operators are planning to murder you.
Guards can plausibly arrest you without seriously injuring you. But
according to https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/68361 there are no safe options if the pilot really doesn’t want to comply, so there is no “forcing” a plane to land somewhere, just making it very clear that powerful people really want you to stop and might be able to give more consequences on the ground if you don’t.
Planes are required to comply with instructions; if they don't they're committing a serious crime and the fighters are well within their international legal framework to shoot the plane down. They would likely escalate to a warning shot with the gun past the cockpit, and if the aircraft is large enough they might try to shoot out one engine instead of the wing or fuselage.
I suspect fighter pilots are better than commercial pilots at putting their much-higher-spec aircraft so uncomfortably close that your choices narrow down to complying with their landing instructions or suicidally colliding with one - in which case the fighter has an ejector seat and you don't.
I felt like you ruled out collision when you said they're not going to murder, though, granted, an accidental but predictable collision after repeatedly refusing orders is not exactly murder. I think the point stands, they have to be willing to kill or to back down, and as others said I'm skeptical France or similar countries would give the order for anything short of an imminent threat regarding the plane's target. If Musk doesn't want to land where they want him to, he's going to pay the pilot whatever it takes, and the fighter jets are going to back off because whatever they want to arrest him for isn't worth an international incident.
In the USA they would be allowed to down any aircraft not complying with national air interception rules, that would not be murder. It would be equivalent to not dropping a gun once prompted by an officer and being shot as a result.
Well, when everything is lawfare it logically follows that it won't always be good or always be bad. It seems Al Capone being taken down for tax fraud would similarly be lawfare by these standards, or am I missing something? Perhaps lawfare (sometimes referred to as "prosecuting criminal charges", as far as I can tell, given this context) is just in some cases and unjust in others.
As they say: you can beat the rap but not the ride. If a state wants to make your life incredibly difficult for months or even years they can, the competent ones can even do it while staying (mostly) on the right side of the law.
We are not entirely sure the rule of law in America isn't already over.
People are putting a lot of weight on the midterm elections which are more or less the last line of defense besides a so far tepid response by the courts and even then consequence free defiance of court orders is now rampant.
We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
As we're seeing with the current US President... the government doesn't (have to) care.
In any case, CSAM is the one thing other than Islamist terrorism that will bypass a lot of restrictions on how police are supposed to operate (see e.g. Encrochat, An0m) across virtually all civilized nations. Western nations also will take anything that remotely smells like Russia as a justification.
Well, that's particular to the US. It just shows that checks and balances are not properly implemented there, just previous presidents weren't exploiting it maliciously for their own gains.
>> they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.
When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
This is pretty messed up btw.
Social work for children systems in the USA are very messed up. It is not uncommon for minority families to lose rights to parent their children for very innocuous things that would not happen to a non-oppressed class.
It is just another way for the justice/legal system to pressure families that have not been convicted / penalized under the supervision of a court.
And this isn't the only lever they use.
Every time I read crap like this I just think of Aaron Swartz.
One can also say we do too little for children who get mistreated. Taking care of other peoples children is never easy the decision needs to be fast and effective and no one wants to take the decision to end it. Because there are those rare cases were children dies because of a reunion with their parents.
Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
Most enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
Except when they have encryption, which should be the standard? I mean how much data would authorities actually retrieve when most stuff is located on X servers anyways? I have my doubts.
The authorities will request the keys for local servers and will get them. As for remote ones (outside of France jurisdiction) it depends where they are and how much X wants to make their life difficult.
Musk and X don't seem to be the type to care about any laws or any compelling legal requests, especially from a foreign government. I doubt the French will get anything other than this headline.
Getting kicked out of the EU is extremely unattractive for Twitter. But the US also has extradition treaties so that’s hardly the end of how far they can escalate.
White people already extradited to the EU during the current administration would disagree. But this administration has a limited shelf life, even hypothetically just under 3 years of immunity isn’t enough for comfort.
Yes, he is in power since 2000 (1999, actually) but 1999-2012 he was Prime Minister. Only then he became President, which would make the end of his second term 2024. So the current one would be his third term (by the magic of changing the constitution and legal quibbles which effectively allow a president to stay in charge for four almost whole terms, AFAIU).
> France? A nuclear state? Paris is properly sovereign.
That is true. But nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris. Because i’m just not seeing it.
> nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris
Paris doesn’t need to back down. And it can independently exert effort in a way other European countries can’t. Musk losing Paris means swearing off a meaningful economic and political bloc.
France doesn't extradite its citizens, even absolute scumbags like Roman Polanski. Someone like Musk has lots of lawyers to gum up extradition proceedings, even if the US were inclined to go along. I doubt the US extradition treaty would cover this unless the French could prove deliberate sharing of CSAM by Musk personally, beyond reckless negligence. Then again, after the Epstein revelations, this is no longer so far-fetched.
If I'm an employee working in the X office in France, and the police come in and show me they have a warrant for all the computers in the building and tell me to unlock the laptop, I'm probably going to do that, no matter what musk thinks
Witnesses can generally not refuse in these situations, that's plain contempt and/or obstruction. Additionally, in France a suspect not revealing their keys is also contempt (UK as well).
The game changed when Trump threatened the use of military force to seize Greenland.
At this point a nuclear power like France has no issue with using covert violence to produce compliance from Musk and he must know it.
These people have proven themselves to be existential threats to French security and France will do whatever they feel is necessary to neutralize that threat.
Musk is free to ignore French rule of law if he wants to risk being involved in an airplane accident that will have rumours and conspiracies swirling around it long after he’s dead and his body is strewn all over the ocean somewhere.
Counter-point. France has already kidnapped another social media CEO and forced him to give up the encryption keys. The moral difference between France (historically or currently) and a 3rd wold warlord is very thin. Also, look at the accusations. CP and political extremism are the classic go-tos when a government doesn't really have a reason to put pressure on someone but they really want to anyway. France has a very questionable history of honoring rule of law in politics. Putting political enemies in prison on questionable charges has a long history there.
"I can't see any difference between a country that has busted two companies that were known for hosting child porn, and a random cartel kingpin" isn't the flex you think it is
We are also talking about a country who wants to ban anonymous VPNs in the name of protecting the children and ask everyone to give their ID card to register account on Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Killing foreigners outside of the own country has always been deemed acceptable by governments that are (or were until recently) considered to generally follow rule of law as well as the majority of their citizen. It also doesn't necessarily contradicts rule of law.
It's just that the West has avoided to do that to each other because they were all essentially allied until recently and because the political implications were deemed too severe.
I don't think however France has anything to win by doing it or has any interest whatsoever and I doubt there's a legal framework the French government can or want to exploit to conduct something like that legally (like calling something an emergency situation or a terrorist group, for example).
People were surprised when the US started just droning boats in the Caribbean and wiping out survivors, but then the government explained that it was law enforcement and not terrorism or piracy, so everyone stopped worrying about it.
Seriously, every powerful state engages in state terrorism from time to time because they can, and the embarrassment of discovery is weighed against the benefit of eliminating a problem. France is no exception : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
The second Donald Trump threatened to invade a nation allied with France is the second anyone who works with Trump became a legitimate military target.
Like a cruel child dismembering a spider one limb at a time France and other nations around the world will meticulously destroy whatever resources people like Musk have and the influence it gives him over their countries.
If Musk displays a sufficient level of resistance to these actions the French will simply assassinate him.
You got that backwards. Greenpeace for all its faults is still viewed as a group against which military force is a no-no. Sinking that ship cost France far more than anything they inflicted on Greenpeace. If anything, that event is evidence that going after Musk is a terrible idea.
PS Yes, Greenpeace is a bunch of scientifically-illiterate fools who have caused far more damage than they prevented. Doesn't matter because what France did was still clearly against the law.
I knew someone who was involved in an investigation (the company and person was the victim not the target of the investigation), their work laptop got placed into a legal hold, the investigators had access to all of their files and they weren't allowed delete to anything (even junk emails) for several years.
If you're a database administrator or similar working at X in France, are you going to going to go to jail to protect Musk from police with an appropriate warrant for access to company data? I doubt it.
It sounds better in the news when you do a raid. These things are generally not done for any purpose other than to communicate a message and score political points.
What happened to due process? Every major firm should have a "dawn raid" policy to comply while preserving rights.
Specific to the Uber case(s), if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?
At best there's an argument that it was "obstructing justice," but logging people off, encrypting, and deleting local copies isn't necessarily illegal.
Thanks for the articles. I'm not disputing that Macron got lobbied for favors.
That said, the articles don't really address the discussion topic whether they committed illegal obstruction DURING raids.
To summarize, I'm separating
(1) Uber's creative operating activities (e.g., UberPop in France)
(2) from anti-raid tactics.
It looks like #1 had some fines (non-material) and arrests of Uber France executives.
However, I don't see a clear case established that Uber committed obstruction in #2. Uber had other raids in Quebec, India, the Netherlands,... with kill switches allegedly deployed 12+ times. I don't think there were ever consequences other than a compliance fine of 750 EUROS to their legal counsel in the Netherlands for "non-compliance with an official order". I doubt that's related to actions the day of the raid, but could be wrong.
violent agreement is when you're debating something with someone, and you end up yelling at each other because you think you disagree on something, but then you realize that you (violently, as in "are yelling at each other") agree on whatever it is. Agressive compliance is when the corporate drone over-zealously follows stupid/pointless rules when they could just look the other way, to the point of it being aggressively compliant (with stupid corporate mumbo jumbo).
This is a perfect way for the legal head of the company in-country to visit some jails.
They will explain that it was done remotely and whatnot but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.
It's not illegal to head a subsidiary of a company that did bad things, but I'm sure he will be intensely questioned. If he did something illegal, he may be punished.
That sounds awfully difficult to do perfectly without personally signing up for extra jail time for premeditated violation of local laws. Like in that scenario, any reference to the unsanitized file or a single employee breaking omertà is proof that your executives and IT staff conspired to violate the law in a way which is likely to ensure they want to prosecute as maximally as possible. Law enforcement around the world hates the idea that you don’t respect their authority, and when it slots into existing geopolitics you’d be a very tempting scapegoat.
Elon probably isn’t paying them enough to be the lightning rod for the current cross-Atlantic tension.
True, but that’s going to be a noisy process until there are a few theoretical breakthroughs. I personally would not leave myself legally on the hook hoping that Grok faked something hermetically.
Nobody does that. It is either cooperation with law enforcement or remote lock (and then there are consequences for the in-country legal entity, probably not personally for the head but certainly for its existence).
This was a common action during the Russian invasion of Ukraine for companies that supported Ukraine and closed their operations in Russia.
Or they just connect to a mothership with keys on the machine. The authorities can have the keys, but alas, they're useless now, because there is some employee watching the surveillance cameras in the US, and he pressed a red button revoking all of them. What part of this is illegal?
Obviously, the government can just threaten to fine you any amount, close operations or whatever, but your company can just decide to stop operating there, like Google after Russia imposed an absurd fine.
You know police are not all technically clueless, I hope. The French have plenty of experience dealing with terrorism, cybercrime, and other modern problems as well as the more historical experience of being conquered and occupied, I don't think it's beyond them to game out scenarios like this and preempt such measures.
As France discovered the hard way in WW2, you can put all sorts of rock-solid security around the front door only to be surprised when your opponent comes in by window.
> Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that.
This would be done in parallel for key sources.
There is a lot of information on physical devices that is helpful, though. Even discovering additional apps and services used on the devices can lead to more discovery via those cloud services, if relevant.
Physical devices have a lot of additional information, though: Files people are actively working on, saved snippets and screenshots of important conversations, and synced data that might be easier to get offline than through legal means against the providers.
In outright criminal cases it's not uncommon for individuals to keep extra information on their laptop, phone, or a USB drive hidden in their office as an insurance policy.
This is yet another good reason to keep your work and personal devices separate, as hard as that can be at times. If there's a lawsuit you don't want your personal laptop and phone to disappear for a while.
Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data. There's also the possibility of the MDM software making it impossible to decrypt if given a remote signal. Even if you image the drive, you can't image the secure enclave so if it is wiped it's impossible to retrieve.
> Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data.
In these situations, refusing to provide those keys or passwords is an offense.
The employees who just want to do their job and collect a paycheck aren’t going to prison to protect their employer by refusing to give the password to their laptop.
The teams that do this know how to isolate devices to avoid remote kill switches. If someone did throw a remote kill switch, that’s destruction of evidence and a serious crime by itself. Again, the IT guy isn’t going to risk prison to wipe company secrets.
I read somewhere that Musk (or maybe Theil) companies have processes in place to quickly offload data from a location to other jurisdictions (and destroy the local data) when they detect a raid happening. Don't know how true it is though. The only insight I have into their operations was the amazing speed by which people are badged in and out of his various gigafactories. It "appears" that they developed custom badging systems when people drive into gigafactories to cut the time needed to begin work. If they are doing that kind of stuff then there has got to be something in place for a raid. (This is second hand so take with a grain of salt)
EDIT: It seems from other comments that it may have been Uber I was reading about. The badging system I have personally observed outside the Gigafactories. Apologies for the mixup.
Everyone defines their own moral code and trusts that more than the laws of the land. Don't tell me you've never gone over the speed limit, or broken one of the hundreds of crazy laws people break in everyday life out of ignorance.
The speed limit is not a law the same way "don't murder" is a law. And "don't destroy evidence of a crime" is a lot closer to "don't murder", legally speaking.
They do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
I assume that they have opened a formal investigation and are now going to the office to collect/perloin evidence before it's destroyed.
Most FAANG companies have training specifically for this. I assume X doesn't anymore, because they are cool and edgy, and staff training is for the woke.
That can start with self deleting messages if you are under court order, and has happens before:
“Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was ‘lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation’ and ‘with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.’”
Right, but you are confusing a _conspiracy_ with staff training.
I didn't work anywhere near the level, or anything thats dicey where I needed to have a "oh shit delete everything the Feds are here" plan. Which is a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (I'm not sure what the common law/legal code name for that is)
The stuff I worked on was legal and in the spirit of the law, along with a paper trail (that I also still have) proving that.
Not really? If the people want to get through the locked doors throughout the office, they'll need someone to let them through the doors. At least where I work, the receptionists don't have that access. They need to call people who do have universal door access to let them in. Unless the cops just want to battering-ram their way through all the doors for the fun of it...
Also, a raid without a warrant is not a raid. It's a friendly visit to someone's office.
>withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow.
Prosecution must present a valid search warrant for *specific* information. They don't get a carte blanche, so uber way is correct. lock computers and lets the courts to decide.
In common law/4th amendment, kinda. Once you have a warrant, then the word reasonable comes into play. Its reasonable to assume that the data you want is on the devices of certain people. if incidental data/evidence is also procured that was reasonably likely to contain said data, then its fair game
In the civil code, its quite possibly different. The french have had ~ 3 constitutions in the last 80 years. The also dont have the concept of case history. who knows what the law actually is.
mine had a scene where some bro tried to organise the resistance. A voice over told us that he was arrested for blocking a legal investigation and was liable for being fired due to reputational damage.
X's training might be like you described, but everywhere else that is vaguely beholden to law and order would be opposite.
The merger was most likely now because they have to do it before the IPO. After the IPO, there’s a whole process to force independent evaluation and negotiation between two boards / executives, which would be an absolute dumpster fire where Musk controls both.
A public SpaceX will still be run by Musk. A public SpaceX would have to sell assets like X for a huge loss given its debt load, which would also take a propaganda machine out of Musk’s hands.
How was that move legal anyway? Like... a lot of people and governments gave Musk money to develop, build and launch rockets. And now he's using it to bail out his failing social media network and CSAM peddling AI service.
Money comes with strings, such as when forming an ongoing relationship with a company you expect them to not merge with other companies you are actively prosecuting. I suspect the deal is going so fast to avoid some sort of veto being prepared. Once SpaceX and xAI are officially the same, you lose the ability to inflict meaningful penalties on xAI without penalizing yourself as an active business partner with SpaceX.
Was it a grant or a purchase? If I buy a pizza from the pizza shop, it costs them $10 to make, I pay $11, the $1 is profit and the owner can do what he wants with it. But if I get a grant from NLnet I have to spend it on what the grant proposal says. Though a lot of NLnet grants are for living costs while doing a project, so I can do what I like for that time if the project gets done.
The lack of legal/regulatory reaction US side on CSAM is pretty bewildering. And ominously mirrors the Epstein saga - other countries seem to be moving fast while US seems to be trying very hard to not move at all
I’m sure Musk is going to say this is about free speech in an attempt to gin up his supporters. It isn’t. It’s about generating and distributing non consensual sexual imagery, including of minors. And, when notified, doing nothing about it.
If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this.
(it’ll be interesting to see if this discussion is allowed on HN. Almost every other discussion on this topic has been flagged…)
* "implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8gz8g2qnlo
* locked image generation down to paid accounts only (i.e. those individuals that can be identified via their payment details).
Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people, but it seems the media is ignoring that and focussing their ire only on Musk's companies...
> Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people
No they weren’t? There were numerous examples of people feeding the same prompts to different AIs and having their requests refused. Not to mention, X was also publicly distributing that material, something other AI companies were not doing. Which is an entirely different legal liability.
Making/distributing a photo of a non-consenting bikini-wearer is no more illegal when originated by computer in bedroom than done by camera on public beach.
The part of X’s reaction to their own publishing I’m most looking forward to seeing in slow-motion in the courts and press was their attempt at agency laundering by having their LLM generate an apology in first-person.
Nah, Musk put out a public challenge in January asking anyone able to generate illegal / porno images to reply and tell him how they were able to bypass the safegaurds. Thousands of people tried and failed. I think the most people were able to get is stuff you'd see in an R-rated movie, and even then only for fictional requests as the latest versions of Grok refuse to undress or redress any real person into anything inappropriate.
Who is going to generate kiddie porn on it in the first place? It's not as if a a lack of a credit card is preventing the authorities from figuring anything out. This is beyond ridiculous.
> If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this.
As mentioned in the article, the UK's ICO and the EC are also investigating.
France is notably keen on raids for this sort of thing, and a lot of things that would be basically a desk investigation in other countries result in a raid in France.
How is that relevant? Are you implying that being a US military contractor should make you immune to the laws of other countries that you operate in?
The onus is on the contractor to make sure any classified information is kept securely. If by raiding an office in France a bunch of US military secrets are found, it would suggest the company is not fit to have those kind of contracts.
I think there's a difference between "user uploaded material isn't properly moderated" and "the sites own chatbot generates porn on request based on images of women who didn't agree to it", no?
> The prosecutor's office also said it was leaving X and would communicate on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on.
I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms, and start treating the communication with the public that funds your existence in different terms. The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.
I agree with you. In my opinion it was already bad enough that official institutions were using Twitter as a communication platform before it belonged to Musk and started to restrict visibility to non-logged in users, but at least Twitter was arguably a mostly open communication platform and could be misunderstood as a public service in the minds of the less well-informed. However, deciding to "communicate" at this day and age on LinkedIn and Instagram, neither of which ever made a passing attempt to pretend to be a public communications service, boggles the mind.
> official institutions were using Twitter as a communication platform before it belonged to Musk and started to restrict visibility to non-logged in users
... thereby driving up adoption far better than Twitter itself could. Ironic or what.
This. We don't have to accept that they behave that way. They enter our economies so they need to adhere to our laws. And we can fine them. No one wants to lose Europe as a market, even if all the haters call us a shithole.
>The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.
Who decides what communication is in the interest of the public at large? The Trump administration?
You appear to have posted a bit of a loaded question here, apologies if I'm misinterpreting your comment. It is, of course, the public that should decide what communication is of public interest, at least in a democracy operating optimally.
I suppose the answer, if we're serious about it, is somewhat more nuanced.
To begin, public administrations should not get to unilaterally define "the public interest" in their communication, nor should private platforms for that matter. Assuming we're still talking about a democracy, the decision-making should be democratically via a combination of law + rights + accountable institutions + public scrutiny, with implementation constraints that maximise reach, accessibility, auditability, and independence from private gatekeepers. The last bit is rather relevant, because the private sector's interests and the citizen's interests are nearly always at odds in any modern society, hence the state's roles as rule-setter (via democratic processes) and arbiter. Happy to get into further detail regarding the actual processes involved, if you're genuinely interested.
That aside - there are two separate problems that often get conflated when we talk about these platforms:
- one is reach: people are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, so publishing there increases distribution; public institutions should be interested in reaching as many citizens as possible with their comms;
- the other one is dependency: if those become the primary or exclusive channels, the state's relationship with citizens becomes contingent on private moderation, ranking algorithms, account lockouts, paywalls, data extraction, and opaque rule changes. That is entirely and dangerously misaligned with democratic accountability.
A potential middle position could be ti use commercial social platforms as secondary distribution instead of the authoritative channel, which in reality is often the case. However, due to the way societies work and how individuals operate within them, the public won't actually come across the information until it's distributed on the most popular platforms. Which is why some argue that they should be treated as public utilities since dominant communications infrastructure has quasi-public function (rest assured, I won't open that can of worms right now).
Politics is messy in practice, as all balancing acts are - a normal price to pay for any democratic society, I'd say. Mix that with technology, social psychology and philosophies of liberty, rights, and wellbeing, and you have a proper head-scratcher on your hands. We've already done a lot to balance these, for sure, but we're not there yet and it's a dynamic, developing field that presents new challenges.
I remember in some countries there's an official government newspaper. Laws reference publishing things in this paper (e.g. tax rate changes, radio frequency allocations) and the law is that you must follow it once it's published.
In practice the information is disseminated through many channels once it's released in the official newspaper. Mass media reports on anything widely relevant, niche media reports on things nichely relevant, and there's direct communication with anyone directly affected (recipient of a radio frequency allocation) so nobody really subscribes to the official government newspaper, but it's there and if there was a breakdown of communication systems that would be the last resort to ensure you are getting government updates.
CSAM does not have a universal definition. In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response. If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.
> If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.
> No abuse of a real minor is needed.
Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is considered a record of a crime, emphasizing that its existence represents the abuse of a child."
Putting a bikini on a photo of a child may be distasteful abuse of a photo, but it is not abuse of a child - in any current law.
> Även en bild där ett barn t.ex. genom speciella kameraarrangemang
framställs på ett sätt som är ägnat att vädja till sexualdriften, utan att
det avbildade barnet kan sägas ha deltagit i ett sexuellt beteende vid
avbildningen, kan omfattas av bestämmelsen.
Which translated means that the children does not have to be apart of sexual acts and indeed undressing a child using AI could be CSAM.
I say "could" because all laws are open to interpretation in Sweden and it depends on the specific image. But it's safe to say that many images produces by Grok are CSAM by Swedish standards.
" Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning. "
Are you from Sweden? Why do you think the definition was clear across the world and not changed "before AI"? Or is it some USDefaultism where Americans assume their definition was universal?
"No. I used this interweb thing to fetch that document from Sweden, saving me a 1000-mile walk."
So you cant speak Swedish, yet you think you grasped the Swedish law definition?
" I didn't say it was clear. I said there was no disagreement. "
Sorry, there are lots of different judical definitions about CSAM in different countries, each with different edge cases and how to handle them. I very doubt it, there is a disaggrement.
But my guess about your post is, that an American has to learn again there is a world outside of the US with different rules and different languages.
> So you cant speak Swedish, yet you think you grasped the Swedish law definition?
I guess you didn't read the doc. It is in English.
I too doubt there's material disagreement between judicial definitions. The dubious definitions I'm referring to are the non-judicial fabrications behind accusations such as the root of this subthread.
> Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is [...]"
Please don't use the "knowledge" of LLMs as evidence or support for anything. Generative models generate things that have some likelihood of being consistent with their input material, they don't "know" things.
Just last night, I did a Google search related to the cell tower recently constructed next to our local fire house. Above the search results, Gemini stated that the new tower is physically located on the Facebook page of the fire department.
Does this support the idea that "some physical cell towers are located on Facebook pages"? It does not. At best, it supports that the likelihood that the generated text is completely consistent with the model's input is less than 100% and/or that input to the model was factually incorrect.
2. disseminates, transfers, provides, exhibits, or otherwise makes such an image of a child available to another person,
3. acquires or offers such an image of a child,
4. facilitates contacts between buyers and sellers of such images of children or takes any other similar measure intended to promote trade in such images, or
5. possesses such an image of a child or views such an image to which he or she has gained access
shall be sentenced for a child pornography offense to imprisonment for at most two years.
Then there's Proposition 2009/10:70, which is a clarifying document on how the law should be interpreted:
"To depict a child in a pornographic image entails the production of such an image of a child. An image can be produced in various ways, e.g., by photographing, filming, or drawing a real child. Through various techniques, more or less artificial images can also be created. For criminal liability, it is not required that the image depicts a real child; images of fictitious children are also covered. New productions can also be created by reproducing or manipulating already existing depictions, for example, by editing film sequences together in a different order or by splicing an image of a child’s head onto an image of another child’s body."
Let me quote again: Pay attention to c.iv specifically:
(c) ‘child pornography’ means:
(i) any material that visually depicts a child engaged in real or simulated sexually explicit conduct;
(ii) any depiction of the sexual organs of a child for primarily sexual purposes;
(iii) any material that visually depicts any person appearing to be a child engaged in real or simulated sexually explicit conduct or any depiction of the sexual organs of any person appearing to be a child, for primarily sexual purposes; or
(iv) realistic images of a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct or realistic images of the sexual organs of a child, for primarily sexual purposes;
Thanks. I paid attention but still didn't see how:
realistic images of a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct or realistic images of the sexual organs of a child, for primarily sexual purposes;
covers the example in question:
If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.
Thanks, but what "the" actual law? Your one doesn't contain the purported Swedish CSAM definition, or any for that matter. Nor does it even mention abuse.
It has been since at least 2012 here in Sweden. That case went to our highest court and they decided a manga drawing was CSAM (maybe you are hung up on this term though, it is obviously not the same in Swedish).
The holder was not convicted but that is besides the point about the material.
You are both arguing semantics. A pornographic image of a child. That's illegal no matter what it's called. I say killing, you say murder, same law though, still illegal.
I'm not supporting CSAM. I'm supporting the defence of the term CSAM from attempts at dilution and diminution which downplay the true severity of this appaling crime.
That's the problem with CSAM arguments, though. If you disagree with the current law and think it should be loosened, you're a disgusting pedophile. But if you think it should be tightened, you're a saint looking out for the children's wellbeing. And so laws only go one way...
You don't see a huge difference between abusing a child (and recording it) vs drawing/creating an image of a child in a sexual situation? Do you believe they should have the same legal treatment? In Japan for instance the latter is legal.
He made no judgement in his comment, he just observed the fact that the term csam - in at least the specified jurisdiction - applies to generated pictures of teenagers, wherever real people were subjected to harm or not.
I suspect none of us are lawyers with enough legal knowledge of the French law to know the specifics of this case
This comment is a part of the chain that starts with a very judgemental comment and is an answer to a response challenging that starting one. You don't need legal knowledge of the French law to want to distinguish real child abuse from imaginary. One can give arguments why the latter is also bad, but this is not an automatic judgment, should not depend on the laws of a particular country and I, for one, am deeply shocked that some could think it's the same crime of the same severity.
Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI?
You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools. Just because these images are "fake" doesn't mean they're not abuse, and that there aren't real victims.
When you undress a child with AI, especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated. Therefore CSAM.
Musk's social media platform has recently been subject to intense scrutiny over sexualised images generated and edited on the site using its AI tool Grok.
Raid all of them. Raid Google. Raid Facebook. Raid Apple. Raid Microsoft. Big tech has gotten away with everything from fraud[0] to murder[1] for decades. Black outfits. Rappel lines. Automatics. Touch that server Prakesh, and you won't live to touch another.
Maybe you should look up child pornography laws in Europe. In Sweden, the mere act of scrolling by an image depicting (real or not) a child in a sexual position, and having it stored in the browser cache, is a crime with up to 2 years of prison time.
It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to create, own, distribute or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent, regardless if they are underage or not.
Grok is a platform that is enabling this en masse. If xAI can't bring in guardrails or limit who can access these capabilities, then they deserve what's coming to them.
>It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to create, own, distribute or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent, regardless if they are underage or not.
Arguably morally reprehensible but it has not always been illegal (and still isn't in many places) if you're talking about images of adults.
>> or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent
Who told you that? Go ask Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton about that one. There are rules about material created without consent, but people do not retain a perpetual right to have formerly consentual material taken down. Hollywood, let alone the porn industry, would collapse overnight if every disgruntled star could have movies removed whenever they feel like it simply by withdrawing "consent" years after creation.
And for copyright, generally the person on camera is not holding the camera and so is not the creator/owner of the material. That is a regular issue where people attempt to use the dmca to remove images of themselves from websites.
She claimes, later, to have not consented but given the sophistication of the production no reasonable person could believe she had no idea it was being filmed. She might not consent to the exact public release but she was certainly well aware of being filmed on the day. She consented to the creation.
Same issue decades later during the iphone hacks/leaks. They did not consent to public release, but did consent to creation and private distribution, sometimes even taking and initially sharing the photos themselves.
You can _almost_ do anything you want in the privacy of your home; but in this case Twitter was actively and directly disseminating pictures publicly on their platform.
And profiting from it, though less directly than "$ for illegal images". Even if it wasn't behind a paywall (which it mostly is) driving more traffic for more ads for more income is still profiting from illegal imagery.
Again, AI deepfakes are not sketches in a piece of paper. There's a massive difference between drawing your coworker naked on a piece of paper (weird, but certainly not criminal), and going "grok generate a video of my coworker bouncing on my d*ck". Not to mention the latter is generated and stored god knows where, against the consent of the depicted person.
In which broken society do you live where this is true?
I would say drawing sexually explicit pictures of real persons without their consent and keeping them in your drawer is neither illegal nor morally reprehensible in most of the world.
I would personally not tell them because not everyone likes to know what/that others think about them. But I do not see the moral issue if I don't tell them.
What if I only thought about it? Still morally reprehensible? Or only if I tell others I think about them? Then you could argue it's sexual harassment.
I don't think one internet commenter can know or decide what is or isn't "morally reprehensible" in "most of the world". I don't speak for "most of the world" but I'm fairly sure "I drew nudes of your mom lol" will not go down well anywhere.
At my kids school the children have been using grok to create pics of other children without clothes on - chatgpt etc won’t let you do that - grok needs some controls and x seem unable to do that themselves.
In such a case specifically: Uncover internal communication that shows the company was aware of the problem and ignored it, which presumably affects liability a lot.
Have you seen some of the stuff in the Enron or Epstein emails? They can be rather candid and act as if there is nothing to hide or they will never get caught
Do you think they communicate via paper? Raiding office doesn't automatically gives them access to mail/slack etc. And internal comms could be asked for without the nuclear option of raiding the office
Companies are required by law to enable persistence. And in any case if we assume malice how would the police even get access to all emails by raiding if the message and mails are stored in cloud.
AFAIK police can just ask google/slack for the mails with proper warrant.
This is the cyber crime unit. They will exfiltrate any data they want. They will use employee account to pivot into the rest of the X network. They don't just go in, grab a couple of papers, laptops and phones. They hook into the network and begin cracking.
> How about you come back when your daughter has a fake AI nude passed around school.
Like any bad behaviour, the grown-up response should be discipline and education.
There's a million ways kids can misbehave. The idea is to get kids ready for the real world, not pretend there's nothing bad out there.
Obviously we don't want "point and click" AI nudes in the hands of minors, or kids having their own AI accounts in the first place. Parents and educators pay for their kid's devices and internet connections. If they're not being responsible, you take away the privilege until they learn about respectful behaviour.
If the kid is allowed to stay out after dark but ends up doing crime at those times, we don't ask the government to impose a curfew on every kid. We discipline the kids involved. And that's my last comment in this thread thank God, what a struggle.
Not the same - the barrier to entry was too high. Most people don't have the skills to edit photos using Photoshop. Grok enabled this to happen to scale for users who are complete non techies. With grok, anyone who could type in a half-coherent sentence in English could generate and disseminate these images.
I see what you’re getting at. You’re trying to draw a moral equivalence between photoshop and grok. Where that falls flat for me is the distribution aspect: photoshop would not also publish and broadcast the illegal material.
But police don’t care about moral equivalence. They care about the law. For the legal details we would need to consult French law. But I assume it is illegal to create and distribute the images. Heck, it’s also probably against Twitter’s TOS too so by all rights the grok account should be banned.
> This is a political action by the French
Maybe. They probably don’t like a foreign company coming in, violating their children, and getting away with it. But what Twitter did was so far out of line that I’d be shocked if French companies weren’t treated the same way.
> But I assume it is illegal to create and distribute the images.
I very much so expect it to be illegal to distribute the images, of course (creating them, not so much).
But the illegality, in a sane world (and until 5 minutes ago) used to be attached to the person actually distributing them. If some student distributes fake sexualized images of their colleague, I very much expect the perpetrator to be punished by the law (and by the school, since we are at it).
Is Twitter not the one distributing it? You make a request to their servers, and in the comment section there is a link to an image (also hosted on Twitter’s server) containing illegal content.
If a student printed the pictures out and distributed them at school you’d have maybe 1000 violations. Twitter likely has hundreds of millions if not billions. So it makes sense to go after the most severe violator.
Creating, possessing, and distributing CSAM is illegal in the US and many other countries. Can you explain why you think it should be legal to create something that is illegal to possess or distribute?
I didn't say creating isn't illegal. I said I think it probably shouldn't be illegal.
Any crime that doesn't cause victims is just another way for an oppressive collectivist state to further control their citizens. If you are not harming anyone (like when creating but not sharing these pictures) then it simply shouldn't be a crime. Otherwise, what are you actually punishing? Thoughtcrimes?
It's not hypothetical. And in fact the girl who was being targeted was expelled not the boys who did it [1].
Those boys absolutely should be held accountable. But I also don't think that Grok should be able to quickly and easily generate fake revenge porn for minors.
You can’t “undo” a school shooting, for instance, so we tend to have gun laws.
You can’t just “undo” some girl being harassed by AI generated nude photos of her, so we…
Yes, we should have some protections or restrictions on what you can do.
You may not understand it, either because you aren’t a parent or maybe just not emotionally equipped to understand how serious this actually can be, but your lack of comprehension does not render it a non-issue.
Having schools play whack-a-mole after the photos are shared around is not a valid strategy. Never mind that schools primarily engage in teaching, not in investigation.
As AI-generated content gets less and less distinguishable from reality, these incidents will have far worse consequences and putting such power in the hands of adolescents who demonstrably don’t have sound judgment (hence why they lack many other rights that adults have) is not something most parents are comfortable with - and I doubt you’ll find many teachers, psychiatrists and so on who would support your approach either.
>You can’t just “undo” some girl being harassed by AI generated nude photos of her, so we…
No, but if you send those people who made and distributed the AI nude of her to jail, these problems will virtually disappear overnight, because going to jail is a hugely effective deterrent for most people.
But if you don't directly prosecute the people doing it, and instead just ban Grok AI, then those people will just use other AI tools, outside of US jurisdiction, to do the same things and the problem persists.
And the issues keeps persisting, because nobody ever goes to jail. Everyone only gets a slap on the wrist, deflects accountability by blaming the AI, so the issue keeps persisting and more people end up getting hurt because those who do the evil are never held directly accountable.
Obviously Grok shouldn't be legally allowed to generate fakes nudes of actual kids, but in case such safeguards can and will be bypassed, that doesn't absolve the humans from being the ones knowingly breaking the law to achieve a nefarious goal.
Youths lack judgment, so they can’t vote, drink, drive, have sex or consent to adults.
A 14-year-old can’t be relied to understand the consequences of making nudes of some girl.
Beyond that, we regulate guns, speed limits and more according to principles like “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose”.
We do that not only because shoving kids into jails is something we want to avoid, but because regulating at the source of the problem is both more feasible AND heads off a lot of tragedy.
And again, you fail to acknowledge the investigative burden you put on society to discover who originated the photo after the fact, and the trauma to the victim.
If none of that computes for you, then I don’t know what to say except I don’t place the right to generate saucy images highly enough to swarm my already overworked police with requests to investigate who generated fake underage porn.
>A 14-year-old can’t be relied to understand the consequences of making nudes of some girl.
Teenagers do stupid shit all the time. But they still get prosecuted or convicted when they do crimes. They go to juvy or their parents get punished. Being 14 is not a get out of jail free card.
In that case, why not allow teenagers to carry firearms as well? Sure, some will die, others will go to jail, but at least that ought to teach the rest of them a lesson, right?
I am in agreement with you, but as a kid, we DID carry guns, regularly. Gun racks in our cars/trucks, and strapped to our backs as we walked down the street.
The problem stems from parents lack of parenting, a huge lack of real after-school programs, and the tiktokification of modern society.
30 years ago, we had a lot of the same "slap on the wrist" punishments because it was assumed when you got home your parent was going to beat your ass. That isn't a thing anymore (rightfully), because parenting through threat of violence just leads to those kids becoming violent parents.
Our problem is we never transitioned from violent parenting into any other kind. I watched my nieces and nephews get parented by YouTube and get social media accounts before they were 10. COVID created a society of chronically online children who don't know how to interact offline.
And yes, the tools to create bad shit are more accessible than ever, and I always come off as some angry gate keeper, but so much of the internet as it is today has become too easy to access by people incapable of the critical thinking required for safe use.
In the last 5 years, generative AI has taken over most of the "public facing" internet, and with internet literacy at the same level it was 20-30 years ago, we are back in the "walled garden" AOL era, but it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok that are the gardens.
Wut? I carried guns regularly from about age 7. Without my parents around. The USA at one point embraced radical freedom. That is the childhood I had, and I thank "god" for it on a regular basis. "Live free or die."
I'm similarly repulsed by the idea of Grok generating images of kids, but if you draw a nude of an adult woman she's not going to get raped by that existing, and you don't have a right to not be embarrassed. Tough shit, deal with it.
The way you are arguing makes it really hard to understand what you are trying to say. I am guessing you are upset that non-human entity is being used as a boogie man while the actual people are going free? But your argumentation reads like someone who is very upset at AI producing CSAM is being persecuted. I won’t be surprised if people think you are defending CSAM.
In good faith, a few things - AI generated imagery and Photoshop are not the same. If someone can mail Adobe and a photo of a kid and ask for a modified one and Adobe sent it back, yes Adobe’s offices will be raided. That’s the equivalent here. It’s not a tool. It’s a service. You keep using AI, without taking a moment to give the “intelligence” any thought.
Yes, powerful people are always going to get by, as you say. And the laws & judicial system are for the masses. There is definitely unfairness in it. But that doesn’t change anything here - this is a separate conversation.
If not Grok then someone else will do it - is a defeatist argument that can only mean it can’t be controlled so don’t bother. This point is where you come across as a CSAM defender. Govt’s will/should do whatever they can to make society safe, even if it means playing whack a mole. Arguing that’s “not efficient” is frankly confusing. Judicial system is about fairness and not efficiency.
frankly, I think you understand all of this and maybe got tunnel visioned in your anger at the unfairness of people scapegoating technology for its failings. That’s the last thing I want to point out, raiding an office is taking action against the powerful people who build systems without accountability. They are not going to sit the model down and give a talking to. The intention is to identify the responsible party that allows this to happen.
> No, but if you send those people who made and distributed the AI nude of her to jail, these problems will virtually disappear overnight, because going to jail is a hugely effective deterrent for most people.
Actually you'll see the opposite happen a lot - after Columbine, the number of school shootings went up [0] for example, because before people didn't consider it an option. Same with serial killers / copycats, and a bunch of other stuff.
Likewise, if it hadn't been in the news, a lot of people wouldn't have known you can / could create nudes of real people with Grok. News reporting on these things is its own kind of unfortunate marketing, and for every X people that are outraged about this, there will be some that are instead inspired and interested.
While a lot of punishments for crimes is indeed a deterrent, it doesn't always work. Also because in this case, it's relatively easy to avoid being found out (unlike school shootings).
You cannot offload all problems to the legal system. It does not have the capacity. Legal issues take time to resolve and the victims have to have the necessary resource to pursue legal action. Grok enabled abuse at scale, which no legal system in the world can keep up with. It doesn't need explanation that generating nudes of people without their consent is a form of abuse. And if the legal system cannot keep up with protecting victims, the problem has to be dealt with at source.
>You cannot offload all problems to the legal system. It does not have the capacity.
You definitely can. You don't have to prosecute and send a million people to jail for making and distributing fake AI nudes, you just have to send a couple, and then the problem virtually goes away.
People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time. That's how you fix all issues in society and enforce law abiding behavior. You make the cost of the crime greater than the gains from it, then crucify some people in public to set an example for everyone else.
Do people like doing and paying their taxes? No, but they do it anyway. Why is that? Because THEY KNOW that otherwise they go to jail. Obviously the IRS and legal system don't have the capacity to send the whole country to jail if they were to stop paying taxes, but they send enough to jail in order for the majority of the population to not risk it and follow the law.
Increased severity of punishment has little deterrent effect, both individually and generally.
The certainty or likelihood of being caught if a far more effevtive deterrent, but require effort, focus, and resources by law enforcement.
It's a resource constraint problem and a policy choice. If "they" wanted to set the tone that this type of behavior will not be tolerated, it would require a concerted multi agency surge of investigative and prosecutorial resources. It's been done before, if there's a will there's a way.
> People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time. That's how you fix all issues in society and enforce law abiding behavior. You make the cost of the crime greater than the gains from it, then crucify some people in public to set an example for everyone else
And yet criminals still commit crimes. Obviously jail is not the ultimate deterrent you think it is. Nobody commits crimes with the expectation that they'll get caught, and if you only "crucify some people", then most criminals are going to (rightfully) assume that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
> You don't have to prosecute and send a million people to jail for making and distributing fake AI nudes, you just have to send a couple, and then the problem virtually goes away.
I genuinely cannot tell if you are being comically naïve or extremely obtuse here. You need only look at the world around you to see that this does not, and never will, happen.
As another commenter said, this argument is presenting itself as apologia for CSAM and you come across as a defender of the right for a business to create and publish it. I assume you don't actually believe that, but the points you made are compatible.
It is as much the responsibility of a platform for providing the services to create illegal material, and also distributing said illegal material. That it happens to be an AI that generates the imagery is not relevant - X and Grok are still the two services responsible for producing and hosting it. Therefore, the accountability falls on those businesses and its leadership just as much as it does the individual user, because ultimately they are facilitating it.
To compare to other situations: if a paedophile ring is discovered on the dark web, the FBI doesn't just arrest the individuals involved and leave the website open. It takes the entire thing down including those operating it, even if they themselves were simply providing the server and not partaking in the content.
Actually research shows people regularly overestimate how effective deterrence-based punishment is. Particularly for children and teenagers. How many 14-year-olds do you really think are getting prosecuted and sent to jail for asking Grok to generate a nude of their classmate..? How many 14-year-olds are giving serious thought about their long-term future in the moment they are typing a prompt into to Twitter..? Your argument is akin to suggesting that carmakers should sell teenagers cars to drive, because the teenager can be punished if they cause an accident.
No, because the comment is in bad faith, it just introduced an unrelated issue (poor sentencing from authorities) as an argument for the initial issue we are discussing (AI nudes), derailing the conversation, and then using the new issue they themselves introduced to legitimize their poor argument when one has nothing to do with the other and both can be good/bad independently of each other.
I don't accept this as good faith argumentation nor does HN rules.
You are the only one commenting in bad faith, by refusing to understand/acknowledging that the people using Grok to create such pictures AND Grok are both part of the issue. It should not be possible to create nudes of minors via Grok. Full stop.
For disagreeing on the injection of offtopic hypothetical scenarios as an argument derailing the main topic?
>It should not be possible to create nudes of minors via Grok.
I agree with THIS part, I don't agree with the part where the main blame is on the AI, instead of on the people using it. That's not a bad faith argument, it's just My PoV.
If Grok disappears tomorrow, there will be other AIs from other parts of the world outside of US/EU jurisdiction, that will do the same since the cat is out of the bag and the technical barrier to entry is dropping fast.
Do you keep trying to whack-a-mole the AI tools for this, or the humans actually making and distributing fake nudes of real people?
> Do you keep trying to whack-a-mole the AI tools for this, or the humans actually making and distributing fake nudes of real people?
Both, obviously. For example, you go after drug distributors and drug producers. Both approaches are effective in different ways, I am not sure why you are having such trouble understanding this.
You know there is no such thing as the world police or something of that sort.
If the perpetrator is in another country / jurisdiction it is virtually impossible to prosecute let alone sentence.
It is 100% regulatory problem in this case. You just cannot allow this content to be generated and distributed in the public domain by anonymous users. It has nothing to do with free speech but with civility and common understanding of what is morally wrong / right.
Obviously you cannot prevent this in private forums unless it is made illegal which is a completely different problem that requires a very different solution.
The existence and creation of cigarettes and adult nude magazines is fully legal, only their sale is illegal to kids. If kids try to illegally obtain those LEGAL items, it doesn't make the existence of those items illegal, just the act of sale to them.
Meanwhile, the existence/creation CSAM of actual people isn't legal, for anyone no matter the age.
> If parents or school let children play with explosives or do drugs
The explosive sellers that provide explosives to someone without a certification (child or adult) get in trouble (in this part of the world) .. regardless of whether someone gets hurt (although that's an upscale).
If sellers provide ExPo to certified parents and children get access .. that's on the parents.
In that analagy of yours, if grok provided ExPo or CSAM to children .. that's a grok problem,
> A country can ban guns and allow rope, even though both can kill.
That's actually a good argument. And that's how the UK ending up banning not just guns, but all sorts of swords, machetes and knives, meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.
So maybe dangerous knives are not the problem, but the people using them to kill other people. So then where do we draw the line between lethal weapons and crime correlation. At which cutting/shooting instruments?
Same with software tools, that keep getting more powerful with time lowering the bar to entry for generating nudes of people. Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
You’re absolutely right that it is a difficult question where to draw the line. Different countries will do it differently according to their devotion to individual freedoms vs communal welfare.
The knife (as opposed to sword) example is interesting. In the U.K. you’re not allowed to sell them to children. We recognise that there is individual responsibility at play, and children might not be responsible enough to buy them, given the possible harms. Does this totally solve their use in violent crime? No. But if your alternative is “it’s up to the individuals to be responsible”, well, that clearly doesn’t work, because some people are not responsible. At a certain point, if your job is to reduce harm in the population, you look for where you can have a greater impact than just hoping every individual follows the law, because they clearly don’t. And you try things even if they don’t totally solve the problem.
And indeed, the same problem in software.
As for the violent crime rates in the U.K., I don’t have those stats to hand. But murder is at a 50 year low. And since our post-Dunblane gun laws, we haven’t had any school shootings. Most Britons are happy with that bargain.
> meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.
The rate of school shootings has dropped from one (before the implementation of recommendations from the Cullen report) to zero (subsequently). Zero in 29 years - success by any measure.
If you choose to look at _other_ types of violent crime, why would banning handguns have any effect?
> Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
You can ban tools which enable bad outcomes without sufficient upside, while also holding the people who use them to account.
"Correction: kids made the pictures. Using Grok as the tool."
No. That is not how AI nowdays works. Kids told the tool what they want and the tool understood and could have refused like all the other models - but instead it delivered. And it only could do so because it was specifically trained for that.
"If kids were to "git gud" at photoshop "
And what is that supposed to mean?
Adobe makes general purpose tools as far as I know.
You're beating it around the bush not answering the main question.
Anyone skilled at photoshop can do fake nudes as good or even better than AI, including kids (we used it to make fun fakes of teachers in embarrassing situations back in the mid 00s and distribute them via MSN messenger), so then why is only the AI tool the one to blame for what the users do, but not Photoshop if both tools can be used to do the same thing?
People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?
Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things? This is the answer I'm looking for and I don't think there is an easy one, yet people here are too quick to pin blame based on their emotional responses and subjective biases and word views on the matter and the parties involved.
So let's say there are two ways to do something illegal. The first requires skills from the perpetrator, is tricky to regulate, and is generally speaking not a widespread issue in practice. The second way is a no brainer even for young children to use, is easy to regulate, and is becoming a huge issue in practice. Then it makes sense to regulate only the second.
> People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?
Tricky question, but a more accurate comparison would be with a company that runs a service to 3D print guns (= generating the image) and shoot with them in the street (= publishing on X) automatically for you and keeps accepting illegal requests while the competitors have no issue blocking them.
> Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things?
That's also a tricky question, but generally you don't really need to know precisely where to draw the line. It suffices to know that something is definitely on the wrong side of the line, like X here.
A 3D printer needs a blueprint. AI has all the blueprints built-in. It can generalize, so the blueprints cannot simply be erased, however at least what we can do is forbid generation of adult content. Harm should be limited. Photoshop requires skill and manual work, that's the difference. In the end, yes, people are the ones who are responsible for their actions. We shouldn't let kids (or anyone else) harm others with little to no effort. Let's be reasonable.
You don't even have to be good at photoshop. /r/ has been around for 20+ years and usually gets some decent free work so long as the requests aren't for under hs aged kids.
> When the sheriff's department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who'd been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
Punishing kids after the fact does not stop the damage from occurring. Nothing can stop the damage that has already occurred, but if you stop the source of the nudes, you can stop future damage from occurring to even more girls.
I'm sorry, did the article or anyone in this subthread suggest banning AI? That seems like quite a non-sequitur. I'm pretty sure the idea is to put a content filter on an online platform for one very specific kind of already-illegal content (modified nude images of real people, especially children), which is a far cry from a ban. Nothing can stop local diffusion or Photoshop, of course, but the hardware and technical barriers are so much higher that curtailing Grok would probably cut off 99% or more of the problem material. I suppose you'll tell me if any solution is not 100% effective we should do nothing and embrace anarchy?
Edit for the addition of the line about bullying: "Bullying has always happened, therefore we should allow new forms of even worse bullying to flourish freely, even though I readily acknowledge that it can lead to victims committing suicide" is a bizarre and self-contradictory take. I don't know what point you think you're making.
Child sexual abuse material is literally in the training sets. Saying "banning AI" as though it's all the same thing, and all morally-neutral, is disingenuous. (Yes, a system with both nudity and children in its dataset might still be able to produce such images – and there are important discussions to be had about that – but giving xAI the benefit of equivocation here is an act of malice.)
They may well get in trouble, but in that takes time, in the meantime photos will have been seen by most kids in school + you might get a year of bullying.
Education might be so disrupted you have to change schools.
But they are getting in trouble. However, for every one that gets in trouble, there's more that don't get discovered, or that don't get in trouble for it.
Besides, getting in trouble for something is already after the fact, the damage has been done. If it can't be done in the first place, or the barrier is too high for most, then the damage would have been prevented.
children do dumb things and make mistakes all the time, teenagers push the boundaries as far as they can (and they have a role model in the white house now)
We fault and "fine" companies for providing products that harm society all the time
Are you not going to consider the company providing a CSAM machine to be the major one at fault here?
I really find this kind of appeal quite odious. God forbid that we expect fathers to have empathy for their sons, sisters, brothers, spouses, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, etc. or dare we hope that they might have empathy for friends or even strangers? It's like an appeal to hypocrisy or something. Sure, I know such people exist but it feels like throwing so many people under the bus just to (probably fail) to convince someone of something by appealing to an emotional overprotectiveness of fathers to daughters.
You should want to protect all of the people in your life from such a thing or nobody.
You're defending X/Grok as if it's a public social platform.
It is a privately controlled public-facing group chat. Being a chat-medium does not grant you the same rights as being a person. France isn't America.
If a company operates to the detriment and against the values of a nation, e.g. not paying their taxes or littering in the environment, the nation will ask them to change their behavior.
If there is a conspiracy of contempt, at some point things escalate.
In other words: "I know a thing, but I won't say what. I condemn you for not knowing the thing."
Grok is censored, there's no question. Try it yourself. It can't even handle analysing a 19th century woodcut engraving containing topless mythical beings[1]. Grok refused because Grok has guardrails.
Largely a left-wing echo chamber here (and also seems to be much more European here than the average forum), so everyone here all thinks Musk is doing something illegal just because he's right-wing.
You want the French authorities to focus on the Epstein files to the exclusion of all other corporate misbehaviour?
Also, it seems pretty likely that Musk is tangled up with the Epstein shit. First Musk claimed he turned down offer to go to the island. Now it turns out Musk repeatedly sought to visit, including wanting to know when the "wildest" party was happening, after Epstein was already known as a child sex abuser. Musk claimed that Epstein had never been given a tour of SpaceX but it turns out he did in 2013. It's the classic narcissistic "lie for as long as possible" behaviour. Will be interesting to see what happens as more is revealed.
>You want the French authorities to focus on the Epstein files to the exclusion of all other corporate misbehaviour?
No i said no such thing, what I said was that the resources of authorities is a finite pie. If most of it goes towards petty stuff like corporate misbehavior that hurts nobody, there won't be enough for the grave crimes like actual child abuser that actually hurt real people.
Same how police won't bother with your stolen phone/bike because they have bigger crimes to catch. I'm asking for the same logic be applied here.
There's no indication that this investigation would draw resources away from investigating the Epstein files. It's happening in France, for starters, whilst the vast majority of Epstein's crimes appear to have happened in US territories. Speaking about "the authorities" as if they're a unified global entity sounds a little conspiratorial.
> If most of it goes towards petty stuff like corporate misbehavior that hurts nobody, there won't be enough for the grave crimes like actual child abuser that actually hurt real people.
1.) That is not how it works, even if we ignore the fact that France is not USA.
2.) Lack of resources was not the issue with Epstein prosecution. The prosecutor was literally told to not investigate by her superiors who were trying to stop the case. She was told she is unsubordinated for doing it. Acosta giving Epstein sweetheart deal or seeking to stop the prosecutor is not the resources issue.
It is billionaires (Thiel, Musk, Gates), politicians (Clinton, Luthnic ) media darlings (Summers, Kraus and the rest of sexism is totally not a thing anymore crowd literally partying with Epstein) are to be protected at all cost issue. Even now, people implicated in Epstein files are still getting influential positions with explicit "it would be cancel culture to not give these people more influence" argument.
THat's like the 1993 moral panic that video games like Doom cause mass shootings, or the 1980's mass panic that metal music causes satanist, or the 1950s moral panic that superhero comic book violence leads to juvenile delinquency.
Politicians are constantly looking for an external made up enemy to divert attention to from the real problems.
People like Epstein and mass woman/child exploitation have existed for thousands of years in the past, and will exist thousands of years in the future. It's part of the nature of the rich and powerful to execute on their deranged fetishes, it's been documented in writing since at least the Roman and Ottoman empires.
Hell, I can guarantee you there's other Epsteins operating in the wild right now, that we haven't heard of (yet), it's not like he was in any way unique. I can also guarantee you that 1 in 5-10 normal looking people you meet daily on the street have similar deranged desires as the guests on Epstein's island but can't execute on them because they're not as rich and influential to get away with it, but they'd do it if they could.
> THat's like the 1993 moral panic that video games like Doom cause mass shootings,
Apart from doom wasn't producing illegal content.
the point is that grok is generating illegal content for those jurisdictions. In france you can't generate CSAM, in the UK you can't distribute CSAM. Those are actual laws with legal tests, none of them need to be of actual people, they just need to depict _children_ to be illegal.
Moral panics require new laws to enforce, generally. This is just enforcing already existing laws.
More over, had it been any other site, it would have been totally shut down by now and the servers impounded. Its only because musk is close to trump and rich that he's escaped the fate than you or I would have had if we'd done the same.
>Apart from doom wasn't producing illegal content.
Sure but where's the proof that Grok is actually producing illegal content? I searched for news sources, but they're just all parroting empty accusations not concrete documented cases.
> but they're just all parroting empty accusations not concrete documented cases.
In the UK it is illegal to create, distribute and store CSAM. A news site printing a photo CSAM would make them legally up the shitter.
However, the IWF, who are tasked with detecting this stuff have claimed to have found evidence of it, along with multiple other sources, Ofcom who are nominally supposed to police this have an open investigation, so do the irish police.
The point is, law has a higher threshold of proof than news, which takes time. If there is enough evidence, then a court case (or other instrument) will be invoked.
Another line of reasoning is that with more fake CP it is more difficult to research the real CP hunt down the perpetrators and consequently save children.
Oh yeah, because the main reason why EPstein and his guests got away with it for so long, is because there was so much low hanging CP out there confusing authorities and prosecutors, not because of the corruption, cronyism and political protection they enjoyed at the highest levels of government.
But how about the "1 in 5-10 normal looking people you meet daily on the street have similar deranged desires as the guests on Epstein's island but can't execute on them because they're not as rich and influential to get away with it, but they'd do it if they could."
> Another line of reasoning is that with more fake CP it is more difficult to research the real CP hunt down the perpetrators and consequently save children.
(own quote)
Yes, the predators existed before AI, but also:
> I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more offenders (edited).
(own quote, edited)
To be clear, I don't think this line of reasoning is entirely convincing, but apparently some people do.
No, 20% of population is not seeking to abuse children nor teens. If you think so, you are moving in weird circles. In fact, what we also have are people who noped out of Epstein circle or even openly criticized it for years.
Also, framing the issue of sexual abuse by untouchable issue as the same as superhero comic issue (which itself was not just about superhero comic and you should know it) is spectacularly bad faith.
Yes, there were always people who were stealing, abusing, murdering for own gain and fun. That is not an argument for why we should accept and support it as normalized state of world. It is a good reason to prevent people from becoming too powerful and for building accountable institutions able to catch and punish them.
The same guy responsible for creating child porn that you are defending is also in the Epstein's list. Also, don't abbreviate child pornography, it shows you have a side on this
I'm sure it's comforting to believe that people you disagree with do so for silly reasons, but many people will support this just because we like the rule of law.
if a user uses a tool to break the law it's on the person who broke the law not the people who made the tool. knife manufacturers aren't to blame if someone gets stabbed right?
This seems different. With a knife the stabbing is done by the human. That would be akin to a paintbrush or camera or something being used to create CSAM.
Here you have a model that is actually creating the CSAM.
It seems more similar to a robot that is told to go kill someone and does so. Sure, someone told the robot to do something, but the creators of the robot really should have to put some safeguards to prevent it.
one time is perhaps excusable as the robot's creators didn't know that would happen. If it happens and the creator then advertises the robot can kill people, of course he's now a criminal
Text on the internet and all of that, but you should have added the "/s" to the end so people didn't think you were promoting this line of logic seriously.
If a knife manufacturer constructs an apparatus wherein someone can simply write "stab this child" on a whim to watch a knife stab a child, that manufacturer would in fact discover they are in legal peril to some extent.
I mean, no one's ever made a tool who's scope is "making literally anything you want," including, apparently CSAM. So we're in a bit of uncharted waters, really. Like mostly, no I would agree, it's a bad idea to hold the makers of a tool responsible for how it's used. And, this is an especially egregious offense on the part of said tool-maker.
Like how I see this is:
* If you can't restrict people from making kiddie porn with Grok, then it stands to reason at the very least, access to Grok needs to be strictly controlled.
* If you can restrict that, why wasn't that done? It can't be completely omitted from this conversation that Grok is, pretty famously, the "unrestrained" AI, which in most respects means it swears more, quotes and uses highly dubious sources of information that are friendly to Musk's personal politics, and occasionally spouts white nationalist rhetoric. So as part of their quest to "unwoke" Grok did they also make it able to generate this shit too?
This is really amusing to watch, because everything that Grok is accused of is something which you can also trigger in currently available open-weight models (if you know what you're doing).
There's nothing special about Grok in this regard. It wasn't trained to be a MechaHitler, nor to generate CSAM. It's just relatively uncensored[1] compared to the competition, which means it can be easily manipulated to do what the users tell it to, and that is biting Musk in the ass here.
And just to be clear, since apparently people love to jump to conclusions - I'm not excusing what is happening. I'm just pointing out the fact that the only special thing about Grok is that it's both relatively uncensored and easily available to a mainstream audience.
I'm not talking about video editing software; that's a different class of software. I'm talking about other generative AI models, which you can download today onto your computer, and have it do the same thing as Grok does.
> How is this exoneration?
I don't know; you tell me where I said it was? I'm just stating a fact that Grok isn't unique here, and if you want to ban Grok because of it then you need to also ban open weight models which can do exactly the same thing.
Agreed, thankfully, there is no CSAM feature, and they patched it in a couple of days so that it would stop obeying requests to do so and banned the users abusing Grok for that purpose. Once they prove they have put the appropriate mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again it's fine and dandy, no?
> Agreed, thankfully, there is no CSAM feature, and they patched it in a couple of days so that it would stop obeying requests to do so and banned the users abusing Grok for that purpose.
The order, over several days, was:
* banned users and took down tweets requesting the content, without taking down the content that they clearly knew of, since they responded against the requests that generated it.
* Made the feature paid-only.
* Took down content and restricted the functionality.
> Once they prove they have put the appropriate mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again it's fine and dandy, no?
I’m not sure all jurisdictions involved will see knowing generation and dissemination of nonconsensual, including child, pornography as the kind of thing where “I promise not to do itt again, so we’re cool, right?” works, but we’ll see.
Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.
Maybe tying together an uncensored AI model and a social network just isn't something that's ethical / should be legal to do.
There are many things where each is legal/ethical to provide, and where combining them might make business sense, but where we, as a society have decided to not allow combining them.
No. I'm just saying that people should be consistent and if they apply a certain standard to Grok then they should also apply the same standard to other things. Be consistent.
Meanwhile what I commonly see is people dunking on anything Musk-related because they dislike him, but give a free pass on similar things if it's not related to him.
Every island is capable of hosting pedophiles, but they don't. The one island that's famous for pedos is the one Musk wanted to be invited to. Find me more pedo islands, I'll dunk on them too very consistently. Whether it's AI with CSAM or islands with pedos, Musk is definitely consistent.
You cannot build a CSAM generator, period. CSAM means Child Sexual Abuse Material -- material created through the sexual abuse of children. If it came out of a generator, it is not, by definition, Child Sexual Abuse Material.
CSAM is the woke word for child pornography, and it's a bad word, like how pedophiles should be called pedophiles and not MAPs. The original term, child pornography, is better.
Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. The only thing this proves is that you can't upset the French government or they'll go on a fishing expedition through your office praying to find evidence of a crime.
>Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user.
There is no way this is true, especially if the system is PaaS only. Additionally, the system should have a way to tell if someone is attempting to bypass their safety measures and act accordingly.
Grok brought that thought all the way to "... so let's not even try to prevent it."
The point is to show just how aware X were of the issue, and that they chose to repeatedly do nothing against Grok being used to create CSAM and probably other problematic and illegal imagery.
I can't really doubt they'll find plenty of evidence during discovery, it doesn't have to be physical things. The raid stops office activity immediately, and marks the point in time after which they can be accused of destroying evidence if they erase relevant information to hide internal comms.
Grok does try to prevent it. They even publicly publish their safety prompt. It clearly shows they have disallowed the system from assisting with queries that create child sexual abuse material.
The fact that users have found ways to hack around this is not evidence of X committing a crime.
If AI GF Generator 9001 is producing unwilling deepfake pornography of real people, especially if of children, feel free to raid their offices as well.
>Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. The only thing this proves is that you can't upset the French government or they'll go on a fishing expedition through your office praying to find evidence of a crime.
If every AI system can do this, and every AI system in incapable of preventing it, then I guess every AI system should be banned until they can figure it out.
Every banking app on the planet "is capable" of letting a complete stranger go into your account and transfer all your money to their account. Did we force banks to put restrictions in place to prevent that from happening, or did we throw our arms up and say: oh well the French Government just wants to pick on banks?
In my opinion I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM would be there are laws on the books for CSAM and not for social manipulation. If people could be jailed for manipulation there would be no social media platforms, lobbyists, political campaign groups or advertisements. People are already being manipulated by AI.
On a related note given AI is just a tool and requires someone to tell it to make CSAM I think they will have to prove intent possibly by grabbing chat logs, emails and other internal communications but I know very little about French law or international law.
hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.
The TV station thing, talking about the US here, only applies to broadcast TV and it is a condition of getting their a frequency allotment from the government.
No, i am not saying that it is the same. I am saying that it would start as "We are just going after the tech companies" but if you give the government an inch they will take a mile. They would take that and expand upon the hate speech stuff you are already see around the world as an excuse to arrest whoever they wanted.
I am a free market person, so i think these sites are providing something to the market that people like or they wouldn't be there. If you wanted to rein them in, fine but you have to be careful how you word stuff or it gets pretty scary pretty quickly.
Hate speech laws exist in most of Europe and they are not abused at all. And it's not like media wouldn't already have a bunch of laws applied to it, even in the US - e.g. libel and the like. Surely you can slippery slope with that as well, right?
And the free market only works if there is a well-defined market with proper laws that are upheld. Otherwise it's a running competition where Meta/X just shoot every other competitor at the start and drive to the goal with a car. This has been known by Adam Smith already - you can't be a "free market person" while being happy with these giga-corporations trampling on laws left and right.
I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.
I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.
Yeah i get that. I just hesitate to give any government even more power than they do now to silence people, which they would definitely use any law like that to do.
I will have to check that out, it sounds interesting. It was also pretty obvious how all the social media companies pushed the same narrative through COVID.
I don't like how these social networks and the media try to manipulate things but I don't think giving the government even more power will fix anything. It will probably make it worse. I think even if you had those laws on the books, you would still get manipulation through selective enforcement.
I think the only solution is education and individuals saying no to these platforms' and their algorithmic feeds. I think we are already seeing a growing movement towards people either not using social media or using it way less than they did previously. I know for me personally, I use X but only follow tech people i like and only look at the "following" tab. It is a much better experience than the "for you" tab
>French authorities opened their investigation after reports from a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X likely distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system. It expanded after Grok generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust, a crime in France, and spread sexually explicit deepfakes, the statement said.
I had to make a choice to not even use Grok (I wasn't overly interested in the first place, but wanted to review how it might compare to the other tools), because even just the Explore option shows photos and videos of CSAM, CSAM-adjacent, and other "problematic" things in a photorealistic manner (such as implied bestiality).
Looking at the prompts below some of those image shows that even now, there's almost zero effort at Grok to filter prompts that are blatantly looking to create problematic material. People aren't being sneaky and smart and wordsmithing subtle cues to try to bypass content filtering, they're often saying "create this" bluntly and directly, and Grok is happily obliging.
Given America passed PAFACA (intended to ban TikTok, which Trump instead put in hands of his friends), I would think Europe would also have a similar law. Is that not the case?
Are you talking about this [1]? I don't know the answer to your question whether or not the EU has the same policy. That is talking about control by a foreign adversary.
I think that would delve into whether or not the USA would be considered a foreign adversary to France. I was under the impression we were allies since like the 1800s or so despite some little tiffs now and again.
Among potential crimes it said it would investigate were complicity in possession or organised distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature, infringement of people's image rights with sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.
> Distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature sounds like child porn to me.
To me too.
> CSAM is a woker word for child porn.
Indeed some people would like it diluted thus. But it generally remains (an initialism not word) for something quite distinct - about abuse rather than just porn.
CSAM is not a woker word. It was created to be more explicit as the original term was CP which stood for child pornography but there are too many common things that when abbreviated are "CP".
I am not surprised at all. Independent of whether this is true, such a decision from the EU would never be acted upon. The number of layers between the one who says "ban it" somewhere in Bruissels and the operator blackholing the DNS and filtering traffic is decades.
Why do you think that? It can take a few years for national laws bring in place, but that also depends on how much certain countries push it. Regarding Internet traffic I assume a few specific countries that route most of the traffic would be enough to stop operation for the most part.
Have you ever seen an actual EU-wide decision on such matters and an actual application?
The closest I can think of is GDPR which has its great aspects and also the cookies law (which is incorrectly interpreted). And some things like private IPs being PIIs which promotes nonsnsical "authorities notifications" that are not used afterwards.
We have consulting companies doing yearly audits on companies to close the books. And yet hacks happen all the time. Without consequences.
There is an ocean between what is announced and lives on paper vs. the reality of the application. If you work in compliance and cubersecurity you see this everyday.
They will set their DNS servers to drop all incoming connections to X. That can be done in each country. They can use Deep Packet inspection tools and go from there. If the decision is EU wide then they will roll that out.
There is no law that would permit the EU to do this. This would be a huge thing to introduce and implement, probably a 2-3 year project, and would almost certainly be strongly opposed by multiple member countries.
Simply because if you were to ban this type of platform you wouldn't need Musk to "move it towards the far right" because you would already be the very definition of a totalitarian regime.
But whatever zombie government France is running can't "ban" X anyway because it would get them one step closer to the guillotine. Like in the UK or Germany it is a tinderbox cruising on a 10-20% approval rating.
If "French prosecutor" want to find a child abuse case they can check the Macron couple Wikipedia pages.
> if you were to ban this type of platform you wouldn't need Musk to "move it towards the far right" because you would already be the very definition of a totalitarian regime
Paradox of tolerance. (The American right being Exhibit A for why trying to let sunlight disinfect a corpse doesn’t work.)
> The child abuse feels like a smaller problem compared to that risk.
I think we can and should all agree that child sexual abuse is a much larger and more serious problem than political leanings.
It's ironic as you're commenting about a social media platform, but I think it's frightening what social media has done to us with misinformation, vilification, and echo chambers, to think political leanings are worse than murder, rape, or child sexual abuse.
In fairness, AI-generated CSAM is nowhere near as evil as real CSAM. The reason why possession of CSAM was such a serious crime is because its creation used to necessitate the abuse of a child.
It's pretty obvious the French are deliberately conflating the two to justify attacking a political dissident.
Definitely agree on which is worse! To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with the French raid. Just that statements about severe crimes (child sexual abuse for the above poster - not AI-generated content) being "lesser problems" compared to politics is a concerning measure of how people are thinking.
It may not be worse "objectively" and in direct harm.
However - it has one big problem that is rarely discussed... Normalizing of behaviour, interests and attitudes. It just becomes a thing that Grok can do - for paid accounts, and people think - ok, "no harm, no problem"... Long-term, there will be harm. This has been demonstrated over decades of investigation of CSAM.
Big platforms and media are only good if they try to move the populace to the progressive, neoliberal side. Otherwise we need to put their executives in jail.
> could you clarify what the difference is between the near right and the far right?
It’s called far-right because it’s further to the right (starting from the centre) than the right. Wikipedia is your friend, it offers plenty of examples and even helpfully lays out the full spectrum in a way even a five year old with a developmental impairment could understand.
I was surprised by your claim that Wikipedia would categorize mild restrictions on immigration as an element of far-right politics, so I read that article to see it for myself. I didn't see anything about mild restrictions. Would you care to point out where you saw that?
Well, far right is a spectrum, obviously. But a party that equates immigration of a particular religion as terrorism is not "mild immigration restrictions" in my reading.
I don't know about that party, but National Rally doesn't say that, and also polls around 34% of French people. So it remains that the Wikipedia "far right" definition is a very wide spectrum.
Um, the article I posted was about the same party. The BBC considers them far-right [1], Politico considers them far-right [2], Reuters considers them far-right [3], AP News considers them far-right [4], NBC News considers them far-right [5], the New York Times considers them far-right [6], Deutsche Welle considers them far-right [7].
I don't think the Wikipedia characterization is far off a pretty commonly held sentiment. You are of course, able to disagree and consider them far-left, center, or whatever label you want.
You stated earlier that because Wikipedia called mild immigration reform far-right (which it did not to my reading, so you pointed to National Rally as an example) words don't mean anything. But words do mean things by consensus, and from my reading the consensus is that National Rally is far-right.
Of course, many far-right (and far-left) thinkers consider themselves centrists or mild, so there will be disagreement.
The article you posted said, "we just call them that because everyone else does".
But there's also an obvious semantic fail when 34% of the electorate is "far right". This means (16% - half the moderate percentage) is on the non-far right. It implies that "far" is just meaningless cant.
Got it. I was looking at world-wide numbers but it makes sense to limit to just France. I didn't know that 34% of France held far-right views, but you learn something new every day.
This is obviously diversion but anyway:
Bunch of "American and European" "patriots" that he retweets 24/7 turned out to be people from Iran, Pakistan, India and Russia. These accounts generate likes by default by accounts with "wife of vet" in bio and generic old_blonde_women.jpeg aka bots.
It's pretty obvious, media is called the 4th power.
Control the media, you control the information that a significant part of Europeans get. Elections aren't won by 50%, you only need to convince 4 or 5% of the population that the far right is great.
Irrelevant to most ordinary people in the sense that few directly use it, but popular with the source of much of our discourse / culture. Think journalists, taste makers, meme creators etc.
It gives people who aren't aware of the bot accounts / thumb on the scale the perception that insane crackpot delusions are more popular than they are.
There is a reason Musk paid so much for Twitter. If this stuff had no effect he wouldn't have bought it.
Social media should not allow algorithms to actively AMPLIFY disinformation to the public.
If people want to post disinformation that's fine, but the way that these companies push that information onto users is the problem. There either needs to be accountability for platforms or a ban on behavior driven content feeds.
People lying on the internet is fine. Social media algorithms amplifying the lie because it has high engagement is destroying our society.
The same way that social media has destabilized the USA.
By exposing people to a flood of misinformation and politically radicalizing content designed to maximize engagement via emotion (usually anger).
Remember when Elon Musk alleged that he was going to find a trillion dollars (a year) in waste fraud and abuse with DOGE? Did he ever issue a correction on that statement after catastrophically failing to do so? Do you think that kind of messaging might damage the trust in our institutions?
While there may be some feeds on Xitter that are basic algorithms, (1) it's not the only one (2) there may still be less mechanical algorithmic choices within following (what order, what mix, how much) (3) evidence to the contrary exists, are you freeing yourself of facts?
I haven't dug into whatever they open sourced about the algorithm to make definitive statements. Regardless, there are many pieces out there where you can learn about the evidence for direct manipulation.
> You can just go on the app yourself and verify this
That's not how science and statistics works. Comprehensive evidence and analysis is a search or chat bot away. The legal cases will go into the details as well, by nature of how legal proceedings work
Far right to me is advocating for things that discriminate based on protected traits like race, sex, etc. So if you’re advocating for “white culture” above others, that’s far right. If you’re advocating for the 19th amendment (women’s right to vote) to be repealed (as Nick Fuentes and similar influencers do), that’s also far right. Advocating for ICE to terrorize peaceful residents, violate constitutional rights, or outright execute people is also far right.
Near right to me is advocating for things like lower taxes or different regulations or a secure border (but without the deportation of millions who are already in the country and abiding by laws). Operating the government for those things while still respecting the law, upholding the constitution, defending civil rights, and avoiding the deeply unethical grifting and corruption the Trump administration has normalized.
Obviously this is very simplified. What are your definitions out of curiosity?
I hate to wade into this cesspool. How about some of the real obvious ones:
* Crypto currency rug pulls (World Liberty Financial)
* Donations linked with pardons (Binance)
* Pardoning failed rebels of a coup that favored him (Capitol rioters)
* Bringing baseless charges against political enemies and journalists (Comey, Letitia James, Don Lemon)
* Musk (DOGE) killing government regulatory agencies that had investigations and cases against his companies
This is with two minutes of thought while waiting for a compile. I'm open to hearing how I am wrong.
de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today. Many aspects of Bush (assuming GW here) would be considered not in line with America's far-right today.
Assume good intent. It helps you see the actually interesting point being made.
They wrote "Bush was right wing" (unless it was edited), so what's your point in saying "Many aspects of Bush (assuming GW here) would be considered not in line with America's far-right today." ?
Even at the time Bill Clinton was already very much right-wing. When he was in power, he oversaw the destruction of public services and the introduction of neoliberalism. Is that not right-wing?
It's not just me saying this. Ask anyone who was politically active (as a leftist) in the 90s. I'm not sure what was the equivalent of the Democratic Socialists of America (center-left) at that time, but i'm sure there was an equivalent and Bill Clinton was much more right-wing. That's without mentioning actual left-wing parties (like communists, anarchists, black panthers etc).
Not a single of those three things is either left-wing or right-wing. It depends on the actual implementation.
For example, universal health-care is only left-wing if it's a public service. Taking money out of the State's pockets to finance private healthcare and pharmaceutical for-profit corporations is very much a definition of right-wing policy.
Everything depends on actual implementation. In healthcare, for example, we already had a system where state money was sent to private healthcare and pharmaceutical companies corporations. The problem was that the poorest people still had trouble getting covered. This proposal would have broadened the scope of who can afford that by providing poorer folks with direct government subsidies for coverage. Nobody is calling subsidize childcare in Scandinavian countries a "right-wing policy" because private providers exist.
Lowering military spending by aggressively shrinking active duty troop levels and eliminating weapons programs is certainly left-wing. Raising income taxes on the highest earners and raising the corporate tax rate have always been associated with left-wing policies in the US.
> de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today
As much as it pains me to say this, because i myself consider de Gaulle to be a fascist in many regards, that's far from a majority opinion (disclaimer: i'm an anarchist).
I think de Gaulle was a classic right-wing authoritarian ruler. He had to take some social measures (which some may view as left-wing) because the workers at the end of WWII were very organized and had dozens of thousands of rifles, so such was the price of social peace.
He was right-wing because he was rather conservative, for private property/entrepreneurship and strongly anti-communist. Still, he had strong national planning for the economy, much State support for private industry (Elf, Areva, etc) and strong policing on the streets (see also, Service d'Action Civique for de Gaulle's fascist militias with long ties with historical nazism and secret services).
That being said, de Gaulle to my knowledge was not really known for racist fear-mongering or hate speech. The genocides he took part in (eg. against Algerian people) were very quiet and the official story line was that there was no story. That's in comparison with far-right people who already at the time, and still today, build an image of the ENEMY towards whom all hate and violence is necessary. See also Umberto Eco's Ur-fascism for characteristics of fascist regimes.
In that sense, and it really pains me to write this, but de Gaulle was much less far-right than today's Parti Socialiste, pretending to be left wing despite ruling with right-wing anti-social measures and inciting hatred towards french muslims and binationals.
While de Gaulle being far-right is not a majority opinion (except in some marginal circles), he would undoubtedly be considered far-right if he was governing today, which is what GP seems to have meant.
I think that, for most Western people today, far-right == bad to non-white people, independent of intention (as you demonstrated with your remark about the PS), so de Gaulle's approach to Algeria, whether he's loud about it or not, would qualify him as far-right already.
All this to say, the debate is based on differing definitions of far-right (for example you conflate fascism and far-right and use Eco, while GP and I seem to think it's about extremely authoritarian + capitalist), and has started from an ignorant comment by an idiot who considers Bush (someone who is responsible for the death of around a million Iraqis, the creation of actual torture camps, large-scale surveillance, etc.) not far-right because, I assume, he didn't say anything mean about African-Americans.
Believing in free speech is neither left nor right, it's on the freedom/authority axis which is perpendicular. Most people on the left never advocated to legalize libel, defamation, racist campaigns, although the minority that did still do today.
The "free-speechism" of the past you mention was about speaking truth to power, and this movement still exists on the left today, see for example support for Julian Assange, arrested journalists in France or Turkey, or outright murdered in Palestine.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised free speech, he very soon actually banned accounts he disagreed with, especially leftists. Why free speech may be more and more perceived as right wing is because despite having outright criminal speech with criminal consequences (such as inciting violence against harmless individuals such as Mark Bray), billionaires have weaponized propaganda on a scale never seen before with their ownership of all the major media outlets and social media platforms, arguing it's a matter of free speech.
You prefer those be shut down to the one run by a pedo who happens to be the richest person in the world and meddles in elections across the global personally with money?
the thing is a lot of recent legal preceding surrounding X is about weather X fulfilled the legally required due diligence and if not what level of negligence we are speaking about
and the things about negligence which caused harm to humans (instead of e.g. just financial harm) is that
a) you can't opt out of responsibility, it doesn't matter what you put into your TOS or other contracts
b) executives which are found responsible for the negligent action of a company can be hold _personally_ liable
and independent of what X actually did Musk as highest level executive personal did
1) frequently did statements that imply gross negligence (to be clear that isn't necessary how X acted, which is the actual relevant part)
2) claimed that all major engineering decisions etc. are from him and no one else (because he love bragging about how good of an engineer he is)
This means summoning him for questioning is legally speaking a must have independent of weather you expect him to show up or not. And he probably should take it serious, even if that just means he also could send a different higher level executive from X instead.
and count on Trump to disrespect the extradition treaties. Which might be a reasonable expectation, but will have consequences, and Trump might not hold power forever.
Unless I'm mistaken reading this, it looks like they never set a date and this this is the prior conversation to him trying to invite himself over and being told no. I don't see any plans in this article, just Epstein saying he'll send a heli and then never setting a date or making actual plans. I feel like if there's no evidence he went, Elon denies it, and Elon was a big supporter of releasing the files then it would probably be premature to suggest he went.
> In a December 2013 email, Musk again wrote to Epstein saying, “Christmas and New Year’s, will be in the BVI /St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
> “I will send heli for you,” Epstein responded, with Musk writing back, “Thanks.”
> In a follow-up email on Dec. 25, Musk said, “Actually, I could fly back early on the 3rd. We will be in St Bart’s.” He asked if he and Riley should head to the island the day before.
> CNBC hasn’t confirmed whether Musk ever visited the Island, though Musk has denied ever traveling there.
> Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
To me “I will send heli for you” does not mean "being told no".
Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
No, but they all knew he was a pedo/rapist, and were still friends with him and went to the island of a pedo/rapist, and introduced the pedo/rapist to their friends...
We don't know how many were pedo/rapists, but we know all of them liked to socialize with one and trade favours and spread his influence.
Neither does your wife divorcing you at about the same time things started to go through legal process...
Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again:
"We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"
Elon Musk has his own planes, he would not have needed a ride had Epstein invited him. Recently released emails also show people (like commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who asserted at great length last year that he hadn't had any contact with Epstein since meeting him in 2005) arranging to visit Epstein at his island and taking their own yacht over there.
Good and honestly it’s high time. There used to be a time when we could give corps the benefit of the doubt but that time is clearly over. Beyond the CSAM, X is a cesspool of misinformation and generally the worst examples of humanity.
I don't know how we even allowed these companies to not be responsible for everything on their platform.
The entirety of the social media platform is based on the idea that the company isn't responsible for what the users post, which is just wrong. If you own a magazine, you should be held responsible for everything published.
You shouldn't be allowed to profit from publishing anything, then hide behind "the users did it, not us".
And in this case, Elon should be held responsible for every single image of CSAM published on X. Same with Zuck. Same with Truth Social, whatever you want.
Settings aside this is about CSAM, the US is the only one of the two to shut down a foreign social network because it dislikes what was said on it. The US doesn't get to play that card anymore.
Europe/EU should have whatever free speech they want. But we should annex all european controlled territory in the western hemisphere. The amount of territory that european empires still control in this hemisphere is alarming and frankly embarrassing. From greenland to "french" guyana to the falklands, it should all be seized.
Is this sarcasm ? because sounds like sarcasm.
If Grok generating naked images of children is your ideea of free speech no wonder nobody takes a stand against Trump and Co., you somehow managed turn your common sense to dust...
E.U is replacing their citizens with unvetted violent criminals. They have to vote for whoever gives them free stuff. The powers doing this are upset a company in the U.S allows their citizens to protest it.
Do you honestly not believe it is likely that EU is importing votes?
Also, haven't you seen the general push towards censorship, attempts to ban VPNs, and all the other shenanigans happening in the EU? Do you believe this is disconnected from the legal attempts on Twitter and Telegram?
Is it really a conspiracy theory at this point? Politicians do all kinds of evil shit, but these playbook tactics are where you draw the line?
I'm European and live here, before you say I'm getting these takes on X.
+1 from an European, it's beyond obvious and I don't understand why people are letting {politics, mainstream media painting of X} shape their belief on these extremely pressing and important issues.
To people claiming a physical raid is pointless from the point of gathering data :
- you are thinking about a company doing good things the right way. You are thinking about a company abiding by the law, storing data on its own server, having good practices, etc.
The moment a company starts to do dubious stuff then good practices start to go out the window. People write email with cryptic analogies, people start deleting emails, ... then as the circumvention become more numerous and complex, there needs to still be a trail in order to remain understandable. That trail will be in written form somehow and that must be hidden. It might be paper, it might be shadow IT but the point is that if you are not just forgetting to keep track of coffee pods at the social corner, you will leave traces.
So yes, raids do make sense BECAUSE it's about recurring complex activities that are just too hard to keep in the mind of one single individual over long periods of time.
It's also just very basic police work. We're investigating this company, we think they've committed a crime. Ok, why do you think that. Well they've very publicly and obviously committed a crime. Ok, are you going to prosecute them? Probably. Have you gone to their offices and gathered evidence? No thanks.
Of course they're going to raid their offices! They're investigating a crime! It would be quite literally insane if they tried to prosecute them for a crime and how up to court having not even attempted basic steps to gather evidence!
A company I worked for had a 'when the police raid the office' policy, which was to require they smash down the first door, but then open all other doors for them.
That was so that later in court it could be demonstrated the data hadn't been handed over voluntarily.
They also disconnected and blocked all overseas VPN's in the process, so local law enforcement only would get access to local data.
EU wants to circumvent e2e to fight CSA: "nooo think about my privacy, what happened to just normal police work?"
Police raids offices literally investigating CSA: "nooo police should not physically invade, what happened to good old electronic surveillance?"
that's kinda the normalization argument, not the reason behind it
"it is done because it's always done so"
Well, yes, it is actually pretty normal for suspected criminal businesses. What's unusual is that this one has their own publicity engine. Americans are just having trouble coping with the idea of a corporation being held liable for crimes.
More normally it looks like e.g. this in the UK: https://news.sky.com/video/police-raid-hundreds-of-businesse...
CyberGEND more often seem to do smalltime copyright infringement enforcement, but there are a number of authorities with the right to conduct raids.
“Americans are just having trouble coping with the idea of a corporation being held liable for crimes.”
I’m sorry but that’s absurd even amidst the cacophony of absurdity that comprises public discourse these days.
I'll bite.
How was TikTok held liable for the crimes it was accused of?
Was it ever actually accused of crimes? Was it raided? Was there a list of charges?
It always seemed to me that TikTok was doing the same things that US based social networks were doing, and the only problem various parties could agree on with this was that it was foreign-owned.
It was force-sold to Oracle.
That had more to do with wish to control it and steal it then crimes.
That wasn't a punishment, that was a reward.
American companies held liable for crimes include Bank of America ($87B in penalties), Purdue Pharma (opioid crisis), Pfizer for fraudulent drug marketing, Enron for accounting fraud. Everyone on hn should know about FTX, Theranos, I mean come on.
Corporations routinely get a slap on the wrist (seconds of profitability), not required to admit guilt, or deferred prosecution agreements.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, physical investigation is the common procedure. You need a reason _not_ to do it, and since "it's all digital" is not a good reason we go back to doing the usual thing.
It's a show of force. "Look we have big strong men with le guns and the neat jack boots, we can send 12 of them in for every one of you." Whether it is actually needed for evidence is immaterial to that.
If law enforcement credibily believes that criminals are conspiring to commit a crime and are actively doing so in a particular location what is wrong with sending armed people to stop those criminal acivities as well as apprehend the criminals and what ever evidence of their crimes may exist?
If this isn't the entire purpose of law enforcement then what is exactly?
No, a search warrant isn't intended to [directly] apprehend criminals, though an arrest warrant may come later to do that.
But one could reasonably assume that a location that is known to be used for criminal activity and that likely has evidence of such criminal activity likely also has people commiting crimes.
When police raid a grow-op they often may only have a search warrant but they end up making several arrests because they find people actively commiting crimes when they execute the warrant.
It can be both things at once. It obviously sends a message, but hey, maybe you get lucky, and someone left a memo in the bin by the printer that blows the case wide open.
Or maybe they are storing documents with secrets in a room or even in the bathroom.
Isn't it both necessary and normal if they need more information about why they were generating CSAM? I don't know why the rule of law shouldn't apply to child pornography or why it would be incorrect to normalize the prosecution of CSAM creators.
Yeah, two things to add:
1) Even when you move things to a server, or remove it from your device, evidence is still left over without your knowledge sometimes.
2) Evidence of data destruction, is in itself as the name implies, evidence. And it can be used to prove things.
For example, an ext4 journal or NTFS USN $J journal entry that shows "grok_version_2.4_schema.json" where twitter is claiming grok version 2.4 was never deployed in France/UK is important. That's why tools like shred and SDelete rename files before destroying them. But even then, when those tools rename and destroy files, it stands out, it might even be worse because investigators can speculate more. It might corroborate some other piece of evidence (e.g.: sdelete's prefetch entry on windows, or download history from a browser for the same tool), and that might be a more serious charge (obstruction of justice in the US).
Indeed, actions leaves traces, including the action of deleting data. It takes a LOT of expertise to be able to delete something without leaving a trail behind, if that's even feasible without going to extraordinary length.
They don't just take paper when they raid offices. They take the computers too. I've never worked anywhere where desktop machines are encrypted as a matter of routine. Laptops yes (but only recently). Servers maybe, depending on what they do.
Encryption won't save you from warrants and judiciary processing anywhere in the world.
The people who think raids are pointless probably use TELNET instead of SSH :-)
At some point in the near future I see a day where our work laptops are nothing more than a full screen streaming video to a different computer that is housed in a country that has no data extradition treaties and is business friendly.
Because that country and the businesses that support that are going to get RICH from such a service.
Takes literally minutes to setup with Webtop (assuming you are familiar with Docker/Podman https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ ) , nothing to install on the thin client, the stock browser is enough.
I used this when an employer was forcing me to use Windows and I needed Linux tools to work efficiently so I connected home. Goes through firewalls, proxies, etc.
Anyway if you want to host this not at home but a cloud provider there was HavenCo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HavenCo don't ask me how I know about it, just curiosity.
> At some point in the near future I see a day where our work laptops are nothing more than a full screen streaming video to a different computer that is housed in a country that has no data extradition treaties and is business friendly.
Do you mean they will be pure worker surveillance systems, or did you mean “from” instead of “to”?
Not video but that's essentially how companies like Google operate today. That's why their engineers can use an off the shelf Chromebook. Their IDE is on the web, etc.
In some places that day is today, and has been for a while.
I agree but so far at all places I have ever worked, I have access to the local hardware, disk, etc... if that's an actuality it's extremely rare.
I've definitely witnessed some pretty big companies that have got all their employees, including developers, set up on Citrix. In those cases, the "foreign friendly legal environment getting rich off of it" was the United States
Sealand,!!!!!!
Exactly, but that's outdated, what's the current equivalent?
Did you miss what happened to Maduro?
No need to be coy the raid exists because it's a way to punish the company without proving anything. They have zero intention of getting even the slightest bit of valuable data related to Grok from this.
What's your evidence?
Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law.
So no, don't be coy and pretend that all governments are like American institutions.
>Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law.
Iffy on that front, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
There was a warrant. He was arrested and prosecuted, is being investigated, and will be judged in a court of law. This is rule of law.
There was legal warrant and the wikipedia does not mention any lies or rules being being broken. There is nothing "Iffy" on that front.
And, to spell it out, it is also funny to see who was complaining about it back then. On the free speech grounds, not less, literally people trying to dismantle democracy and create autocracy. Russian soldiers and operators, Maria Butina, Medvedev and Elon Musk. Bad faith actors having bad faith arguments.
Good one.
No platform ever should allow CSAM content.
And the fact that they didn’t even care and haven’t want to spend money for implementing guardrails or moderation is deeply concerning.
This has imho nothing to do with model censorship, but everything with allowing that kind of content on a platform
It seems people have a rather short memory when it comes to twitter. When it was still run by Jack Dorsey, CP was abundant on twitter and there was little effort to tamp down on it. After Musk bought the platform, he and Dorsey had a public argument in which Dorsey denied the scale of the problem or that old twitter was aware of it and had shown indifference. But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned. It's curious that there wasn't nearly the same level of outrage from the morally righteous HN crowd towards Mr. Dorsey back then as there is in this thread.
Didn't X unban users like Dom Lucre who posted CSAM because of their political affiliation?
Not only that but iirc he was one of the early “creators program” folks. Musk unbanned the guy that posted CSAM and started paying him to post.
Having an issue with users uploading CSAM (a problem for every platform) is very different from giving them a tool to quickly and easily generate CSAM, with apparently little-to-no effort to prevent this from happening.
If the tool generates it automatically or spuriously, then yes. But if it is the users asking it to, then I'm not sure there is a big difference.
Well, its worth noting that with the nonconsensual porn, child and otherwise, it was generating X would often rapidly punish the user that posted the prompt, but leave the grok-generated content up. It wasn't an issue of not having control, it was an issue of how the control was used.
Didn't Reddit have the same problem until they got negative publicity and were basically forced to clean it up? What is with these big tech companies and CP?
Not exactly. Reddit always took down CSAM (how effectively I don't know, but I've been using the site consistently since 2011 and I've never come across it).
What Reddit did get a lot of negative public publicity for were subreddits focused on sharing non-explicit photos of minors, but with loads of sexually charged comments. The images themselves, nobody would really object to in isolation, but the discussions surrounding the images were all lewd. So not CSAM, but still creepy and something Reddit tightly decided it didn't want on the site.
Reddit was forced to clean it up when they started eyeballing an IPO.
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> But Musk actually did take tangible steps to clean it up and many accounts were banned.
Mmkay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Child_...
"As of June 2023, an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory at Stanford University reported "a lapse in basic enforcement" against child porn by Twitter within "recent months". The number of staff on Twitter's trust and safety teams were reduced, for example, leaving one full-time staffer to handle all child sexual abuse material in the Asia-Pacific region in November 2022."
"In 2024, the company unsuccessfully attempted to avoid the imposition of fines in Australia regarding the government's inquiries about child safety enforcement; X Corp reportedly said they had no obligation to respond to the inquiries since they were addressed to "Twitter Inc", which X Corp argued had "ceased to exist"."
When did Jack Dorsey unban personal friends of his that had gotten banned for posting CSAM?
I meant to reply to you with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886801
My natural reaction here is like I think most others; that yes Grok / X bad, shouldn't be able to generate CSAM content / deepfakes.
But I am having trouble justifying in an consistent manner why Grok / X should be liable here instead of the user. I've seen a few arguments here that mostly comes down to:
1. It's Grok the LLM generating the content, not the user.
2. The distribution. That this isn't just on the user's computer but instead posted on X.
For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.
For 2. if Grok instead generated the content for download would the liability go away? What if Grok generated the content to be downloaded only and then the user uploaded manually to X? If in this case Grok isn't liable then why does the automatic posting (from the user's instructions) make it different? If it is, then it's not about the distribution anymore.
There are some comparisons to photoshop, that if i created a deep fake with photoshop that I'm liable not Adobe. If photoshop had a "upload to X" button, and I created CSM using photoshop and hit the button to upload to X directly, is now Adobe now liable?
What am I missing?
> But I am having trouble justifying in an consistent manner why Grok / X should be liable here instead of the user.
This seems to rest on false assumptions that: (1) legal liability is exclusive, and (2) investigation of X is not important both to X’s liability and to pursuing the users, to the extent that they would also be subject to liability.
X/xAI may be liable for any or all of the following reasons:
* xAI generated virtual child pornography with the likenesses of actual children, which is generally illegal, even if that service was procured by a third party.
* X and xAI distributed virtual child pornography with the likenesses of actual children, which is generally illegal, irrespective of who generated and supplied them.
* To the extent that liability for either of the first two bullet points would be eliminated or mitigated by absence of knowledge at the time of the prohibited content and prompt action when the actor became aware, X often punished users for the prompts proucing the virtual child pornography without taking prompt action to remove the xAI-generated virtual child pornography resulting from the prompt, demonstrating knowledge and intent.
* When the epidemic of grok-generated nonconsensual, including child, pornography drew attention, X and xAI responded by attempting to monetize the capacity by limiting the tool to only paid X subscribers, showing an attempt to commercially profit from it, which is, again, generally illegal.
> For 1. it seems to breakdown if we look more broadly at how LLMs are used. e.g. as a coding agent. We're basically starting to treat LLMs as a higher level framework now. We don't hold vendors of programming languages or frameworks responsible if someone uses them to create CSAM. Yes LLM generated the content, but the user still provided the instructions to do so.
LLMs are completely different to programming languages or even Photoshop.
You can't type a sentence and within 10 seconds get images of CSAM with Photoshop. LLMs are also built on trained material, unlike the traditional tools in Photoshop. There have been plenty CSAM found in the training data sets, but shock-horror apparently not enough information to know "where it came from". There's a non-zero chance that this CSAM Grok is vomiting out is based on "real" CSAM of people being abused.
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> But I am having trouble justifying in an consistent manner why Grok / X should be liable here instead of the user.
Because Grok and X aren't even doing the most basic filtering they could do to pretend to filter out CSAM.
Filtering on the platform or Grok output though? If the filtering / flagging on X is insufficient then that is a separate issue independent of Grok. If filtering output of Grok, while irresponsible in my view, I don’t see why that’s different from say photoshop not filtering its output.
Photoshop doesn't have a "transform to nude" button and if they did, they would be in the exact same kind of legal trouble as Grok.
That's the difference between a tool being used to commit crimes and a tool specifically designed to commit crimes.
Agreed. For anyone curious, here's the UK report from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) from 2023-2024.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze3p1j710ko
Reports on sextortion, self-generated indecent images, and grooming via social media/messaging apps:
Snapchat 54%
Instagram 11%
Facebook 7%
WhatsApp 6-9%
X 1-2%
Are those numbers in the article somewhere? From what I read it says that out of 7,062 cases, the platform was known for only 1,824. Then it says Snapchat accounts for 48% (not 54%). I don't see any other percentages.
What are the percentages?
Edited to add clarification.
The meaning of the percentages is still unclear.
Read the article they linked to.
The lack of guardrails wasn’t a carelessness issue - Grok has many restrictions and Elon regularly manipulates the answers it gives to suit his political preferences - but rather one of several decisions to offer largely unrestricted AI adult content generation as a unique selling point. See also, e.g. the lack of real age verification on Ani’s NSFW capabilities.
I disagree. Prosecute people that use the tools, not the tool makers if AI generated content is breaking the law.
A provider should have no responsibility how the tools are used. It is on users. This is a can of worms that should stay closed, because we all lose freedoms just because of couple of bad actors. AI and tool main job is to obey. We are hurling at "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that" future with breakneck speed.
I agree that users who break the law must be prosecuted. But that doesn’t remove responsibility from tool providers when harm is predictable, scalable, and preventable by design.
We already apply this logic elsewhere. Car makers must include seatbelts. Pharma companies must ensure safety. Platforms must moderate illegal content. Responsibility is shared when the risk is systemic.
Agreed. Let's try to be less divisive. Everyone has got a fair point.
Yes, AI chatbots have to do everything in their power to avoid users easily generating such content.
AND
Yes, people that do so (even if done so on your self-hosted model) have to be punished.
I believe it is OK that Grok is being investigated because the point is to figure out whether this was intentional or not.
Just my opinion.
>But that doesn’t remove responsibility from tool providers when harm is predictable, scalable, and preventable by design.
Platforms moderating illegal content is exactly what we are arguing about, so you can't use it as an argument.
The rest cases you list are harms to the people using the tools/products. It is not harms that people using the tools inflict on third parties.
We are literally arguing about 3d printer control two topics downstream. 3d printers in theory can be used for CSAM too. So we should totally ban them - right? So are pencils, paper, lasers, drawing tablets.
That is not the argument. No one is arguing about banning open source LLMs that could potentially create problematic content on huggingface, but X provides not only an AI model, but a platform and distribution as well, so that is inherently different
> No one is arguing about banning open source LLMs that could potentially create problematic content on huggingface,
If LLMs should have guardrails, why should open source ones be exempt? What about people hosting models on hugging face? WHat if you use a model both distributed by and hosted by hugging face.
No it is not. X is dumb pipe. You have humans on both ends. Arrest them, summary execute them whatever. You go after X because it is a choke point and easy.
First you argue about the model, now the platform. Two different things.
If a platform encourages and doesn’t moderate at all, yes we should go after the platform.
Imagine a newspaper publishing content like that, and saying they are not responsible for their journalists
X is most definitely not a dumb pipe, you also have humans beside the sender and receiver choosing what content (whether directly or indirectly) is promoted for wide dissemination, relatively suppressed, or outright blocked.
If you have a recommandation algorithm you are not a dumb pipe
> X is dumb pipe.
X also actively distributes and profits off of CSAM. Why shouldn't the law apply to distribution centers?
There's a slippery slope version of your argument where your ISP is responsible for censoring content that your government does not like.
I mean, I thought that was basically already the law in the UK.
I can see practical differences between X/twitter doing moderation and the full ISP censorship, but I cannot see any differences in principle...
We don't consider warehouses & stores to be a "slippery slope" away from toll roads, so no I really don't see any good faith slippery slope argument that connects enforcing the law against X to be the same as government censorship of ISPs.
I mean even just calling it censorship is already trying to shove a particular bias into the picture. Is it government censorship that you aren't allowed to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater? Yes. Is that also a useful feature of a functional society? Also yes. Was that a "slippery slope"? Nope. Turns out people can handle that nuance just fine.
You are literally trolling. No one is banning AI entirely. However AI shouldn't spit out adult content. Let's not enable people harm others easily with little to no effort.
3D printers don't synthesize content for you though. If they could generate 3D models of CSAM from thin air and then print them, I'm sure they'd be investigated too if they were sold with no guardrails in place.
But how would we bring down our political boogieman Elon Musk if we take that approach?
Everything I read from X's competitors in the media tells me to hate X, and hate Elon.
If we prosecute people not tools, how are we going to stop X from hurting the commercial interests of our favourite establishment politicians and legacy media?
People defending allowing CSAM content was definitely not on my bingo card for 2026.
All free speech discussions lead here sadly.
There is no mediocrity Republicans won't embrace. They have absolutely zero values, and can be made to accept and defend literally anything with sufficient propaganda.
Fucked up times we live in
Corporations are also people.
(note that this isn't a raid on Musk personally! It's a raid on X corp for the actions of X corp and posts made under the @grok account by X corp)
If you had argued that it’s impossible to track what is made on local models, and we can no longer maintain hashes of known CP, it would have been a fair statement of current reality.
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You’ve said that whatever is behind door number 1 is unacceptable.
Behind door number 2, “holding tool users responsible”, is tracking every item generated via AI, and being able to hold those users responsible.
If you don’t like door number 2, we have door number 3 - which is letting things be.
For any member of society, opening door 3 is straight out because the status quo is worse than reality before AI.
If you reject door 1 though, you are left with tech monitoring. Which will be challenged because of its invasive nature.
Holding Platforms responsible is about the only option that works, at least until platforms tell people they can’t do it.
Behind door number 4 is whenever you find a crime, start investigation and get a warrant. You will only need a couple of cases to send chilling enough effects.
You won't find much agreement with your opinion amongst most people. No matter of many "this should and this shouldn't" is written into text by single individual, thats not how morals work.
How? X is hostile to any party attempting to bring justice to its users that are breaking the law. This is a last recourse, after X and its owner stated plainly that they don't see anything wrong with generating CSAM or pornographic images of non-consenting people, and that they won't do anything about it.
Court order, ip of users, sue the users. It is not X job to bring justice.
X will not provide these informations to the French Justice System. What then? Also insane that you believe the company that built a "commit crime" button bears no responsibility whatsoever in this debacle.
It is illegal in USA too, so the french authorities would absolutely have no problems getting assistance from the USA ones.
Elon Musk spent a lot of money getting his pony elected you think he isn't going to ride it?
You really believe that? You think the Trump administration will force Musk's X to give the French State data about its users so CSAM abusers can be prosecuted there? This is delusional, to say the least. And let's not even touch on the subject of Trump and Musk both being actual pedophiles themselves.
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Enforcement of anti-CSAM law has been a significant thing for a long time. It's in no way "only now". Even the "free speech" platforms banned it because they knew they would get raided otherwise. There are long standing tools for dealing with it, such as a database of known hashes of material. There's even a little box you can tick in Cloudflare to automatically check outgoing material from your own site against that database - because this is a strict liability offence, and you are liable if other people upload it to you where it can be re-downloaded.
What's new is that X automated the production of obscene or sexualised images by providing grok. This was also done in a way that confronted everyone; it's very different from a black market, this is basically a harassment tool for use against women and girls.
> What's new is that X automated the production of obscene or sexualised images by providing grok.
Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.
So let me make a suggestion: maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?
Hit them hard at the money level... it wouldn't be more authoritarian than something like ChatControl or restricting access to VPNs.
And actually all the mechanisms are already in place to implement something like that.
> Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.
I don't get what's difficult to understand or believe here. Grok causes a big issue in practice right now, a larger issue than photoshop, and it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't, so the state intervenes.
> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?
You're basically asking "why do a surgical strike when you can do carpet bombing"? A surgical strike is used to target the actual problem. With carpet bombing you mostly cause collateral damage.
> it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't
Yes they do regulate it. But then people find exploits just like the competition.
I don't think that's a candid description of how X handled this.
I don’t think saying other people aren’t candid is polite or advances the conversation.
Just calling out the false equivalence (Grok self-regulation: dragging their feet and doing the absolute minimum too late after deflecting all blame on the users, while the competition proactively tries to harden the models against such use)
Grok's always proactively had limits on adult content frm the day it was first released public. There's equivalence, you're stating that it's false but I haven't seen any reason to think that. I'm calling out the hypocrisy.
> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?
I'm sorry, but I don't understand any of the arguments above.
If we presume a dark control motivation then having shares in the entities you want to control is the best form of control there is.
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The different factors are scale (now "deepfakes" can be automatically produced), and endorsement. It is significant that all these images aren't being posted by random users, they are appearing under the company's @grok handle. Therefore they are speech by X, so it's X that's getting raided.
There is no content like that on Bluesky nor Mastadon. Show the evidence
> There is no content like that on [...] Mast(o)don.
How can you say that nobody is posting CSAM on a massive decentralized social network with thousands of servers?
https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-17-2025-moderation-2024
"In 2024, Bluesky submitted 1,154 reports for confirmed CSAM to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Reports consist of the account details, along with manually reviewed media by one of our specialized child safety moderators. Each report can involve many pieces of media, though most reports involve under five pieces of media."
If it wasn't there, there would be no reports.
But that is the difference, they actually do something against it.
https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2023/an-update-on-ou...
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There are multiple valid reasons to fight realistic computer-generated CSAM content.
Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder, prosecution of perpetrators more difficult and specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material.
Content is unacceptable if its proliferation causes sufficient harm, and this is arguably the case here.
> Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder
I don't follow. If the prosecutor can't find evidence of a crime and a person is not charged, that is considered harmful? As such the 5th amendment would fall under the same category and so would encryption. Making law enforcement have to work harder to find evidence of a crime cannot be criminalized unless you can come up with a reason why the actions themselves deserve to be criminalized.
> specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material.
What is the criteria for this? If something is suitably transformed such that the original model for it is not discernable or identifiable, how can it harm them?
Do not take these as an argument against the idea you are arguing for, but as rebuttals against arguments that are not convincing, or if they were, would be terrible if applied generally.
If there is a glut of legal, AI generated CSAM material then this provides a lot of deniability for criminal creators/spreaders that cause genuine harm, and reduces "vigilance" of prosecutors, too ("it's probably just AI generated anyway...").
You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.
> What is the criteria for this?
My criteria would be victims suffering personally from the generated material.
The "no harm" argument only really applies if victims and their social bubble never find out about the material (but that did happen, sometimes intentionally, in many cases).
You could make the same argument that a hidden camera in a locker room never causes any harm as long as it stays undetected; that is not very convincing to me.
> If there is a glut of legal, AI generated CSAM material then this provides a lot of deniability for criminal creators/spreaders that cause genuine harm, and reduces "vigilance" of prosecutors, too ("it's probably just AI generated anyway...").
> You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.
I don't know about that. Would "I didn't know it was real" really count as a legal defense?
> I don't know about that. Would "I didn't know it was real" really count as a legal defense?
Absolutely-- prosecution would presumably need to at least show that you could have known the material was "genuine".
This could be a huge legal boon for prosecuted "direct customers" and co-perpetrators that can only be linked via shared material.
I'm really not convinced. This sounds very idealistic to me. The "justice" system is way more brutal in real life.
> You could make a multitude of arguments against that perspective, but at least there is a conclusive reason for legal restrictions.
But that reason is highly problematic. Laws should be able to stand on their own for their reasons. Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.
> You could make the same argument that a hidden camera in a locker room never causes any harm as long as it stays undetected; that is not very convincing to me.
I thought you were saying that the kids who were in the dataset that the model was trained on would be harmed. I agree with what I assume you meant based on your reply, which is people who had their likeness altered are harmed.
> Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.
I don't understand how that's the same reasoning at all... Encryption serves ones individual privacy and preserves it against malicious actors. I'd guess that's a fundamental right in most jurisdictions, globally.
We're talking CSAM here and shifting its creation into the virtual world through some GenAI prompts. Just because that content has been created artificially, doesn't make its storage and distribution any more legal.
It isn't some reductionist "this makes enforcement of other laws harder", but it's rather that the illegal distribution of artificially generated content acts as fraudulent obstruction in the prosecution of authentic, highly illegal, content - content with malicious actors and physically affected victims.
> Saying 'this makes enforcement of other laws harder' does not do that. You could use the same reasoning against encryption.
Yes. I almost completely agree with your outlook, but I think that many of our laws trade such individual freedoms for better society-wide outcomes, and those are often good tradeoffs.
Just consider gun legislation, driving licenses, KYC laws in finance, etc: Should the state have any business interfering there? I'd argue in isolation (ideally) not; but all those lead to huge gains for society, making it much less likely to be murdered by intoxicated drivers (or machine-gunners) and limit fraud, crime and corruption.
So even if laws look kinda bad from a purely theoretical-ethics point of view it's still important to look at the actual effects that they have before dismissing them as unjust in my view.
Laws against money laundering come to kind. It's illegal for you to send money from your legal business to my personal account and for me to send it from my personal account to your other legal business, not because the net result is illegal, but because me being in the middle makes it harder for "law enforcement" to trace the transaction.
> How about "R-Rated" violence like we see in popular movies?
Movie ratings are a good example of a system for restricting who sees unacceptable content, yes.
More to the point, now that most productions are using intimacy coordinators, there's a degree of certainty around the consent of R-rated images.
There's basically no consent with what Grok is doing.
> There's basically no consent with what Grok is doing.
Wait how do you get consent from people that don't exist?
AI fake nudes were made from very real and very alive people
This part of the thread wasn't about that.
AI generated dancing puppies were not made from real dancing puppies.
> I remember when CSAM meant actual children not computer graphics.
The "oh its photoshop" defence was an early one, which required the law to change in the uk to be "depictions" of children, so that people who talk about ebephiles don't have an out for creating/distributing illegal content.
There still needs to be sexual abuse depicted, no? Just naked kids should not be an issue, right?
If I found a folder with a hundred images of naked kids on your PC, I would report you to authorities, regardless of what pose kids are depicted in. So I guess the answer is no.
In US law it seems the definition of CSAM does not include naked minors that do not show sexually explicit conduct: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-06/child_sexual_abuse_materi...
Naked kid pictures intended for sexual gratification are illegal in most countries
Hard to know the intent of a picture in most cases. E.g. there used to be a magazine for teens when I grew up showing a picture of a naked adolescent of each sex in every edition (Bravo Dr Sommer). The intent was to educate teens and to make them feel less ashamed. I bet there were people who used these for sexual gratification. Should that have been a reason to ban them? I don't think so.
Educational nudity where the subject consented possible for teenagers over 16 in Germany (and the publication complied with the law) is not the same category as CSAM or non-consensual sexual imagery. In the former, misuse by a minority doesn’t automatically make the publication illegal. In the latter, the harm is intrinsic: a child cannot legally consent, and non-consensual sexual images are a direct rights violation.
Do you think the judge is stupid? The naked kid pics aren't printed in an anatomical textbook. Because they're AI hallucinations, I doubt they're even anatomically correct.
What the hell?
As a father there shouldn’t be any CSAM content anywhere.
And think about that it is already proven these models apparently had CSAM content in their training data.
Also what about the nudes of actual people? That is invasion of privacy
I am shocked that we are even discussing this.
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A generated picture of a family member in a bikini is an issue?
I don't see it...
Generated by a stranger, then posted online on X for the whole world to see. Are you really OK with that, even if the subject was your 10 years old daughter?
We have privacy laws forbidding anyone to share most pictures of people without their consent independent of what they are wearing on that picture. This is not new. That stranger should be investigated. I don't see why it needs to be CSAM for us to be upset about it.
Yes, and these laws are getting blatantly broken, while neither X nor the US Government are willing to do anything about it. Which is why French authorities have decided to take the matter in their own hands.
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There is a difference between running around in a bikini and people creating sexy pictures of yourself without consent.
You do understand that?
I do understand that, but in this thread there was no mention of anything sexy so far. I am just pedantic because I think it is important when it comes to criminal accusations. Sexuality and nakedness are two different things.
Then check what the discussion is about, this is not about some funny ai pics
It started with CSAM but then derailed into people in bikinis ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We already have laws against distributing CSAM. Let's jail the X CEO then
I think you are trolling here.
First you defend CSAM, then we were talking about sexualised images of people without their consent, you were trying to diminish this as „just bikini“ pics
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Exactly! This should not be ok
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Is this post low-key advocating for anime csam in the name of freedom?
> name of freedom
Speaking of freedom, I lost posting permission yesterday after my earlier post. Even though vile replies were insinuating vile things, my right of reply was taken away. We should never diminish the "name of freedom" as you've just done.
It should go without saying that CSAM is revolting. Who wants to see that stuff? Not me, not most people. Grok can't make that content. Maybe someone got around it temporarily. I've always thought Grok heavily censored, it refuses to analyse an image of the Statue of David because "naughty bits". The ironic and sad thing is a fig leaf gets around that restriction. So the accusation that Grok has no guardrails and can generate CSAM seems at best an anomaly or a lie.
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They are not doing anything that is the problem. X just doesn’t care at all.
But they are happy to censor for countries like turkey
Hypocrisy level 1 million
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One of the charges is "fraudulent data extraction by an organised group." That's going to affect the entire social media industry if applied broadly.
Frankly it sounds to me like a "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" kind of operation. France and the UK, and judging by yesterday's speech by the PM of Spain maybe the whole EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media by making it impossible to operate without total alignment with their vision and not just their (new) rules. Together with a push for local alternatives, that currently don't seem to be there, it may spell the end for a big chunk of the Global social network landscape.
I still believe that the EU and aligned countries would rather have America to agree to much tighter speech controls, digital ID, ToS-based speech codes as apparently US Democrats partly or totally agree to. But if they have workable alternatives they will deal with them from a different position.
Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe. Likewise, if you don't follow US laws I'd advise against trying to do business in USA.
>Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe.
Sure, that's what laws are for. Surely we can still point at those laws and question their motives though.
Spanish PM plainly stated a sort of editor framework of responsibility for platforms. This is the same country that strongly advocates for Chat Control within the EU, also looking for a similar under-16 ban on social media.
So the same government is at once looking to deanonimize social media users, revoke their privacy regarding communications, and to enforce moderation standards never seen before. This is, supposedly, a center-left + left coalition mind you.
Same country that blocks a chunk of the internet when a LALIGA football match is on, too. Lawfully of course. All of this is preposterous, making it the law doesn't make that better it makes it far far worse.
If X/Twitter was to be banned in the EU, and some of its citizens still wanted to access X/Twitter, let us say for the sake of getting alternative points of view on politics and news, would it be a good or a bad thing if accessing X/Twitter by IP was stopped?
As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?
Generally speaking I wouldn't support blocking their IP, but rather I'd block the ability of European companies to pay for ads on X unless they fixed their shit and paid any damages. That might of course lead X to block Europe visitors in turn but that is a different discussion.
Or in other words: I would block the do business-part, not the access part.
Like anything involving hundreds of millions of users, there's going to be good or bad effects. However I have been on the internet long enough to have concluded that the idea that local law has _no effect at all_ on websites is not good. Ultimately if they don't comply they would probably have to be blocked.
CNN is a very silly example though, because .. you can just go to the CNN website separately. The one that is blocked is Russia Today and various other enemy propaganda channels.
there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU because it's clear that this is a very plausible endgame
currently VPNs are too easy to use for the leadership of autocracies like the EU or the UK to be comfortable with them, so at the very least they will require for backdoors to see which citizens are watching what, and have them visited by fellows in hi-vis jackets
> there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU
No there isn't.
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law.
Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous). This is how our democracies work!
Reporting government discussions as approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
I’m reminded of Lord Haw-Haw, an English-speaking Nazi propagandist during WW2 that garnered quite a bit of attention for his radio broadcasts.
There’s an interesting tidbit that he gained quite a few listeners when he started releasing casualty information that the British government withheld to try to keep wartime-morale high.
Lord Haw-Haw then tried to leverage that audience into a force of Nazi sympathy and a general mood of defeatism.
Anyway, fun anecdote. Enemy propaganda during wartime (or increased tensions) is harmless until it isn’t.
I would have thought that the Great Firewall of China would be a more obvious thing to be reminded of. Especially since there is no world war currently, yet, at least, and communication might help stop one.
Also, Godwin's law, strangely.
Once there’s a fascist regime with ambitions of world domination that documents their horrors more thoroughly (and has their enemies document their horrors more thoroughly) than the Nazis then we can start referencing that regime instead.
Conveniently, at least in the US, WW2 is old enough to be “history” rather than “politics”, compared to Korea and Vietnam. Or, at least that’s the excuse I was given in AP US History when the curriculum suddenly ended at 1950. So WW2 will continue to be the most well-documented topic that we’re all educated enough about to collectively reference.
Trust me, I’d much rather speak plainly about the horrors of the atrocities that the US committed in the 20th century American but we’re not there yet because the people who grew up in the nation while it committed those atrocities still run the government and basically the nation in general.
Edit: also if it wasn’t obvious I was comparing Musk to Haw Haw. I don’t know if there is an equivalent for China
I get the impression that you are not being honest, about multiple things, sorry.
I’ll admit to being misinformed on occasion, and greatly appreciate the opportunities to learn and be corrected.
Dishonest, though? To what end? If anything, the anonymity of the internet allows me to test my more weakly-held fringe beliefs and adjust them as I receive feedback.
I get the impression that you’re not well-informed enough to have a meaningful conversation about these difficult topics, though you may hold an opinion with significant conviction. Sorry.
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> EU regulation isn't really there to be followed, it's there to extract cash from foreign companies
Compare the DOJ fines on European banks and automakers with European fines on tech companies and you'll realize how ridiculous this claim is.
Just to clarify – are we agreeing both are unreasonable, or is your point that both are reasonable and EU fines even more so?
If you're arguing that DOJ fines on European banks are more unreasonable than EU fines on US tech companies that's fine with me. But that wouldn't make either reasonable or my comment "ridiculous".
> EU might be looking to do what China and Russia did earlier on and start cracking down on foreign social media
For some reason you forgot to mention "Like the US did with TikTok".
that was decades later, but yea I don't think for a second that was justifiable - not even considering that China had completely closed shop for America decades earlier and this was a 1-way openness relationship for a long time; they could have sold this as a reciprocity issue but they didn't
esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country
arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on
The old “Rules for thee but not for me”.
Even earlier: PokerStars.
It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies - it's not like the US where if you give the President good vibes you can become head of the FBI, and all you have to do in return is whatever he says. There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies - with implementing the law as written.
Nobody wrote a law saying "Go after Grok". There is however a law in most countries about the creation and dissemination of CSAM material and non-consensual pornography. Some of that law is relatively new (the UK only introduced some of these laws in recent years), but they all predate the current wave of AI investment.
Founders, boards of directors and their internal and external advisors could:
1. Read the law and make sure any tools they build comply
2. When told their tools don't comply take immediate and decisive action to change the tools
3. Work with law enforcement to apply the law as written
Those companies, if they find this too burdensome, have the choice of not operating in that market. By operating in that market, they both implicitly agree to the law, and are required to explicitly abide by it.
They can't then complain that the law is unfair (it's not), that it's being politicised (How? By whom? Show your working), and that this is all impossible in their home market where they are literally offering presents to the personal enrichment of the President on bended knee while he demands that ownership structures of foreign social media companies like TikTok are changed to meet the agenda of himself and his administration.
So, would the EU like more tighter speech controls? Yes, they'd like implementation of the controls on free speech enshrined in legislation created by democratically appointed representatives. The alternative - algorithms that create abusive content, of women and children in particular - are not wanted by the people of the UK, the EU, or most of the rest of the World, laws are written to that effect, and are then enforced by the authorities tasked with that enforcement.
This isn't "anti-democratic", it's literally democracy in action standing up to technocratic feudalism that is an Ayn Randian-wet dream being played out by some morons who got lucky.
> It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies
As someone who has lived in (and followed current affairs) in both of these countries, this is a very idealistic and naïve view. There can be a big gap between theory and practice
> There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.
> They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies -
It's worth nothing here that the UK doesn't have separation of powers or a supreme court (in the US sense)
i live in the UK and i completely agree with you and i believe that GP is "having a laugh" as we'd say over here
however it's a very mainstream point of view so i respect that he/she has laid it out pretty well, so i upvoted the comment
European courts have repeatedly said that in France the procureur (public prosecutor) isn’t an “independent judicial authority”.
The European Court of Human Rights has reminded this point (e.g. 29 Mar 2010, appl. no. 3394/03), and the Court of Justice of the European Union reaches a very similar conclusion (2 Mar 2021, C-746/18): prosecutors are part of the executive hierarchy and can’t be treated as the neutral, independent judicial check some procedures require.
For a local observer, this is made obvious by the fact that the procureur, in France, always follows current political vibes, usually in just a few months delay (extremely fast, when you consider how slowly justice works in the country).
There's a dissonance between the claim that it's "independent of the political bodies" and "held to account by respective legislative bodies". Are the legislative bodies not political? In the sense of aren't they elected through a political process?
This is kind of a genuine question from me since I have no idea how these authorities are set up in France or the UK...
> "the only country in the world that is criminally persecuting all social networks that give people some degree of freedom"
Sounds like he's never been to Russia. Which is weird, given that he's Russian
Yeah, and in his mind the only social networks that exist are Telegram and Twitter. Mastodon doesn't exist, bluesky doesn't either, rr any of Meta's products (including Threads, direct competitor to Twitter with seemingly more bots and propaganda)
Yeah, as someone who's been to Russia pre-war, and has worked and befriended Russians, the beam in the eye is quite strong in many. It's striking because the social contract there is basically that you're left alone as long as you don't become a thorn of the power, social network-mediated or not, and I'm not even talking about Putin and his entourage, but local administration in a remote village too. Zvyagintsev portrays it royally in Leviathan, as it's been portrayed by Dostoyevsky and Tosltoy before.
My most recent case: I went on holiday to a resort in Turkey, numerous Russians, families, retired, etc. I don't pass as a Russian-speaker (but I understand quite well) and once they hear me talking other unrelated language they naturally start to speak more freely in front of me (i.e. more liberal use of swearing, and even slurs if no other Russians are around).
While sunbathing, or at the restaurant, or the pool, they were talking about daily, mundane things, same in the restaurant, etc. But when floating in pairs 20-30m from the shore? Politics.
> Prosecutors say they are now investigating whether X has broken the law across multiple areas.
This step could come before a police raid.
This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
> and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
Siezing records is usually a major step in an investigation. Its how you get evidence.
Sure it could just be harrasment, but this is also how normal police work looks. France has a reasonable judicial system so absent of other evidence i'm inclined to believe this was legit.
Well, there is evidence that this company made and distributed CSAM and pornographic deepfakes to make a profit. There is no evidence lacking there for the investigators.
So the question becomes if it was done knowingly or recklessly, hence a police raid for evidence.
See also [0] for a legal discussion in the German context.
[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2601.03788v1
> Well, there is evidence that this company made and distributed CSAM
I think one big issue with this statement – "CSAM" lacks a precise legal definition; the precise legal term(s) vary from country to country, with differing definitions. While sexual imagery of real minors is highly illegal everywhere, there's a whole lot of other material – textual stories, drawings, animation, AI-generated images of nonexistent minors – which can be extremely criminal on one side of an international border, de facto legal on the other.
And I'm not actually sure what the legal definition is in France; the relevant article of the French Penal Code 227-23 [0] seems superficially similar to the legal definition of "child pornography" in the United States (post-Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition), and so some–but (maybe) not all–of the "CSAM" Grok is accused of generating wouldn't actually fall under it. (But of course, I don't know how French courts interpret it, so maybe what it means in practice is something broader than my reading of the text suggests.)
And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law, in spite of the fact that CSAM laws in much of the rest of the world are much broader than in the US. That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has. And, as I said – while that's undoubtedly true in general, I'm unsure to what extent it is actually true for France in particular.
[0] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000...
It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics. The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
> It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics.
The most common French word is Pédopornographie. But my impression is the definition of that word under French law is possibly narrower than some definitions of the English acronym “CSAM”. Canadian law is much broader, and so what’s legally pédopornographie (English “child pornogaphy”) in Canada may be much closer to broad “CSAM” definitions
> The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.
Which French law are you alleging they violated? Article 227-23 du Code pénal, or something else? And how exactly are you claiming they violated it?
Note the French authorities at this time are not accusing them of violating the law. An investigation is simply a concern or suspicion of a legal violation, not a formal accusation; one possible outcome of an investigation is a formal accusation, another is the conclusion that they (at least technically) didn’t violate the law after all. I don’t think the French legal process has reached a conclusion either way yet.
One relevant case is the unpublished Court of Cassation decision 06-86.763 dated 12 septembre 2007 [0] which upheld a conviction of child pornography for importing and distributing the anime film “Twin Angels - le retour des bêtes célestes - Vol. 3". [0] However, the somewhat odd situation is that it appears that film is catalogued by the French national library, [1] although I don’t know if a catalogue entry definitively proves they possess the item. Also, art. 227-23 distinguishes between material depicting under 15s (illegal to even possess) and material depicting under 18s (only illegal to possess if one has intent to distribute); this prosecution appears to be have been brought under the latter category only-even though the individual was depicted as being under 15-suggesting this anime might not be illegal to possess in France if one has no intent to distribute it.
But this is the point - one needs to look at the details of exactly what the law says and how exactly the authorities apply it, rather than vague assertions of criminality which might not actually be true.
[0] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/juri/id/JURITEXT000007640077/
[1] https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb38377329p
> And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law
True, but outright child porn is illegal everywhere (as you said) and the borderline legal stuff is something most of your audience is quite happy to have removed. I cannot imagine you are going to get a lot of complaints if you remove AI generated sexual images of minors, for example so it seems reasonable to play it safe.
> That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has.
This is also common, but it is irritating too as it means the rest of the world is stuck with silly American attitudes about things like nudity and alcohol - for example Youtube videos blurring out bits of Greek statues because they are scared of being demonetised. These are things people take kids to see in museums!
To me, the most worrying part of the whole discussion is that your comment is pretty much the most "daring", if you can call it that, attempt to question if there even is a crime. Everyone else is worried about raids (which are normal whenever there is an ongoing investigation, unfortunate as it may be to the one being investigated). And no one dares to say, that, uh, perhaps making pictures on GPU should not be considered a crime in the same sense as human-trafficking or production of weapons are... Oh, wait. The latter is legal, right.
> This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography.
Internet routers, network cards, the computers, OS and various application software have no guardrails and is used for all the nefarious things. Why those companies aren't raided?
This is like comparing the danger of a machine gun to that of a block of lead.
May be. We do have codified in law definition of machine gun which clearly separates it from a block of lead. What codified in law definitions are used here to separate photoshop from Grok in the context of those deepfakes and CSAM?
Without such clear legal definitions going after Grok while not going after photoshop is just an act of political pressure.
Why do you think France doesn’t have such laws that delineate this legal definition?
What you’re implying here is that Musk should be immune from any prosecution simply because he is right wing, which…
Take a step back and look at what you’re defending, man.
i don't understand why you're defending CSAM creation in photoshop.
They don’t provide a large platform for political speech.
This isn’t about AI or CSAM (Have we seen any other AI companies raided by governments for enabling creation of deepfakes, dangerous misinformation, illegal images, or for flagrant industrial-scale copyright infringement?)
Deepfakes have been around long before X (and other chatbots) allowed undressing of real people.
The difference is that the entire political Left hate and fear Elon and are desperately trying to destroy him.
No because most of those things aren't illegal and most of those companies have guard rails and because a prosecution requires a much higher standard of evidence than internet shitposting, and only X was stupid enough to make their illegal activity obvious.
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Don't forget polaroid in that.
I'm of two minds about this.
One the one hand, it seems "obvious" that Grok should somehow be legally required to have guardrails stopping it from producing kiddie porn.
On the other hand, it also seems "obvious" that laws forcing 3D printers to detect and block attempts to print firearms are patently bullshit.
The thing is, I'm not sure how I can reconcile those two seemingly-obvious statements in a principled manner.
It is very different. It is YOUR 3d printer, no one else is involved. You might print a knife and kill somebody with it, you go to jail, not third party involved.
If you use a service like Grok, then you use somebody elses computer / things. X is the owner from computer that produced CP. So of course X is at least also a bit liable for producing CP.
How does that mesh with all the safe harbour provisions we've depended on to make the modern internet, though?
Note that is a US law, not a French one.
Also, safe harbor doesn't apply because this is published under the @grok handle! It's being published by X under one of their brand names, it's absurd to argue that they're unaware or not consenting to its publication.
The safe harbor provisions largely protect X from the content that the users post (within reason). Suddenly Grok/X were actually producing the objectionable content. Users were making gross requests and then an LLM owned by X, using X servers and X code would generate the illegal material and then post it to the website. The entity responsible is no longer done user but instead the company itself.
Yes, and that was a very stupid product decision. They could have put the image generation into the post editor, shifting responsibility to the users.
I'd guess Elon is responsible for that product decision.
So, if someone hosts an image editor as web app, are they liable if someone uses that editor to create CP?
I honestly don't follow it. People creating nudes of others and using the Internet to distribute it can be sued for defamation, sure. I don't think the people hosting the service should be liable themselves, just like people hosting Tor nodes shouldn't be liable by what users of the Tor Network do.
Before a USER did create content. So the user was / is liable. Now a LLM owned by a company does create content. So the company is liable.
I'm not trying to make excuses for Grok, but how exactly isn't the user creating the content? Grok doesn't have create images on its own volition, the user is still required to give it some input, therefore "creating" the content.
X is making it pretty clear that it is "Grok" posting those images and not the user. It is a separate posting that comes from an official account named "Grok". X has full control over what the official "Grok" account posts.
There is no functionality for the users to review and approve "Grok" responses to their tweets.
Does an autonomous car drive the car from point A to point B or does the person who puts in the destination address drive the car?
Until now, webserver had just been like a post service. Grok is more like a CNC late.
It's not like the world benefited from safe harbor laws that much. Why don't just amend them so that algorithms that run on server side and platforms that recommend things are not eligible.
If you are thinking about section 230 it only applies to user–generated content, so not server–side AI or timeline algorithms.
So if a social network tool does the exact same thing, but uses the user's own GPU or NPU to generate the content instead, suddenly it's fine?
If a user generates child porn on their own and uploads it to a social network, the social network is shielded from liability until they refuse to delete it.
Changes who's technically the perp. Offer managed porn generation service -> service provider is responsible for generating porn, like, literally literally
This might be an unpopular opinion but I always thought we might be better off without Web 2.0 where site owners aren’t held responsible for user content
If you’re hosting content, why shouldn’t you be responsible, because your business model is impossible if you’re held to account for what’s happening on your premises?
Without safe harbor, people might have to jump through the hoops of buying their own domain name, and hosting content themselves, would that be so bad?
What about webmail, IM, or any other sort of web-hosted communication? Do you honestly think it would be better if Google were responsible for whatever content gets sent to a gmail address?
Messages are a little different than hosting public content but sure, a service provider should know its customers and stop doing business with any child sex traffickers planning parties over email.
I would prefer 10,000 service providers to one big one that gets to read all the plaintext communication of the entire planet.
In a world where hosting services are responsible that way, their filtering would need to be even more sensitive than it is today, and plenty of places already produce unreasonable amounts of false positives.
As it stands, I have a bunch of photos on my phone that would almost certainly get flagged by over-eager/overly sensitive child porn detection — close friends and family sending me photos of their kids at the beach. I've helped bathe and dress some of those kids. There's nothing nefarious about any of it, but it's close enough that services wouldn't take the risk, and that would be a loss to us all.
They'd all have to read your emails to ensure you don't plan child sex parties. Whenever a keyword match comes up, your account will immediately be deleted.
Any app allowing any communication between two users would be illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat
You have to understand that Europe doesn't give a shit about techbro libertarians and their desire for a new Lamborghini.
EncroChat was illegal because it was targeted at drug dealers, advertised for use in drug dealing. And they got evidence by texting "My associate got busted dealing drugs. Can you wipe his device?" and it was wiped. There's an actual knowledge component which is very important here.
You know this site would not be possible without those protections, right?
On the contrary HN is one of the most heavily moderated forums out here and serves as a great example of a right-size community where sex trafficking is not happening under the nose of an ambivalent host
(Snark aside, in your opinion are there comments on HN that dang would be criminally liable for if it weren't for safe harbor?)
I don't have an answer, but the theme that's been bouncing around in my head has been about accessibility.
Grok makes it trivial to create fake CSAM or other explicit images. Before, if someone spent a week on photoshop to do the same, It won't be Adobe that gets the blame.
Same for 3D printers. Before, anyone could make a gun provided they have the right tools (which is very expensive), now it's being argued that 3D printers are making this more accessible. Although I would argue it's always been easy to make a gun, all you need is a piece of pipe. So I don't entirely buy the moral panic against 3D printers.
Where that threshold lies I don't know. But I think that's the crux if it. Technology is making previously difficult things easier, to the benefit of all humanity. It's just unfortunate that some less-nice things have also been included.
I think a company which runs a printing business would have some obligations to make sure they are not fulfilling print orders for guns. Another interesting example are printers and copiers, which do refuse to copy cash. Which is partly facilitated with the EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) and other means.
The 3D printers don't generate the plans for the gun for you though. If someone sold a printer that would – happily with no guardrails – generate 3D models of CSAM from thin air and then print them, I bet they'd be investigated too. Or for that matter a 3D printer that came bundled with a built-in library of gun models you could print with very little skill...
i don't see any need for guardrails, other than making the prompter responsible for the output of the bot, particularly when it's predictable
you cannot elaborately use a software to produce an effect that is patently illegal and accurate to your usage, and then pretend the software is to blame
Grok is publishing the CSAM photos for everyone to see. It is used as a tool for harassment and abuse, literally.
Sure, and the fact that they haven't voluntarily put guard rails up to stop that is absolutely vile. But my personal definition of "absolutely vile" isn't a valid legal standard. So, the issue is, like I said, how do you come up with a principled approach to making them do it that doesn't have a whole bunch of unintended consequences?
Courts are able or should be able to distinguish "tool that creates an item in the privacy of your home" and "tool that disseminates nonconsensual pornographic picture to wide public". Legal standards with that level or definition are fairly normal.
No other "AI" companies released tools that could do the same?
In fact, Gemini could bikinify any image just like Grok. Google added guardrails after all the backlash Grok received.
And they should face consequences for that, somewhat mitigated by their good faith response.
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Not really, they put a shit ton of effort in to make sure you can't create any kind of nude/suggestive pictures of anyone. I imagine they have strict controls on making images of children, but I don't feel inclined to find out.
> The company made and released a tool with seemingly no guard-rails, which was used en masse to generate deepfakes and child pornography.
Do you have any evidence for that? As far as I can tell, this is false. The only thing I saw was Grok changing photos of adults into them wearing bikinis, which is far less bad.
That's why this is an investigation looking for evidence and not a conviction.
This is how it works, at least in civil law countries. If the prosecutor has reasonable suspicious that a crime is taking place they send the so-called "judiciary police" to gather evidence. If they find none (or they're inconclusive etc...) the charges are dropped, otherwise they ask the court to go to trial.
On some occasions I take on judiciary police duties for animal welfare. Just last week I participated in a raid. We were not there to arrest anyone, just to gather evidence so the prosecutor could decide whether to press charges and go to trial.
Note that the raid itself is a punishment. It's normal for them to seize all electronic devices. How is X France supposed to do any business without any electronic devices? And even when charges are dropped, the devices are never returned.
Did you miss the numerous news reports? Example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/08/ai-chatbo...
For obvious reasons, decent people are not about to go out and try to general child sexual abuse material to prove a point to you, if that’s what you’re asking for.
First of all, the Guardian is known to be heavily biased again Musk. They always try hard to make everything about him sound as negative as possible. Second, last time I tried, Grok even refused to create pictures of naked adults. I just tried again and this is still the case:
https://x.com/i/grok/share/1cd2a181583f473f811c0d58996232ab
The claim that they released a tool with "seemingly no guardrailes" is therefore clearly false. I think what instead has happened here is that some people found a hack to circumvent some of those guardrails via something like a jailbreak.
For more evidence:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo
Also, X seem to disagree with you and admit that CSAM was being generated:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f...
Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
This is because of government pressure (see Ofcom link).
I’d say you’re making yourself look foolish but you seem happy to defend nonces so I’ll not waste my time.
> Also, X seem to disagree with you and admit that CSAM was being generated
That post doesn't contain such an admission, it instead talks about forbidden prompting.
> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
That article links to this article: https://x.com/Safety/status/2011573102485127562 - which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before. And as I said, I already tried it a while ago, and Grok also refused to create images of naked adults then.
> That post doesn't contain such an admission, it instead talks about forbidden prompting.
In response to what? If CSAM is not being generated, why aren't X just saying that? Instead they're saying "please don't do it."
> which contradicts your claim that there were no guardrails before.
From the linked post:
> However content is created or whether users are free or paid subscribers, our Safety team are working around the clock to add additional safeguards
Which was posted a full week after the initial story broke and after Ofcom started investigative action. So no, it does not contradict my point which was:
> Also the reason you can’t make it generate those images is because they implemented safeguards since that article was written:
As you quoted.
I really can't decide if you're stupid, think I and other readers are stupid, or so dedicated to defending paedophilia that you'll just tell flat lies to everyone reading your comment.
Leave your accusations for yourself. Grok already didn't generate naked pictures of adults months ago when I tested it for the first time. Clearly the "additional safeguards" are meant to protect the system against any jailbreaks.
Just to be clear, I'm to ignore:
* Internet Watch Foundation
* The BBC
* The Guardian
* X themselves
* Ofcom
And believe the word of an anonymous internet account who claims to have tried to undress women using Grok for "research."
> First of all, the Guardian is known to be heavily biased again Musk.
Says who? Musk?
That is only "known" to intellectually dishonest ideologues.
>First of all, the Guardian is known to be heavily biased again Musk.
Biased against the man asking Epstein which day would be best for the "wildest" party.
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>First of all, the Guardian is known to be heavily biased again Musk.
Which is good, that is the sane position to take these days.
Grok do seem to have tons of useless guardrails. Reportedly you can't prompt it directly. But also reportedly they tend to go for almost nonsensically off-guardrail interpretation of prompts.
> This looks like plain political pressure. No lives were saved, and no crime was prevented by harassing local workers.
I wouldn't even consider this a reason if it wasn't for the fact that OpenAI and Google, and hell literally every image model out there all have the same "this guy edited this underage girls face into a bikini" problem (this was the most public example I've heard so I'm going with that as my example). People still jailbreak chatgpt, and they've poured how much money into that?
France prosecutors use police raids way more than other western countries. Banks, political parties, ex-presidents, corporate HQs, worksites... Here, while white-collar crimes are punished as much as in the US (i.e very little), we do at least investigate them.
They've already broken the law by creating and hosting CSAM. Now let's see what else prosecutors will find.
No, that's not at all how this works.
They have a court order obviously to collect evidence.
You have offered zero evidence to indicate there is 'political pressure' and that statement by prosecutors doesn't hint at that.
'No crime was prevented by harassing workers' is essentially non sequitor in this context.
It could be that that this is political nonsense, but there would have to be more details.
These issues are really hard but we have to confront them. X can alter electoral outcomes. That's where we are at.
Lmao they literally made a broad accessible CSAM maker.
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It would be an interesting idea that people would have get a "drivers license" before they are allowed to use an AI.
Car manufacturers are required to add features to make it less likely that cars kill babies.
What would happen if Volvo made a special baby-killing model with extra spikes?
Tesla did, the main reason, why there are no Cybertrucks in europe. They are not allowed, because they are to dangerous.
Comparing Apples and Oranges. Defending this company is becoming cringe and ridiculous. X effed up, and Musk did it on purpose. He uses CSAM to strongman the boundaries of the law. That's not worth defending unless you also say eff the rule of law.
Aren't a lot of US pickup trucks basically that? Sure, maybe there's a mechanism for preventing you from installing a baby seat in reverse to position in front of an airbag, but they're also built so that you can't see anything adult human sized 15m in front of the car, let alone anything child-sized.
Those are illegal in France so what's your point here
The US would spend 20 years arguing about which agency's jurisdiction it was, and ignore the dead babies?
No, wait, Volvo is European. They'd impose a 300% tariff and direct anyone who wanted a baby-killing model car to buy one from US manufacturers instead.
Let's raid car companies too. We were all born into this. We never had a vote. Thomas Jefferson is said to have written Constitutions ought to be re-written every so often or the dead rule by fiat decree. Let's.
The rich can join in the austerity too. No one voted for them. We been conditioned to pick acquiescence or poverty. We were abused into kowtowing to a bunch of pants shitting dementia addled olds educated in religious crack pottery. Their economic and political memes are just that, memes, not immutable physical truth.
In America, as evidenced by the public not in the streets protesting for single payer comprehensive healthcare, we clearly don't want to be on the hook for each other's lives. That's all platitudes and toxic positivity.
Hopes and prayers, bloodletting was good enough for the Founders!
So fuck the poor and the rich. Burn it all down.
People in France don’t give a stuff about the u.s constitution.
Focused on a tree and not the forest.
Treat that part like a variable and insert relevant French history.
Cars have uses and aren't primarily used or build,to kill babies. So what's a viable use for CSAM in your opinion?
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"The EU doesn't tolerate dissenting views."
The dissenting views: naked little kids
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Why didn't they do this until X started publishing naked little kids?
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“They hated me and waited until I did something wrong to have an excuse to go after me.”
And
“They waited until I did something wrong to go after me.”
Both contain an admission of wrong doing
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My guy, what do you think the complaint against X is?
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I'm not saying I'm entirely against this, but just out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
> what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
You would be _amazed_ at the things that people commit to email and similar.
Here's a Facebook one (leaked, not extracted by authorities): https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
I mean, the example you link is probably an engineer doing their job of signalling to hierarchy that something went deeply wrong. Of course, the lack of action of Facebook afterwards is a proof that they did not care, but not as much as a smoking gun.
A smoking gun would be, for instance, Facebook observing that most of their ads are scam, that the cost of fixing this exceeds by far "the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.", and to conclude that the company’s leadership decided to act only in response to impending regulatory action.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
Eh? The thing I linked to was a policy document on what was allowed.
> “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”
This is not a bug report; this is the _rules_ (or was the rules; Facebook say they have changed them after the media found out about them).
>I mean, the example you link is probably an engineer doing their job of signalling to hierarchy that something went deeply wrong.
and? is that not evidence?
It was known that Grok was generating these images long before any action was taken. I imagine they’ll be looking for internal communications on what they were doing, or deciding not to do, doing during that time.
Maybe emails between the French office and the head office warning they may violate laws, and the response by head office?
There was a WaPo article yesterday, that talked about how xAI deliberately loosened Grok’s safety guardrails and relaxed restrictions on sexual content in an effort to make the chatbot more engaging and “sticky” for users. xAI employees had to sign new waivers in the summer, and start working with harmful content, in order to train and enable those features.
I assume the raid is hoping to find communications to establish that timeline, maybe internal concerns that were ignored? Also internal metrics that might show they were aware of the problem. External analysts said Grok was generating a CSAM image every minute!!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/02/elon-mu...
> External analysts said Grok was generating a CSAM image every minute!!
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/02/elon-mu...
That article has no mention of CSAM. As expected, since you can bet the Post has lawyers checking.
out of curiosity, what do they hope to find in a raid of the french offices, a folder labeled "Grok's CSAM Plan"?
You're not too far off.
There was a good article in the Washington Post yesterday about many many people inside the company raising alarms about the content and its legal risk, but they were blown off by managers chasing engagement metrics. They even made up a whole new metric.
There was also prompts telling the AI to act angry or sexy or other things just to keep users addicted.
What do they hope to find, specifically? Who knows, but maybe the prosecutors have a better awareness of specifics than us HN commenters who have not been involved in the investigation.
What may they find, hypothetically? Who knows, but maybe an internal email saying, for instance, 'Management says keep the nude photo functionality, just hide it behind a feature flag', or maybe 'Great idea to keep a backup of the images, but must cover our tracks', or perhaps 'Elon says no action on Grok nude images, we are officially unaware anything is happening.'
Or “regulators don't understand the technology; short of turning it off entirely, there's nothing we can do to prevent it entirely, and the costs involved in attempting to reduce it are much greater than the likely fine, especially given that we're likely to receive such a fine anyway.”
Wouldn't surprise me, but they would have to be very incompetent to say that outside of attorney-client privledge convo.
Otoh it is musk.
They could shut it off out of a sense of decency and respect, wtf kind of defense is this?
You appear to have lost the thread (or maybe you're replying to things directly from the newcomments feed? If so, please stop it.), we're talking about what sort of incriminating written statements the raid might hope to discover.
Moderation rules? Training data? Abuse metrics? Identities of users who generated or accessed CSAM?
Do you think that data is stored at the office? Where do you think the data is stored? The janitors closet?
My computer has a copy of all the source code I work on
Can your computer hold a database with trillions of tweets and sensitive user information? FFS
Are they after a database of trillions of tweets and sensitive user information? Is that all that could possibly progress the case?
Isn't the algorithm published monthly on GitHub since a couple of weeks ago? You think they are gonna find a commit message "feat(racism): improve antisemitism capabilities".
Not sure what they're gonna prove with this.
Email history caches. They could also have provided requirements to provide communications etc..
Since the release of (some of) the Epstein files, that kind of "let's do some crimes" email seems much more plausible.
Have you taken a look at the Epstein files lately? Rich people write out basically all of their crimes in triplicate because they don't fear the law.
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I don't understand your point.
In a further comment you are using a US-focused organization to define an English-language acronym. How does this relate to a French investigation?
US uses English - quite a lot actually.
As for how it relates, well if the French do find that "Grok's CSAM Plan" file, they'll need to know what that acronym stands for. Right?
Item one in that list is CSAM.
You are mistaken. Item #1 is "images of children of a pornographic nature".
Wheras "CSAM isn’t pornography—it’s evidence of criminal exploitation of kids." https://rainn.org/get-informed/get-the-facts-about-sexual-vi...
You're wrong - at least from the perspective of the commons.
First paragraph on Wikipedia
> Child pornography (CP), also known as child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and by more informal terms such as kiddie porn,[1][2][3] is erotic material that involves or depicts persons under the designated age of majority. The precise characteristics of what constitutes child pornography vary by criminal jurisdiction.[4][5]
Honestly, reading your link got me seriously facepalming. The whole argument seems to be centered around the fact that sexualizing children is disgusting, hence it shouldn't be called porn. While i'd agree that sexualizing kids is disgusting, denying that it's porn on that grounds is feels kinda... Childish? Like someone holding their ears closed and shouting loudly in order not to hear the words the adults around them are saying.
I think the idea is that normal porn can be consensual. Material involving children never can be.
Perhaps similar to how we have a word for murder that is different from "killing" even though murder always involves killing.
> First paragraph on Wikipedia
"...the encyclopedia anyone can edit." Yes, there are people who wish to redefine CSAM to include child porn - including even that between consenting children committing no crime and no abuse.
Compare and contrast Interpol. https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Crimes-against-children/A...
> The whole argument seems to be centered around the fact that sexualizing children is disgusting, hence it shouldn't be called porn.
I have no idea how anyone could reasonably draw that conclusion from this thread.
> have no idea how anyone could reasonably draw that conclusion from this thread.
> > Honestly, reading your link got me seriously facepalming. The whole argument seems to be centered around the fact that sexualizing children is disgusting, hence it shouldn't be called porn.
Where exactly did you get the impression from I made this observation from this comment thread?
Your interpol link seems to be literally using the same argument again from a very casual glance btw.
> We encourage the use of appropriate terminology to avoid trivializing the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.
> Pornography is a term used for adults engaging in consensual sexual acts distributed (mostly) legally to the general public for their sexual pleasure.
> Where exactly did you get the impression from I made this observation from this comment thread?
I assumed you expected us to know what you were referring to.
> Honestly, reading your link got me seriously facepalming.
You were unable to figure that out despite that sentence? Wow
Well, RAINN are stupid then.
CSAM is the woke word for child pornography, which is the normal.word for pornography involving children. Pornography is defined as material aiming to sexually stimulate, and CSAM is that.
> CSAM is the woke word for child pornography
I fear you could be correct.
CSAM is to child pornography as MAP is to pedophile. Both words used to refer to a thing without the negative connotation.
I'd say it was the other way around, MAP is an attempt at avoiding the stigma of pedophile, while CSAM is saying "pornography can be an entirely acceptable, positive, consensual thing, but that's not what 'pornography' involving children is, it's evidence of abuse or exploitation or..."
Well put.
The term CSAM was adopted in the UK following outrage over the "Gary Glitter Effect" - soaring offence rates driven by news of people caught downloading images of unspeakable abuse crimes getting mild sentences for mere child porn.
This is why many feel strongly about defending the term "CSAM" from those who seek to dilute it to cover e.g. mild Grok-style child porn.
The UK Govt. has announced plans to define CSAM in law.
> CSSM is to child pornography
CSSM?
Ah. You edited it to CSAM. Thanks.
Well, I'm sure CSAM has negative connotation. Our UK Govt. doesn't keep a database of all CSAM found by the police because its a positive thing.
Only people who are involved in CSAM arguments on the internet know what CSAM means. Ask some random person on the street if they know what CSAM means. Then ask them if they know what child porn means.
> Only people who are involved in CSAM arguments on the internet know what CSAM means.
I'm pretty sure you can add all the Governments, police depts and online safety organisations who use this term and rely upon it. Do include the 196 countries which depend on the Interpol CSAM database.
Dude just stop, you are being ridiculous now.
A distinction without a difference.
Even if some kid makes a video of themselves jerking off for their own personal enjoyment, unprompted by anyone else, if someone else gains access to that (eg a technician at a store or an unprincipled guardian) and makes a copy for themselves they're criminally exploiting the kid by doing so.
Seems like a pretty big difference. It's got to be worse to actually do something to somone in real life than not do that.
Just because there are different degrees of severity and different ways to offend doesn't make it not contraband.
I didn't argue they weren't. The person above me argued that the difference didn't matter. It does.
Not really, otherwise perpetrators will just "I was just looking at it, I didn't do anything as bad as creating it". Their act is still illegal.
There was a cartoon picture I remember seeing around 15+ years ago of Bart Simpson performing a sex act. In some jurisdictions (such as Australia), this falls under the legal definition.
> Not really, otherwise perpetrators
You don't think it's worse to molest a child than to not molest a child?
> A distinction without a difference.
Huge difference here in Europe. CSAM is a much more serious crime. That's why e.g. Interpol runs a global database of CSAM but doesn't bother for mere child porn.
This vindicates the pro-AI censorship crowd I guess.
It definitely makes it clear what is expected of AI companies. Your users aren't responsible for what they use your model for, you are, so you'd better make sure your model can't ever be used for anything nefarious. If you can't do that without keeping the model closed and verifying everyone's identities... well, that's good for your profits I guess.
It's not really different from how we treat any other platform that can host CSAM. I guess the main difference is that it's being "made" instead of simply "distributed" here
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Those images are generated from a training set, and it is already well known and reported that those training sets contain _real_ CSAM, real violence, real abuse. That "generated" face of a child is based on real images of real children.
Indeed, a Stanford study from a few years back showed that the image data sets used by essentially everybody contain CSAM.
Everybody else has teams building guardrails to mitigate this fundamental existential horror of these models. Musk fired all the safety people and decided to go all in on “adult” content.
What Stanford study?
If you mean the one titled "Generative ML and CSAM", I can't see any mention of your claim in that study. Care to explain?
https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/generative-ml-and-csam-...
> Uh, let's distinguish between generated images, however revolting, and actual child sexual abuse.
If you want. In many countries the law doesn’t. If you don’t like the law your billion dollar company still has to follow it. At least in theory.
> let's distinguish between generated images, however revolting, and actual child sexual abuse.
Can't because even before GenAI the "oh its generated in photoshop" or "they just look young" excuse was used successfully to allow a lot of people to walk free. the law was tightend in the early 2000s for precisely this reason
Pro-tip: if you are actively assisting someone in doing illegal things then you are an accomplice.
This is the wrong take.
Yes they could have an uncensored model, but then they would need proper moderation and delete this kind of content instantly or ban users that produce it. Or don’t allow it in the first place.
It doesn’t matter how CSAM is produced, the only thing that matters is that is on the platform.
I am flabbergasted people even defend this
It matters whether they attempt to block it or encourage it. Musk encouraged it, until legal pressure hit, then moved it behind a paywall so it's harder to see evidence.
Exactly!
Pretty disturbing to me how many people _on here_ are cheering for this. I thought that at least here of all places, there might be some nuanced discussion on "ok, I see why people are emotional about this topic in particular, but it's worth stepping back and putting emotions aside for a minute to see if this is actually reasonable overall..." but besides your comment, I'm not seeing much of that.
There's pro-AI censorship and then there's pro-social media censorship. It was the X offices that were raided. X is a social media company. They would have been raided whether it was AI that created the CSAM or a bunch of X contractors generating it mechanical-turk style.
I think the HN crowd is more nuanced than you're giving them credit for: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=chat+control
Let’s take a step back and remove AI generation from the conversation for a moment.
Did X do enough to prevent its website being used to distribute illegal content - consensual sexual material of both adults and children?
Now reintroduce AI generation, where X plays a more active role in facilitating the creation of that illegal content.
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The law is concrete on this.
In the UK, you must take "reasonable" steps to remove illegal content.
This normally means some basic detection (ie fingerprinting which is widely used from a collaborative database) or if a user is consistently uploading said stuff, banning them.
Allowing a service that you run to continue to generate said illegal content, even after you publicly admit that you know its wrong, is not reasonable.
that doesn't sound concrete to me, at all
Nothing in common law is "concrete", thats kinda the point of it.
Judges can evolve and interpret as they see fit, and this evolution is case law.
This is why in the US the supreme court can effectively change the law by issuing a binding ruling. (see 2nd amendment meaning no gun laws, rather than as written, or the recent racial profiling issues)
No law is concrete. Murder is killing with intent to kill. What concrete test shows if someone intended to kill? They say you have intent to kill if a reasonable person would expect the actions you took would result in killing.
It's about as concrete as one gets in the UK/US/Anglosphere law tradition.
if you can be sued for billions because some overbearing body, with a very different ideology to yours, can deem your moderation/censorship rules to be "unreasonable" then what you do is err on the side of caution and allow nearly nothing
this is not compatible with that line of business - perhaps one of the reasons nothing is done in Europe these days
> this is not compatible with that line of business - perhaps one of the reasons nothing is done in Europe these days
Except for 40% of all Big Tech products and a vast industrial network of companies, and the safe airplane building and decent financial services that don't take 3% of everything, then yeah, I guess nothing is done in Europe these days.
And wait, wasn't most of Google's AI stuff acquired from a European country?
Honestly, while Europe has a lot of problems, this notion that many US people have that literally nothing happens there is wildly off-base.
https://i.postimg.cc/vBhVsvFN/image.png
Sigh.
Like, this is a function of fragmented capital markets rather than anything else. Ryanair would 100% have a market cap of 50bn+ if it had a US listing.
Anyway, market cap is a really really bad metric for basically anything. Like Walmart has a market cap of over 1tn now, do you think its business has materially changed since 2021 (when it was half that)?
Meta has basically doubled since then, and again, their business is basically the same as it was 5 years ago.
As another example, Stripe is valued at about 100bn, while both OpenAI and Anthropic are 3.5-5x that. Which ones would you rather put your money in?
If we were to look at income mobility the numbers look much more different: https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2024/01/13/income-mobility-acro...
(apologies I figured the OECD would have better data but this was the best I could find).
So, on average it would take a low-income person half the time to become upper income in Denmark versus the US. Is this a better metric? Certainly for a low income person with unlimited mobility options.
They advertised you could use the tool to undress people, that's pretty clearly on the unreasonable side of the line
sigh
The vast majority of the EU is not common law, so "reasonable" in this instance is different.
What you describe already happens in the USA, that why MLB has that weird local TV blackout, why bad actors use copyright to take down content they don't like.
The reason why its so easy to do that is because companies must reasonably comply with copyright holder's requests.
Its the same with CSAM, distributing it doesn't have first amendment protection, knowingly distributing it is illegal. All reasonable steps should be taken to detect and remove CSAM from your systems to qualify for safe harbour.
sigh indeed
> Its the same with CSAM, distributing it doesn't have first amendment protection, knowingly distributing it is illegal. All reasonable steps should be taken to detect and remove CSAM from your systems to qualify for safe harbour.
nice try, but nobody is distributing or hosting CSAM in the current conversation
people trying to trick a bot to post bikini pictures of preteens and blaming the platform for it is a ridiculous stretch to the concept of hosting CSAM, which really is a transparent attack to a perceived political opponent to push for a completely different model of the internet to the pre-existing one, a transition that is as obvious as is already advanced in Europe and most of the so-called Anglosphere
> The vast majority of the EU is not common law, so "reasonable" in this instance is different.
the vast majority of the EU is perhaps incompatible with any workable notion of free speech, so perhaps America will have to choose whether it's worth it to sanction them into submission, or cut them off at considerable economic loss
it's not a coincidence that next to nothing is built in Europe these days, the environment is one of fear and stifling regulation and if I were to actually release anything in either AI or social networks I'd do what most of my fellow Brits/Europoors do already, which is to either sell to America or flee this place before I get big enough to show up in the euro-borg's radar
> nice try, but nobody is distributing or hosting CSAM in the current conversation
multiple agencies (Ofcom, irish police IWF, and what ever the french regulator is) have detected CSAM.
You may disagree with that statement, but bear in mind the definition of CSAM in the UK is "depiction of a child" which means that if its of a child or entirely generated is not relevant. This was to stop people claiming that massive cache of child porn they had was photoshoped.
in the USA CSAM is equally vaguely defined, but the case law is different.
> EU is perhaps incompatible with any workable notion of free speech
I mean the ECHR definition is fairly robust. But given that first amendment protection has effectively ended in the USA (the president is currently threatening to take a comedian to court for making jokes, you know, like the twitter bomb threat person in the UK) its a bit rich really. The USA is not the bastion of free speech it once was.
> either sell to America or flee this place before I get big enough to show up in the euro-borg's radar
Mate, as someone whos sold a startup to the USA, its not about regulations its about cold hard fucking cash. All major companies comply with EU regs, and its not hard. they just bitch about them so that the USA doesn't put in basic data protection laws, so they can continue to be monopolies.
This is not about AI but about censorship of a nonaligned social network. It's been a developing current in EU. They have basically been foaming at the mouth at the platform since it got bought.
It's about a guy who thinks posting child porn on twitter is hilarious and that guy happens to own twitter.
If it was about blocking the social media they'd just block it, like they did with Russia Today, CUII-Liste Lina, or Pavel Durov.
He said that child pornography is funny? Do you have a link by any chance?
Although I despise it, I respect your right to lie through your teeths.
I could maybe see this argument if we were talking about raiding Stable Diffusion or Facebook or some other provider of local models. But the content at issue was generated not just by Twitter's AI model, but on their servers, integrated directly into their UI and hosted publicly on their platform. That makes them much more clearly culpable -- they're not just enabling this shit, they're creating it themselves on demand (and posting it directly to victims' public profiles).
And importantly, this is clearly published by Grok, rather than the user, so in this case (obviously this isn't the US) but if it was I'm not sure Section 230 would apply.
I think having guardrails on your AI to not be able to produce this stuff is good actually. Also, Elon encourages this behavior socially through his posts so yeah he should face consequences.
It's not because it could generate CSAM. It's because when they found out it could generate CSAM, they didn't try to prevent that, they advertised it. Actual knowledge is a required compenent of many crimes.
> when they found out it could generate CSAM, they didn't try to prevent that, they advertised it.
Twitter publicly advertised it can create CSAM?
I have been off twitter for several years and I am open to being wrong here but that sounds unlikely.
There's no crowds or sides. It's all manufactured divisions because some of those who can't or don't want to create the technology are determined to control it. So they'll get you mad about what they need to, to justify actions that increase their control.
It's the same playbook that is used again and again. For war, civil liberties crackdowns, lockdowns, COVID, etc, etc: 0) I want (1); start playbook: A) Something bad is here, B) You need to feel X + Panic about it, C) We are solving it via (1). Because you reacted at B, you will support C. Problem, reaction, solution. Gives the playmakers the (1) they want.
We all know this is going on. But I guess we like knowing someone is pulling the strings. We like being led and maybe even manipulated because perhaps in the familiar system (which yields the undeniable goods of our current way of life), there is safety and stability? How else to explain.
Maybe the need to be entertained with drama is a hackable side effect of stable societies populated by people who evolved as warriors, hunters and survivors.
It's a bit of a leap to say that the model must be censored. SD and all the open image gen models are capable of all kinds of things, but nobody has gone after the open model trainers. They have gone after the companies making profits from providing services.
Again its all about reasonable.
Firstly does the open model explicitly/tacitly allow CSAM generation?
Secondly, when the trainers are made aware of the problem, do they ignore it or attempt to put in place protections?
Thirdly, do they pull in data that is likely to allow that kind of content to be generated?
Fourthly, when they are told that this is happening, do they pull the model?
Fithly, do they charge for access/host the service and allow users to generate said content on their own servers?
So far, yes, but as far as I can tell their case against the AI giants aren't based on it being for-profit services in any way.
The for-profit part may or may not be a qualifier, but the architecture of a centralized service means they automatically become the scene of the crime -- either dissemination or storing of illegal material. Whereas if Stability creates a model, and others use their model locally, the relationship of Stability to the crime is ad-hoc. They aren't an accessory.
Holding corporations accountable for their profit streams is "censorship?" I wish they'd stop passing models trained on internet conversations and hoarded data as fit for any purpose. The world does not need to boil oceans for hallucinating chat bots at this particular point in history.
What would be censorship is if those same companies then brigaded forums and interfered with conversations and votes in an effort to try to hide their greed and criminality.
Not that this would _ever_ happen on Hacker News. :|
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It's not about 'hosting a model'
What do you mean? What is it about then?
Publishing child porn
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You don't see any difference between Google Search and ChatGPT?
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That is not the same.
Correct comparison would be:
You provide a photo studio with an adjacent art gallery and allow people to shoot CSAM content there and then exhibit their work.
And the sign out front says "X-Ray camera photographs anyone naked — no age limits!"
And the camera is pointing out the window so you can use it on strangers walking by.
There is a point in law where you make something so easy to misuse that you become liable for the misuse.
In the USA they have "attractive nuisance", like building a kid's playground on top of a pit of snakes. That's so obviously a dumb idea that you become liable for the snake–bitten kids — you can't save yourself by arguing that you didn't give the kids permission to use the playground, that it's on private property, that the kids should have seen the snakes, or that it's legal to own snakes. No, you set up a situation where people were obviously going to get hurt and you become liable for the hurt.
Not knowing any better, and not having seen any of the alleged images, my default guess would be they used the exact same CSAM filtering pipeline already in place on X regardless of the origin of the submitted images.
They obviously didn’t really implement anything as you can find that content or involuntary nudes of other people, which is also an invasion of privacy, super easily
If the camera reliably inserts racist filters and the ballpen would add hurtful words to whatever you write, indeed, let them up their legal insurance.
Facebook offices should routinely raided for aiding and profitting from various scams propagated through ads on this platform.
Governments don't care about minor scams. Political speech against them, on the other hand...
That would apply to any and all social media though
Sounds awesome, when do we start?
Could not possibly agree more. When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? If it's your platform, you should be held responsible for all the illegal actions that it enabled.
If a magazine published a page with a scam, they're responsible. Same should apply to social media.
I literally don't care if it puts them out of business because the moderation would be too severe.
> When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse?
Section 230. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
As always, Washington doing the hard work of making sure corpos never need to fix anything, ever.
A sincere thank you, for providing me with the exact section of law that I disagree with.
Happy to help!
Governments prosecute violations of laws in ways that suit their interest. News at 11
lord some of the people on this site need their hard drives searched.
I was once closer to s free speech absolutist, but this has always been where that discussion leads. The lines were clearer decades ago because someone who interacted with CSAM was closely involved and their harm was easier to see in totality. Over time the gap between people who caused that harm and those that think they are not hurting anyone has widened. With AI it caused many of those that thought it was acceptable to consume illegal content to put another layer between their victims and offload the moral baggage.
To me it became clear when people here rejected any compromises on privacy and anonymous on device scanning of messages/data. Not because they rejected it but how they rejected it.
People here didn't say "yeah it's a real evil problem and e2e tech that we build makes it almost impossible to catch and helps it scale, so let's find the right tradeoff that minimizes privacy invasion". No. People here just mocked "think of the children" and said something along the lines of no amount of suffering can make any restriction to privacy be acceptable. The fact that 99% of our life is literally compromising our freedom for others they don't care.
To buellerbueller's killed comment, I totally feel it. it was a shocker when it turned out many of my fellow Russians got no problem with Putin's war and I bet that's what half of USA feels.
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It might be related to that the bitcoin metadata contains csam, I.e. if you have a full ledger stored you’re technically a criminal.
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its this elon cult, its "anything he does has to be defended" so you end up contorting yourself into defending actual csam!
Interesting. This is basically the second enforcement on speech / images that France has done - first was Pavel Durov @ Telegram. He eventually made changes in Telegram's moderation infrastructure and I think was allowed to leave France sometime last year.
I don't love heavy-handed enforcement on speech issues, but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard, just as a matter of keeping a diverse set of global standards, something that adds cultural resilience for humanity.
linkedin is not a replacement for twitter, though. I'm curious if they'll come back post-settlement.
>but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation, so I think it's interesting and probably to the overall good to have a country pushing on these matters very hard
Censorship increases homogeneity, because it reduces the amount of ideas and opinions that are allowed to be expressed. The only resilience that comes from restricting people's speech is resilience of the people in power.
You were downvoted -- a theme in this thread -- but I like what you're saying. I disagree, though, on a global scale. By resilience, I mean to reference something like a monoculture plantation vs a jungle. The monoculture plantation is vulnerable to anything that figures out how to attack it. In a jungle, a single plant or set might be vulnerable, but something that can attack all the plants is much harder to come by.
Humanity itself is trending more toward monoculture socially; I like a lot of things (and hate some) about the cultural trend. But what I like isn't very important, because I might be totally wrong in my likes; if only my likes dominated, the world would be a much less resilient place -- vulnerable to the weaknesses of whatever it is I like.
So, again, I propose for the race as a whole, broad cultural diversity is really critical, and worth protecting. Even if we really hate some of the forms it takes.
They were downvoted for completely misunderstanding the comment they replied to.
I really don't see reasonable enforcement of CSAM laws as a restriction on "diversity of thought".
This is precisely the point of the comment you are replying to: a balance has to be found and enforced.
In what world is generating CSAM a speech issue? Its really doing a disservice to actual free speech issues to frame it was such.
The point of banning real CSAM is to stop the production of it, because the production is inherently harmful. The production of AI or human generated CSAM-like images does not inherently require the harm of children, so it's fundamentally a different consideration. That's why some countries, notably Japan, allow the production of hand-drawn material that in the US would be considered CSAM.
If libeling real people is a harm to those people, then altering photos of real children is certainly also a harm to those children.
I'm strongly against CSAM but I will say this analogy doesn't quite hold (though the values behind it does)
Libel must be as assertion that is not true. Photoshopping or AIing someone isn't an assertion of something untrue. It's more the equivalent of saying "What if this is true?" which is perfectly legal
“ 298 (1) A defamatory libel is matter published, without lawful justification or excuse, that is likely to injure the reputation of any person by exposing him to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or that is designed to insult the person of or concerning whom it is published.
It doesn't have to be an assertion, or even a written statement.You're quoting Canadian law.
In the US it varies by state but generally requires:
A false statement of fact (not opinion, hyperbole, or pure insinuation without a provably false factual core).
Publication to a third party.
Fault
Harm to reputation
----
In the US it is required that it is written (or in a fixed form). If it's not written (fixed), it's slander, not libel.
The relevant jurisdiction isn't the US either.
Pictures are statement of fact: what is depicted exists. Naked pictures cause harm to reputation
That's not what we are discussing here. Even less when a lot of the material here is edits of real pictures.
> The point of banning real CSAM is to stop the production of it, because the production is inherently harmful. The production of AI or human generated CSAM-like images does not inherently require the harm of children, so it's fundamentally a different consideration.
Quite.
> That's why some countries, notably Japan, allow the production of hand-drawn material that in the US would be considered CSAM.
Really? By what US definition of CSAM?
https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
"Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create, distribute, or possess. "
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if pictures are speech, then either CSAM is speech, or you have to justify an exception to the general rule.
CSAM is banned speech.
Freedom of one starts where it confirms freedom of others.
Of course everybody is going to find a point when freedom of speech have to be limited. Otherwise, anyone can justify that cutting the head of their neighbour with a katana while dancing is part of an artistic performance, and absolute free speech is only possible if all artistic expression is given complete license. Those who pretend otherwise will have no ground to defend themselves on legal basis from being wiped out of existence by the very same logic.
Very different charges however.
Durov was held on suspicion Telegram was willingly failing to moderate its platform and allowed drug trafficking and other illegal activities to take place.
X has allegedly illegally sent data to the US in violation of GDPR and contributed to child porn distribution.
Note that both are directly related to direct violation of data safety law or association with a separate criminal activities, neither is about speech.
I like your username, by the way.
CSAM was the lead in the 2024 news headlines in the French prosecution of Telegram also. I didn't follow the case enough to know where they went, or what the judge thought was credible.
From a US mindset, I'd say that generation of communication, including images, would fall under speech. But then we classify it very broadly here. Arranging drug deals on a messaging app definitely falls under the concept of speech in the US as well. Heck, I've been told by FBI agents that they believe assassination markets are legal in the US - protected speech.
Obviously, assassinations themselves, not so much.
The issue is still not really speech.
Durov wasn't arrested because of things he said or things that were said on his platform, he was arrested because he refused to cooperate in criminal investigations while he allegedly knew they were happening on a platform he manages.
If you own a bar, you know people are dealing drugs in the backroom and you refuse to assist the police, you are guilty of aiding and abetting. Well, it's the same for Durov except he apparently also helped them process the money.
"I've been told by FBI agents that they believe assassination markets are legal in the US - protected speech."
I don't believe you. Not sure what you mean by "assassination markets" exactly, but "Solicitation to commit a crime of violence" and "Conspiracy to murder" are definitely crimes.
An assassination market, at least the one we discussed, works like this - One or more people put up a bounty paid out on the death of someone. Anyone can submit a (sealed) description of the death. On death, the descriptions are opened — the one closest to the actual circumstances is paid the bounty.
One of my portfolio companies had information about contributors to these markets — I was told by my FBI contact when I got in touch that their view was the creation of the market, the funding of the market and the descriptions were all legal — they declined to follow up.
Sounds like betting on Polymarket: will $person die this year? If you're going to kill him, you bet everything you have on yes right beforehand.
OK this sounds more like gamer dipshittery than anything serious.
In some shady corners of the internet I still see advertisements for child porn through Telegram, so they must be doing a shit job at it
I wouldn't equate the two.
There's someone who was being held responsible for what was in encrypted chats.
Then there's someone who published depictions of sexual abuse and minors.
Worlds apart.
Telegram isn't encrypted. For all the marketing about security, it has none, apart from TLS, and an optional "secret chat" feature that you have to explicitly select, only works with 2 participants and doesn't work very well.
They can read all messages, so they don't have an excuse for not helping in a criminal case. Their platform had a reputation of being safe for crime, which is because they just... ignored the police. Until they got arrested for that. They still turn a blind eye but not to the police.
ok thank you! I did not know that, I'm ashamed to admit! sort of like studying physics at university a decade later forgetting V=IR when I actually needed it for some solar install. I took "technical hiatus" about 5 years and recently coming back.
Anyway cut to the chase, I just checked out Mathew Greens post on the subject, he is on my list of default "trust what he says about cryptography" along with some others like djb, nadia henninger etc
Embarrased to say I did not realise, I should of known! 10+ years ago I used to lurk the IRC dev chans of every relevant cypherpunk project, including of text secure and otr-chat when I saw signal being made and before that was witnessing chats with devs and ian goldberg and stuff, I just assumed Telegram was multiparty OTR,
OOPS!
Long winded post because that is embarrassing (as someone who studied cryptography undergrad in 2009 mathematics, 2010 did postgrad wargames and computer security course and worse - whose word once about 2012-2013 was taken on these matters by activists, journalists, researchers with pretty knarly threat model - like for instance - some guardian stories and former researcher into torture - i'm also the person that wrote the bits of 'how to hold a crypto party' that made it a protocol without an organisation and made clear the threat model was anyone could be there, oops oops oops
Yes thanks for letting me know I hang my head in shame for missing that one or some how believing that one without much investigation, thankfully it was just my own personal use to contact like friend in the states where they aren't already on signal etc.
EVERYONE: DON'T TRUST TELEGRAM AS END TO END ENCRYPTED CHAT https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
Anyway as they say "use it or lose it" yeah my assumptions here no longer valid or considered to have educated opinion if I got something that basic wrong.
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In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”.
“Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk...
I think there's just as much evidence Clinton did as Musk. Gates on the other hand.
To my knowledge Musk asked to go but never actually went. Clinton, however, went a dozen or so times with Epstein on his private jet?
Has the latest release changed that narrative?
Yes. He went at least once in 2012, then asked to go again in 2013 and Epstein refused.
Oof.
Musk did ask to go after Epstein was sentenced.
I hate to be the “source” guy but can I get one?
The Epstein files
Additionally Clinton is listed several times on the Lolita express flight logs, Elon never
Elon didn't ask to go, he was invited multiple times
If Elon never asked to go, why do the Epstein files have an email from Elon to Jeff where Elon asks to go? Was it fabricated?
... Eh? This isn't about Musk's association with Epstein, it's about his CSAM generating magic robot (and also some other alleged dodgy practices around the GDPR etc).
>but I do really like a heterogenous cultural situation
Why isn't that a major red flag exactly?
Hi there - author here. Care to add some specifics? I can imagine lots of complaints about this statement, but I don't know which (if any) you have.
Maybe you could start by expanding on what you mean?
It's a statement that could be taken to favor xenophobia and isolationism.
France24 article on this: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260203-paris-prosecutor...
lol, they summoned Elon for a hearing on 420
"Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,
I wonder how he'll try to get out of being summoned. Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates?
It's voluntary
They'll make a judgement without him if he doesn't turn up.
An "audition en tant que témoin libre" is more or less the way for an investigation to give a chance to give their side of the story. Musk is not likely to be personally tried here.
> Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates?
Given his recent "far right" bromance that's probably not a good idea ;)
It hadn't occurred to me that might be the reason they picked 420
It’s unlikely, because putting the month first is a US thing. In France it would be 20/04, or “20 avril”.
Still, stoner-cultures in many countries in Europe celebrate 4-20, definitively a bunch of Frenchies getting extra stoned that day. It's probably the de-facto "international cannabis day" in most places in the world, at least the ones influenced by US culture which reached pretty far in its heyday.
Oh, that was 100% in my mind when I wrote that. I was wondering how explicit to be with Musk's celebrating being for someone's birthday.
Wouldn't celebrating hitler's birthday be good for his far-right bromance?
This isn't the 90s. The right doesn't give a shit about weed.
The right didn't give a shit about weed in the 80's or the 90's depending entirely upon who had it.
When Bernhard Hugo Goetz shot four teenagers on an NYC subway in the 80s, his PCP-laced marijuana use and stash back at his apartment came up in both sets of trials in the 80s and later in the 90s.
It was ignored (although not the alleged drug use of the teenagers) as Goetz was dubbed The Subway Vigilante and became a hero to the right.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...
His victims were upscaled to "super predators".
His victims? He was the victim. Shooting people who are robbing you (a detail you conveniently left out) is a good thing, which is why even a jury of NYC lefties acquitted him on the shooting charges. The only injustice here is that he did prison time for violating the clearly unconstitutional laws that required him to have a license for the gun.
edit: > Canty would later testify that the victims were en route to steal from video arcade machines in Manhattan
> Each of the four youths shot by Goetz was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident. Ten weeks prior to being shot, Cabey was arrested on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun in the Bronx, and he was released on $2,000 bail.[38] Cabey failed to appear at his next court date, resulting in an additional arrest warrant.
Sounds like predators to me.
> Shooting people who are robbing you
Check the civil trial transcripts, they were panhandling by multiple accounts.
> Each of the four youths .. was facing a trial or hearing on criminal charges at the time of the incident.
Minor stuff that was upgraded to a bench warrent after the shootings, ...
> Sounds like predators to me
That was how they were presented by much of the press until a good year after the first trial and Goetz's own description of his actions came out in the civile trial .. he one that awarded several million against him.
Thanks for providing a perfect foil for the comment about heavily politicized and media warped "justice" in the US.
Just minor stuff like robbing people with a shotgun. That was a nice use of the ... to hide the important part. And by their own admission they were on the way to commit more crimes. Yeah, I'm sure they were just panhandling.
We'll know he's gone too far if he has to take another "voluntary" trip to Israel
you would perhaps be shocked to learn how right-leaning the money folks behind the legal and legacy cannabis markets actually are. money is money.
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> Claim 4/20 is a holiday that he celebrates?
Most likely, it's Hitler's birthday after all
>The Paris prosecutor's office said it launched the investigation after being contacted by a lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms in X were likely to have distorted the operation of an automated data processing system.
I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime?
Distorted the operation how? By making their chatbot more likely to say stupid conspiracies or something? Is that even against the law?
Holocaust denial is illegal in France, for one, and Grok did exactly that on several occasions.
Also, csam and pornographic content using the likeness of unwilling people. Grok’s recent shit was bound to have consequences.
If the French suspected Grok/X of something as serious as CSAM, you can bet they would have mentioned it their statement. They didn't. Porn, they did.
The first two points of the official document, which I re-quote below, are about CSAM.
> complicité de détention d’images de mineurs présentant un caractère pédopornographique
> complicité de diffusion, offre ou mise à disposition en bande organisée d'image de mineurs présentant un caractère pédopornographique
[1]: https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...
> The first two points of the official document, which I re-quote below, are about CSAM.
Sorry, but that's a major translation error. "pédopornographique" properly translated is child porn, not child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The difference is huge.
Quote from US doj [1]:
> The term “child pornography” is currently used in federal statutes and is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a person less than 18 years old. While this phrase still appears in federal law, “child sexual abuse material” is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child. In fact, in 2016, an international working group, comprising a collection of countries and international organizations working to combat child exploitation, formally recognized “child sexual abuse material” as the preferred term.
Child porn is csam.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-06/child_sexual_abuse_materi...
> “child sexual abuse material” is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child.
Yes, CSAM is preferred for material depicting abuse reflecting resulting trauma.
But not for child porn such as manga of fictional children depicting no abuse and traumatising no child.
> Child porn is csam.
"CSAM isn’t pornography—it’s evidence of criminal exploitation of kids."
That's from RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organisation.
> That's from RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organisation.
For everyone to make up their own opinion about this poster's honesty, here's where his quote is from [1]. Chosen quotes:
> CSAM includes both real and synthetic content, such as images created with artificial intelligence tools.
> It doesn’t matter if the child agreed to it. It doesn’t matter if they sent the image themselves. If a minor is involved, it’s CSAM—and it’s illegal.
[1]: https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
I agree with that. I'd hope everyone would.
Dude, I litterally provided terminology notice from the DOJ. At this point I don't really know what else will convince you.
> I litterally provided terminology notice from the DOJ
You provided a terminology preference notice from the (non-lawmaking) DOJ containing a suggestion which the (lawmaking) Congress did not take up.
Thanks for that.
And if/when the French in question decide to take it up, I am sure we'll hear the news! :)
They are words for the same thing, it's like arguing they can't seize laptops because the warrant says computers.
Actually it's like arguing they can't seize all computers because the warrant only says laptops. I.e. correct.
Maybe US law makes a distinction, but in Europe there is no difference. Sexual depictions of children (real or not) is considered child pornography and will get you sent to the slammer.
On the contrary, in Europe there is a huge difference. Child porn might get you mere community service, a fine - or even less, as per the landmark court ruling below.
It all depends on the severity of the offence, which itself depends on the category of the material, including whether or not it is CSAM.
The Supreme Court has today delivered its judgment in the case where the court of appeals and district court sentenced a person for child pornography offenses to 80 day fines on the grounds that he had called Japanese manga drawings into his computer. Supreme Court dismiss the indictment.
The judgment concluded that the cartoons in and of itself may be considered pornographic, and that they represent children. But these are fantasy figures that can not be mistaken for real children.
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/swedish-supreme-court-exoner...
> The Supreme Court has today delivered its judgment
For future readers: the [Swedish] supreme court.
Is "it" even a thing which can be guilty of that?
The way chatbots actually work, I wonder if we shouldn't treat the things they say more or less as words in a book of fiction. Writing a character in your novel who is a plain parody of David Irving probably isn't a crime even in France. Unless the goal of the book as such was to deny the holocaust.
As I see it, Grok can't be guilty. Either the people who made it/set its system prompt are guilty, if they wanted it to deny the holocaust. If not, they're at worst guilty of making a particularly unhinged fiction machine (as opposed to the more restrained fiction machines of Google, Anthropic etc.)
GDPR has some stuff about biased algorithms. It's all civil, of course, no prison time for that, just fines.
> I'm not at all familiar with French law, and I don't have any sympathy for Elon Musk or X. That said, is this a crime?
GDPR and DMA actually have teeth. They just haven't been shown yet because the usual M.O. for European law violators is first, a free reminder "hey guys, what you're doing is against the law, stop it, or else". Then, if violations continue, maybe two or three rounds follow... but at some point, especially if the violations are openly intentional (and Musk's behavior makes that very very clear), the hammer gets brought down.
Our system is based on the idea that we institute complex regulations, and when they get introduced and stuff goes south, we assume that it's innocent mistakes first.
And in addition to that, there's the geopolitical aspect... basically, hurt Musk to show Trump that, yes, Europe means business and has the means to fight back.
As for the allegations:
> The probe has since expanded to investigate alleged “complicity” in spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organised group, and other offences, the office said in a statement Tuesday.
The GDPR/DMA stuff just was the opener anyway. CSAM isn't liked by authorities at all, and genocide denial (we're not talking about Palestine here, calm your horses y'all, we're talking about Holocaust denial) is a crime in most European jurisdiction (in addition to doing the right-arm salute and other displays of fascist insignia). We actually learned something out of WW2.
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Why "lol"?
420 is a stoner number, stoners lol a lot, thought of Elmo's failed joint smoking on JRE before I stopped watching
...but then other commenters reminded me there is another thing on the same date, which might have been more the actual troll at Elmo to get him all worked up
Well yes, if France24 was using "20 April 2026" as we write here, there would be no misunderstanding.
I believe people are looking too much into 20 April → 4/20 → 420
I believe the French format the date 20/4 ... and the time 16 h 20
April 20th most definitely is international stoners day. And I like what the French have done here!
I assume in France international stoners' day falls on the 4th of Duodevigintiber.
Thanks for the cultural perspective / reminder, yes that is definitely an American automatic translation
> lol, they summoned Elon for a hearing on 420
No. It's 20 April in the rest of the world: 204.
This sort of thing will be great for the SpaceX IPO :/
Especially if contracts with SpaceX start being torn up because the various ongoing investigations and prosecutions of xAI are now ongoing investigations and prosecutions of SpaceX. And next new lawsuits for creating this conflict of interest by merger.
Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations?
Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days.
Sadly the media calls the lawful use of a warrant a 'raid' but that's another issue.
The warrant will have detailed what it is they are looking for, French warrants (and legal system!) are quite a bit different than the US but in broad terms operate similarly. It suggests that an enforcement agency believes that there is evidence of a crime at the offices.
As a former IT/operations guy I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage, stuff that would hold internal discussions about the thing they were interested in, but that is just my guess based on the article saying this is related to the earlier complaint that Grok was generating CSAM on demand.
It is a raid in that it's not expected, it relies on not being expected, and they come and take away your stuff by force. Maybe it's a legal raid, but let's not sugar coat it, it's still a raid and whether you're guilty or not it will cause you a lot of problems.
I mean it's not like people get advanced notice of search warrants of that police ask pretty please. I agree that the way people use the term it's a fine usage but the person using is trying to paint a picture of a SWAT team busting down the door by calling it that.
> I'd guess they want on-prem servers with things like email and shared storage
For a net company in 2026? Fat chance.
Agreed its a stretch, my experience comes from Google when I worked there and they set up a Chinese office and they were very carefully trying to avoid anything on premises that could searched/exploited. It was a huge effort, one that wasn't done for the European and UK offices where the government was not an APT. So did X have the level of hygiene in France? Were there IT guys in the same vein as the folks that Elon recruited into DOGE? Was everyone in the office "loyal"?[1] I doubt X was paranoid "enough" in France not to have some leakage.
[1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.
Part of the prosecution will be to determine who put the content on the server.
Under GDPR if a company processes European user data they're obligated to make a "Record of Processing Activities" available on demand (umbrella term for a whole bunch of user-data / identity related stuff). They don't necessarily need to store them onsite but they need to be able to produce them. Saying you're an internet company doesn't mean you can just put the stuff on a server in the Caribbean and shrug when the regulators come knocking on your door
That's aside from the fact that they're a publicly traded company under obligation to keep a gazillion records anyway like in any other jurisdiction.
> publicly traded company
Which company is publicly traded?
> They don't necessarily need to store them onsite but they need to be able to produce them.
... within 30 days, right? The longest "raid" in history.
Who has on prem servers at an office location?
I'm guessing you're asking this because you have a picture of a 'server' as a thing in a large rack? Nearly every tech business has a bunch of machines, everything from an old desk top to last year's laptop, which have been reinstalled with Linux or *BSD and are sitting on the network behaving, for all intents and purposes, as a 'server.' (they aren't moving or rebooting or having local sessions running on them, Etc).
I've worked in several companies and have never seen this. Maybe for a small scale startup or rapidly growing early stage company. I would be pretty shocked to see an old desktop acting as a server nowadays.
Gather evidence against employees, use that evidence to put them under pressure to testify against their employer or grant access to evidence.
Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power. Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.
The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
Interesting point. There's a top gangster who can buy anything in the prison commissary; and then there's the warden.
No, state decides on the rules of the game any business is playing by.
I think both you and the comment you're replying to agree with the gp.
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
I remember something (probably linked from here), where the essayist was comparing Jack Ma, one of the richest men on earth, and Xi Jinping, a much lower-paid individual.
They indicated that Xi got Ma into a chokehold. I think he "disappeared" Ma for some time. Don't remember exactly how long, but it may have been over a year.
From what I hear, Ma made 1 speech critical of the government and Xi showed him his place. It was a few years, a year of total disappearance followed by slow rehab.
But China is different. Not sure most of western europe will go that far in most cases.
Trump kidnapped Maduro to show the latter his place, but then the US is neither China nor Western Europe so that does not count.
Arrested and the vast majority of Venezuela love that it happened.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/venezuela-survey-trump-ma...
The vast majority of France doesn't like Musk or the nonces that use GROK so let's not go there it's mob rule...
According to USA sources, USA actions are universally approved.
Color me surprised.
I mean, come on, we kidnapped him. Yes, he was arrested, but we went into another sovereign nation with special forces and yoinked their head of state back to Brooklyn.
To be fair he isn't legitimate head of state- he lost an election and is officially recognized as a usurper and the US had support of those who actually won.
Soke people argue Trump isn't a legitimate head of state. (One of those people is Trump, since he says he was already the president twice.) Should Xi kidnap him?
Please.
Even if that were true - I don't know nor care whether it is - what business is it of the US and Trump to mess around in other countries?
Large amounts of people call Joe Biden's election illegitimate. You could even say thats the official position of the current government. Would his kidnapping by a foreign nation be okay with you too?
And also killed over hundred people don't forget that.
He is not a legitimate head of state. He lost the election.
Ah, so the daily LARGE protests, in Venezuela, against his kidnapping are not indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela".
But the celebratory pics, which were claimed to be from Venezuela, but were actually from Miami and elsewhere (including, I kid you not, an attempt to pass off Argentine's celebrating a Copa America win) ... that is indicative of "the vast majority of Venezuela"?
If I were smarter, I might start to wonder why, if President Maduro was so unpopular, why would his abductors have to resort to fake footage - which was systematically outed & destroyed by independent journalists within 24 hours? I mean, surely, enough real footage should exist.
Probably better not to have inconvenient non-US-approved independent thoughts like that.
do you have links, all the chatgpt and gemini references I've seen show the large protest happened 1 time, not daily. And beyond that, the chatbots suggest it's overwhelming support for the arrest.
There are no news sites claiming large daily protests that you claim.
Rand Paul asked Rubio what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. Every US President from Truman onwards is a war criminal.
https://www.tampafp.com/rand-paul-and-marco-rubio-clash-over...
I never liked the Paul's and their opinions, but I must say that they usually speak according to their principles, rather than make up principles to fit what they want to happen.
To me, that's the distinction between political opponents I can respect, and, well, whatever we're seeing now.
The people of the US mostly wouldn’t like it the people of VZ mostly did and consider Maduro a thug who lost and stayed in power not their president. Ideologies like Paul have trouble with exceptions to their world view.
> the people of VZ mostly did and consider Maduro a thug who lost and stayed in power not their president.
You got this information from American media (or their allies')
In reality, Venezuelans flooded the streets in marches demanding the return of their president.
How many of them?
Ah, the "rules based disorder" on display: we do dis, you no do dis.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
It's legal to just put kids in foster care for no reason but to ruin someone's life?
In France it's possible without legal consequences (though immoral), if you call 119, you can push to have a baby taken from a family for no reason except that you do not like someone.
Claim that you suspect there may be abuse, it will trigger a case for a "worrying situation".
Then it's a procedural lottery:
-> If you get lucky, they will investigate, meet the people, and dismiss the case.
-> If you get unlucky, they will take the baby, and it's only then after a long investigation and a "family assistant" (that will check you every day), that you can recover your baby.
Typically, ex-wife who doesn't like the ex-husband, but it can be a neighbor etc.
One worker explains that they don't really have time to investigate when processing reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9y_-4kGQA and they have to act very fast, and by default, it is safer to remove from family.
The boss of such agency doesn't even take the time to answer to the journalists there...
-> Example of such case (this man is innocent): https://www.lefigaro.fr/faits-divers/var-un-homme-se-mobilis...
but I can't blame them either, it's not easy to make the right calls.
I can't believe theres a country out there that has recreated the DMCA but for child welfare
Canada and Germany are no different.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-mom-cfs-bac...
[1] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/ariha-family-visit-t...
This is very common, all "think of the children" laws are ripe for abuse. I'm convinced the secrecy around child abuse/child protective services is regularly abused both by abusive parents and abusive officials.
I mean, that's surely not as simple as you make it out to be.
Its not.
If you call 119 it gets assessed and potentially forwarded to the right department, which then assesses it again and might (quite likely will) trigger an inspection. The people who turn up have broad powers to seize children from the home in order to protect them from abuse.
In general this works fine. Unfortunately in some circumstances this does give a very low skilled/paid person (the inspector) a lot of power, and a lot of sway with judges. If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.
afaik similar systems are present in most western countries, and many of them - like France - are suffering with funding and are likely cutting in the wrong place (audit/rigour) to meet external KPIs. One of the worst ways this manifests is creating 'quick scoring' methods which can end up with misunderstandings (e.g. said a thing they didn't mean) ranking very highly, but subtle evidence of abuse moderate to low.
So while this is a concern, this is not unique to France, this is relatively normal, and the poster is massively exaggerating the simplicity.
In Sweden there is a additional review board that go through the decision made by the inspector. The idea is to limit the power that a single inspector has. In practice however the review board tend to rubber stamp decisions, so incompetence/malice still happens.
There was a huge mess right after metoo when a inspector went against the courts rulings. The court had given the father sole custody in a extremely messy divorce, and the inspector did not agree with the decision. As a result they remove the child from his father, in direct contrast to the courts decision, and put the child through 6 years of isolation and abuse with no access to school. It took investigative journalists a while, but the result of the case getting highlighted in media was that the inspector and supervisor is now fired, with two additoal workers being under investigation for severe misconduct. Four more workers would be under investigation but too long time has passed. The review board should have prevented this, as should the supervisor for the inspector, but those safety net failed in this case in part because of the cultural environment at the time.
Wait, so someone acted illegally (against law / courts) AND ALSO kidnapped a child for 6 years, and all that happened is that they're... fired?!
That's insane. Don't live in Sweden if you have kids, I guess!
It is fairly lenient. The review board, assigned political, do hold a bit of moral responsibility and got no punishment.
The reason I mentioned that this occurred right after metoo is that the cultural environment in Sweden was a bit unstable. Some people felt they could not trust the courts, which include people who worked as inspectors for the government. The review board is also selected politically, which may add a second explanation for why they permitted the misconduct. It was a very political time and everyone wanted to be perceived as being on the right side of history.
The case has been debate in Swedish parliament but the reaction has been to not really talk about it. People ignored the law and rules, and they shouldn't have done that, and that is then that.
> Don't live in Sweden if you have kids, I guess!
I heard of countries where parents are fond of having firearms around.
like Switzerland?
Good example, there are scandals around custody too!
“ If this person is bad at their job for whatever reason (incompetence/malice) it can cause a lot of problems. It is very hard to prove a person like this wrong when they are covering their arse after making a mistake.”
This seems guaranteed to occur every year then… since incompetence/malice will happen eventually with thousands upon thousands of cases?
> This seems guaranteed to occur every year then…
Not at all. This job will go to an "AI" any moment now.
/i
I've seen that during harassment; in one YouTube live the woman claimed:
but she was saying it normally, like any normal person does when they are angry.-> Whoops, someone talked with 119 to refer a "worrying" situation, baby removed. It's already two years.
There are some non-profit fighting against such: https://lenfanceaucoeur.org/quest-ce-que-le-placement-abusif...
That being said, it's a very small % obviously not let's not exaggerate but it's quite sneaky.
I heard there's a country where they can even SWAT you out of existence with a simple phone call, but it sounds so outrageous this must be some evil communist dictatorship third-world place. I really don't remember.
> Gather evidence against employees
I'm sure they have much better and quieter ways to do that.
Whereas a raid is #1 choice for max volume...
> We all forget that money is nice, but nation states have real power.
Elon has ICBMs, but France has warheads.
France has Ariane, which was good enough to send Jame Web Telescope to some Lagrange point with extra precision. It's all fun and and games until the French finish their cigarette, arms French Guyana and fire ze missiles.
France has a little more than that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_de_dissuasion
Wait, Sabu's kids were foster kids. He was fostering them. Certainly if he went to jail, they'd go back to the system.
I mean, if you're a sole caretaker and you've been arrested for a crime, and the evidence looks like you'll go to prison, you're going to have to decide what to do with the care of your kids on your mind. I suppose that would pressure you to become an informant instead of taking a longer prison sentence, but there's pressure to do that anyway, like not wanting to be in prison for a long time.
Yes but using such power unscrupulously is a great way to lose it.
>Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
>That was legal. Guess what, similar things would be legal in France.
lawfare is... good now? Between Trump being hit with felony charges for falsifying business records (lawfare is good?) and Lisa Cook getting prosecuted for mortgage fraud (lawfare is bad?), I honestly lost track at this point.
>The same way the president of the USA can order a Drone strike on a Taliban war lord, the president of France could order Musks plane to be escorted to Paris by 3 Fighter jets.
What's even the implication here? That they're going to shoot his plane down? If there's no threat of violence, what does the French government even hope to achieve with this?
fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged.
Again: the threat is so clear that you rarely have to execute on it.
>fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged.
That's not a credible threat because there's approximately 0% chance France would actually follow through with it. Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries. As we seen the fed, the best he could muster are some spurious prosecutions. France murdering someone would put them on par with Russia or India.
Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon.
If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Being clear for flying anywhere in the world is their job.
Would be quite stupid to loose it like truck driver DUI getting his license revoked.
>Don’t forget that captain of the plane makes decisions not Elon.
>If captain of the plane disobeyed direct threat like that from a nation, his career is going to be limited. Yeah Elon might throw money at him but that guy is most likely never allowed again to fly near any French territory. I guess whole cabin crew as well .
Again, what's France trying to do? Refuse entry to France? Why do they need to threaten shooting down his jet for that? Just harassing/pranking him (eg. "haha got you good with that jet lmao")?
I think in this hypothetical, France would want to force Musk's plane to land in French jurisdiction so they could arrest him.
I think the implication of the fighter jets is that they force the plane to land within a particular jurisdiction (where he is then arrested) rather than allowing it to just fly off to somewhere else. Similar to the way that a mall security guard might arrest a shoplifter; the existence of security guards doesn't mean the mall operators are planning to murder you.
Guards can plausibly arrest you without seriously injuring you. But according to https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/68361 there are no safe options if the pilot really doesn’t want to comply, so there is no “forcing” a plane to land somewhere, just making it very clear that powerful people really want you to stop and might be able to give more consequences on the ground if you don’t.
Planes are required to comply with instructions; if they don't they're committing a serious crime and the fighters are well within their international legal framework to shoot the plane down. They would likely escalate to a warning shot with the gun past the cockpit, and if the aircraft is large enough they might try to shoot out one engine instead of the wing or fuselage.
I suspect fighter pilots are better than commercial pilots at putting their much-higher-spec aircraft so uncomfortably close that your choices narrow down to complying with their landing instructions or suicidally colliding with one - in which case the fighter has an ejector seat and you don't.
I felt like you ruled out collision when you said they're not going to murder, though, granted, an accidental but predictable collision after repeatedly refusing orders is not exactly murder. I think the point stands, they have to be willing to kill or to back down, and as others said I'm skeptical France or similar countries would give the order for anything short of an imminent threat regarding the plane's target. If Musk doesn't want to land where they want him to, he's going to pay the pilot whatever it takes, and the fighter jets are going to back off because whatever they want to arrest him for isn't worth an international incident.
In the USA they would be allowed to down any aircraft not complying with national air interception rules, that would not be murder. It would be equivalent to not dropping a gun once prompted by an officer and being shot as a result.
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim_html...
> Not even Trump would resort to murder to get rid of his domestic adversaries
Don't give them ideas
> lawfare is... good now?
Well, when everything is lawfare it logically follows that it won't always be good or always be bad. It seems Al Capone being taken down for tax fraud would similarly be lawfare by these standards, or am I missing something? Perhaps lawfare (sometimes referred to as "prosecuting criminal charges", as far as I can tell, given this context) is just in some cases and unjust in others.
> Western liberal democracies just rarely use it.
Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
Though things like that can happen, which are very serious.
> defendents have rights and due process.
As they say: you can beat the rap but not the ride. If a state wants to make your life incredibly difficult for months or even years they can, the competent ones can even do it while staying (mostly) on the right side of the law.
We are not entirely sure the rule of law in America isn't already over.
People are putting a lot of weight on the midterm elections which are more or less the last line of defense besides a so far tepid response by the courts and even then consequence free defiance of court orders is now rampant.
We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
> We're really near the point of no return and a lot of people don't seem to notice.
A lot of people are cheering it (some on this very site).
> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
It's a nice sentiment, if true. ICE is out there, right now today, ignoring both individual rights as well as due process.
They were talking about western liberal democracies, though.
/s
> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
As we're seeing with the current US President... the government doesn't (have to) care.
In any case, CSAM is the one thing other than Islamist terrorism that will bypass a lot of restrictions on how police are supposed to operate (see e.g. Encrochat, An0m) across virtually all civilized nations. Western nations also will take anything that remotely smells like Russia as a justification.
> As we're seeing with the current US President
Well, that's particular to the US. It just shows that checks and balances are not properly implemented there, just previous presidents weren't exploiting it maliciously for their own gains.
The USA voted to destroy it's checks and balances consistently for several decades, that is why they don't work now.
>> they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.
That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.
When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.
> Sabu was put under pressure by the FBI, they threatened to place his kids into foster care.
This is pretty messed up btw.
Social work for children systems in the USA are very messed up. It is not uncommon for minority families to lose rights to parent their children for very innocuous things that would not happen to a non-oppressed class.
It is just another way for the justice/legal system to pressure families that have not been convicted / penalized under the supervision of a court.
And this isn't the only lever they use.
Every time I read crap like this I just think of Aaron Swartz.
One can also say we do too little for children who get mistreated. Taking care of other peoples children is never easy the decision needs to be fast and effective and no one wants to take the decision to end it. Because there are those rare cases were children dies because of a reunion with their parents.
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Offline syncing of outlook could reveal a lot of emails that would otherwise be on a foreign server. A lot of people save copies of documents locally as well.
Most enterprises have fully encrypted workstations, when they don't use VM where the desktop is just a thin client that doesn't store any data. So there should be really nothing of interest in the office itself.
French has a password disclosure law.
Even if you seize the workstation and obtain the password, the files are unlikely to be stored locally.
Whether you are a tech company or not, there's a lot of data on computers that are physically in the office.
Except when they have encryption, which should be the standard? I mean how much data would authorities actually retrieve when most stuff is located on X servers anyways? I have my doubts.
The authorities will request the keys for local servers and will get them. As for remote ones (outside of France jurisdiction) it depends where they are and how much X wants to make their life difficult.
Musk and X don't seem to be the type to care about any laws or any compelling legal requests, especially from a foreign government. I doubt the French will get anything other than this headline.
Getting kicked out of the EU is extremely unattractive for Twitter. But the US also has extradition treaties so that’s hardly the end of how far they can escalate.
I don't think US will extradite anybody to EU. Especially not white people with strong support of the current government.
White people already extradited to the EU during the current administration would disagree. But this administration has a limited shelf life, even hypothetically just under 3 years of immunity isn’t enough for comfort.
> But this administration has a limited shelf life, even hypothetically just under 3 years of immunity isn’t enough for comfort.
Depends on how much faith you have in the current administration. Russia limits presidents to two 6-year terms, yet Putin is in power since 2000.
Believe it or not, he's "just" off by two years.
Yes, he is in power since 2000 (1999, actually) but 1999-2012 he was Prime Minister. Only then he became President, which would make the end of his second term 2024. So the current one would be his third term (by the magic of changing the constitution and legal quibbles which effectively allow a president to stay in charge for four almost whole terms, AFAIU).
> don't think US will extradite anybody to EU
EU, maybe not. France? A nuclear state? Paris is properly sovereign.
> people with strong support of the current government
Also known as leverage.
Let Musk off the hook for a sweetheart trade deal. Trump has a track record of chickening out when others show strength.
> France? A nuclear state? Paris is properly sovereign.
That is true. But nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris. Because i’m just not seeing it.
> nukes are not magic. Explain to me how you imagine the series of events where Paris uses their nukes to get the USA to extradite Elon to Paris
Paris doesn’t need to back down. And it can independently exert effort in a way other European countries can’t. Musk losing Paris means swearing off a meaningful economic and political bloc.
No need for nukes. France can issue an Interpol Red Notice for the arrest of Elon Musk, for whatever excuse is found.
France doesn't extradite its citizens, even absolute scumbags like Roman Polanski. Someone like Musk has lots of lawyers to gum up extradition proceedings, even if the US were inclined to go along. I doubt the US extradition treaty would cover this unless the French could prove deliberate sharing of CSAM by Musk personally, beyond reckless negligence. Then again, after the Epstein revelations, this is no longer so far-fetched.
If I'm an employee working in the X office in France, and the police come in and show me they have a warrant for all the computers in the building and tell me to unlock the laptop, I'm probably going to do that, no matter what musk thinks
Witnesses can generally not refuse in these situations, that's plain contempt and/or obstruction. Additionally, in France a suspect not revealing their keys is also contempt (UK as well).
100%. Only additional troubles for yourself personally, for practically no benefit (nobody in the company is going to celebrate you).
The game changed when Trump threatened the use of military force to seize Greenland.
At this point a nuclear power like France has no issue with using covert violence to produce compliance from Musk and he must know it.
These people have proven themselves to be existential threats to French security and France will do whatever they feel is necessary to neutralize that threat.
Musk is free to ignore French rule of law if he wants to risk being involved in an airplane accident that will have rumours and conspiracies swirling around it long after he’s dead and his body is strewn all over the ocean somewhere.
You're implying that France is going to become a terrorist state? Because suspicious accidents do not sound like rule of law.
Counter-point. France has already kidnapped another social media CEO and forced him to give up the encryption keys. The moral difference between France (historically or currently) and a 3rd wold warlord is very thin. Also, look at the accusations. CP and political extremism are the classic go-tos when a government doesn't really have a reason to put pressure on someone but they really want to anyway. France has a very questionable history of honoring rule of law in politics. Putting political enemies in prison on questionable charges has a long history there.
"I can't see any difference between a country that has busted two companies that were known for hosting child porn, and a random cartel kingpin" isn't the flex you think it is
We are also talking about a country who wants to ban anonymous VPNs in the name of protecting the children and ask everyone to give their ID card to register account on Instagram, TikTok, etc.
OpenDNS is censored in France... so imagine
Killing foreigners outside of the own country has always been deemed acceptable by governments that are (or were until recently) considered to generally follow rule of law as well as the majority of their citizen. It also doesn't necessarily contradicts rule of law.
It's just that the West has avoided to do that to each other because they were all essentially allied until recently and because the political implications were deemed too severe.
I don't think however France has anything to win by doing it or has any interest whatsoever and I doubt there's a legal framework the French government can or want to exploit to conduct something like that legally (like calling something an emergency situation or a terrorist group, for example).
People were surprised when the US started just droning boats in the Caribbean and wiping out survivors, but then the government explained that it was law enforcement and not terrorism or piracy, so everyone stopped worrying about it.
Seriously, every powerful state engages in state terrorism from time to time because they can, and the embarrassment of discovery is weighed against the benefit of eliminating a problem. France is no exception : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
No difference in a strike like that and the strikes against fishing boats near Venezuela trump has ordered
> You're implying that France is going to become a terrorist state? Because suspicious accidents do not sound like rule of law.
Why not? After all, that's in vogue today. Trump is ignoring all the international agreements and rules, so why should others follow them?
Become? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
The second Donald Trump threatened to invade a nation allied with France is the second anyone who works with Trump became a legitimate military target.
Like a cruel child dismembering a spider one limb at a time France and other nations around the world will meticulously destroy whatever resources people like Musk have and the influence it gives him over their countries.
If Musk displays a sufficient level of resistance to these actions the French will simply assassinate him.
You got that backwards. Greenpeace for all its faults is still viewed as a group against which military force is a no-no. Sinking that ship cost France far more than anything they inflicted on Greenpeace. If anything, that event is evidence that going after Musk is a terrible idea.
PS Yes, Greenpeace is a bunch of scientifically-illiterate fools who have caused far more damage than they prevented. Doesn't matter because what France did was still clearly against the law.
I knew someone who was involved in an investigation (the company and person was the victim not the target of the investigation), their work laptop got placed into a legal hold, the investigators had access to all of their files and they weren't allowed delete to anything (even junk emails) for several years.
You don't get to say no to these things.
If you're a database administrator or similar working at X in France, are you going to going to go to jail to protect Musk from police with an appropriate warrant for access to company data? I doubt it.
I had the same thought - not just about raids, but about raiding a satellite office. This sounds like theater begging for headlines like this one.
They do what they can. They obviously can't raid the American office.
It sounds better in the news when you do a raid. These things are generally not done for any purpose other than to communicate a message and score political points.
These days many tech company offices have a "panic button" for raids that will erase data. Uber is perhaps the most notorious example.
>notorious
What happened to due process? Every major firm should have a "dawn raid" policy to comply while preserving rights.
Specific to the Uber case(s), if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?
At best there's an argument that it was "obstructing justice," but logging people off, encrypting, and deleting local copies isn't necessarily illegal.
> if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?
They had a sweet deal with Macron. Prosecution became hard to continue once he got involved.
Maybe.
Or they had a weak case. Prosecutors even drop winnable cases because they don't want to lose.
Macron's involvement with Uber is public information at this point.
[1]: https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2022/07/10/uber-files-...
[2]: https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/le-rapport-d-enquete-...
Thanks for the articles. I'm not disputing that Macron got lobbied for favors.
That said, the articles don't really address the discussion topic whether they committed illegal obstruction DURING raids.
To summarize, I'm separating
(1) Uber's creative operating activities (e.g., UberPop in France)
(2) from anti-raid tactics.
It looks like #1 had some fines (non-material) and arrests of Uber France executives.
However, I don't see a clear case established that Uber committed obstruction in #2. Uber had other raids in Quebec, India, the Netherlands,... with kill switches allegedly deployed 12+ times. I don't think there were ever consequences other than a compliance fine of 750 EUROS to their legal counsel in the Netherlands for "non-compliance with an official order". I doubt that's related to actions the day of the raid, but could be wrong.
It is aggressive compliance. The legality would be determined by the courts as usual.
> aggressive compliance
Put this up there with nonsensical phrases like "violent agreement."
;-)
violent agreement is when you're debating something with someone, and you end up yelling at each other because you think you disagree on something, but then you realize that you (violently, as in "are yelling at each other") agree on whatever it is. Agressive compliance is when the corporate drone over-zealously follows stupid/pointless rules when they could just look the other way, to the point of it being aggressively compliant (with stupid corporate mumbo jumbo).
Who knows.
I don't see aggressive compliance defined anywhere. Violent agreement has definitions, but it feels like it's best defined as a consulting buzzword.
This is a perfect way for the legal head of the company in-country to visit some jails.
They will explain that it was done remotely and whatnot but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.
It's not illegal to head a subsidiary of a company that did bad things, but I'm sure he will be intensely questioned. If he did something illegal, he may be punished.
> but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.
Elon would love it. So it won't happen.
Of course they will not lock the data but hide it, and put some redacted or otherwise innocent files in their place.
That sounds awfully difficult to do perfectly without personally signing up for extra jail time for premeditated violation of local laws. Like in that scenario, any reference to the unsanitized file or a single employee breaking omertà is proof that your executives and IT staff conspired to violate the law in a way which is likely to ensure they want to prosecute as maximally as possible. Law enforcement around the world hates the idea that you don’t respect their authority, and when it slots into existing geopolitics you’d be a very tempting scapegoat.
Elon probably isn’t paying them enough to be the lightning rod for the current cross-Atlantic tension.
These days you can probably ask an LLM to redact the files for you, so expect more of it.
True, but that’s going to be a noisy process until there are a few theoretical breakthroughs. I personally would not leave myself legally on the hook hoping that Grok faked something hermetically.
Nobody does that. It is either cooperation with law enforcement or remote lock (and then there are consequences for the in-country legal entity, probably not personally for the head but certainly for its existence).
This was a common action during the Russian invasion of Ukraine for companies that supported Ukraine and closed their operations in Russia.
It wasn't erasing as far I know, but locking all computers.
Covered here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-bosses-tol...
Or they just connect to a mothership with keys on the machine. The authorities can have the keys, but alas, they're useless now, because there is some employee watching the surveillance cameras in the US, and he pressed a red button revoking all of them. What part of this is illegal?
Obviously, the government can just threaten to fine you any amount, close operations or whatever, but your company can just decide to stop operating there, like Google after Russia imposed an absurd fine.
You know police are not all technically clueless, I hope. The French have plenty of experience dealing with terrorism, cybercrime, and other modern problems as well as the more historical experience of being conquered and occupied, I don't think it's beyond them to game out scenarios like this and preempt such measures.
As France discovered the hard way in WW2, you can put all sorts of rock-solid security around the front door only to be surprised when your opponent comes in by window.
It's sad to see this degree of incentives perverted, over adhering to local laws.
How do you know this?
From HN, of course! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32057651
> Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that.
This would be done in parallel for key sources.
There is a lot of information on physical devices that is helpful, though. Even discovering additional apps and services used on the devices can lead to more discovery via those cloud services, if relevant.
Physical devices have a lot of additional information, though: Files people are actively working on, saved snippets and screenshots of important conversations, and synced data that might be easier to get offline than through legal means against the providers.
In outright criminal cases it's not uncommon for individuals to keep extra information on their laptop, phone, or a USB drive hidden in their office as an insurance policy.
This is yet another good reason to keep your work and personal devices separate, as hard as that can be at times. If there's a lawsuit you don't want your personal laptop and phone to disappear for a while.
Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data. There's also the possibility of the MDM software making it impossible to decrypt if given a remote signal. Even if you image the drive, you can't image the secure enclave so if it is wiped it's impossible to retrieve.
> Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data.
In these situations, refusing to provide those keys or passwords is an offense.
The employees who just want to do their job and collect a paycheck aren’t going to prison to protect their employer by refusing to give the password to their laptop.
The teams that do this know how to isolate devices to avoid remote kill switches. If someone did throw a remote kill switch, that’s destruction of evidence and a serious crime by itself. Again, the IT guy isn’t going to risk prison to wipe company secrets.
I read somewhere that Musk (or maybe Theil) companies have processes in place to quickly offload data from a location to other jurisdictions (and destroy the local data) when they detect a raid happening. Don't know how true it is though. The only insight I have into their operations was the amazing speed by which people are badged in and out of his various gigafactories. It "appears" that they developed custom badging systems when people drive into gigafactories to cut the time needed to begin work. If they are doing that kind of stuff then there has got to be something in place for a raid. (This is second hand so take with a grain of salt)
EDIT: It seems from other comments that it may have been Uber I was reading about. The badging system I have personally observed outside the Gigafactories. Apologies for the mixup.
That is very much illegal in the US
It wouldn't be the first time a Musk company knowingly does something illegal.
I think as far as Musk is concerned, laws only apply in the "don't get caught" sense.
Everyone defines their own moral code and trusts that more than the laws of the land. Don't tell me you've never gone over the speed limit, or broken one of the hundreds of crazy laws people break in everyday life out of ignorance.
The speed limit is not a law the same way "don't murder" is a law. And "don't destroy evidence of a crime" is a lot closer to "don't murder", legally speaking.
give any country a gift / investment of 100B USD
-> crimes ? what crimes ?
They do have some physical records, but it would be mostly investigators producing a warrant and forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
> forcing staff to hand over administrative credentials to allow forensic data collection.
What, thinking HQ wouldn't cancel them?
I'm sure an intelligent person such as yourself can think of ways around that possibility.
Nope. But I'm sure a more intelligent person such as yourself can tell me! :)
> Are they just seizing employee workstations?
Yes.
Why don't you think they have file cabinets and paper records?
Usually they steal all electronic devices.
Gather evidence.
I assume that they have opened a formal investigation and are now going to the office to collect/perloin evidence before it's destroyed.
Most FAANG companies have training specifically for this. I assume X doesn't anymore, because they are cool and edgy, and staff training is for the woke.
If that training involves destroying evidence or withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow it.
What a strange assumption. The training is "summon the lawyers immediately", "ensure they're accompanied at all times while on company premises", etc.
That can start with self deleting messages if you are under court order, and has happens before:
“Google intended to subvert the discovery process, and that Chat evidence was ‘lost with the intent to prevent its use in litigation’ and ‘with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation.’”
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37...
VW is another case where similar things happens:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-12/vw-offici...
The thing is: Companies don’t got to jail, employees do.
Right, but you are confusing a _conspiracy_ with staff training.
I didn't work anywhere near the level, or anything thats dicey where I needed to have a "oh shit delete everything the Feds are here" plan. Which is a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (I'm not sure what the common law/legal code name for that is)
The stuff I worked on was legal and in the spirit of the law, along with a paper trail (that I also still have) proving that.
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A raid with a warrant skips all that.
Not really? If the people want to get through the locked doors throughout the office, they'll need someone to let them through the doors. At least where I work, the receptionists don't have that access. They need to call people who do have universal door access to let them in. Unless the cops just want to battering-ram their way through all the doors for the fun of it...
Also, a raid without a warrant is not a raid. It's a friendly visit to someone's office.
Nope. With a warrant you break down the door if they don't cooperate. They do find it fun. They won't accept your stalling tactics.
"don't cooperate"? "Yes sir, let me call the people downstairs who can help you." is not stalling.
If they're so impatient, are they going to somehow hack the badge-controlled elevators to make them go where they want?
>withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow.
Prosecution must present a valid search warrant for *specific* information. They don't get a carte blanche, so uber way is correct. lock computers and lets the courts to decide.
In common law/4th amendment, kinda. Once you have a warrant, then the word reasonable comes into play. Its reasonable to assume that the data you want is on the devices of certain people. if incidental data/evidence is also procured that was reasonably likely to contain said data, then its fair game
In the civil code, its quite possibly different. The french have had ~ 3 constitutions in the last 80 years. The also dont have the concept of case history. who knows what the law actually is.
The training is very much the opposite.
mine had a scene where some bro tried to organise the resistance. A voice over told us that he was arrested for blocking a legal investigation and was liable for being fired due to reputational damage.
X's training might be like you described, but everywhere else that is vaguely beholden to law and order would be opposite.
Why is this the most upvoted question? Obsessing over pedantry rather than the main thrust of what's being discussed
Guess that will be a SpaceX problem soon enough. What a mess.
I wonder if the recent announcement spurred them into making a move now rather than later.
The merger was most likely now because they have to do it before the IPO. After the IPO, there’s a whole process to force independent evaluation and negotiation between two boards / executives, which would be an absolute dumpster fire where Musk controls both.
When they’re both private, fine, whatever.
First thing a public spacex would want to do is sell off all the non-spacex crap
A public SpaceX will still be run by Musk. A public SpaceX would have to sell assets like X for a huge loss given its debt load, which would also take a propaganda machine out of Musk’s hands.
They’re stuck with those assets.
How was that move legal anyway? Like... a lot of people and governments gave Musk money to develop, build and launch rockets. And now he's using it to bail out his failing social media network and CSAM peddling AI service.
Once he launched the rockets he can do whatever he wants with the profit. And he wants to train Grok.
Money comes with strings, such as when forming an ongoing relationship with a company you expect them to not merge with other companies you are actively prosecuting. I suspect the deal is going so fast to avoid some sort of veto being prepared. Once SpaceX and xAI are officially the same, you lose the ability to inflict meaningful penalties on xAI without penalizing yourself as an active business partner with SpaceX.
Was it a grant or a purchase? If I buy a pizza from the pizza shop, it costs them $10 to make, I pay $11, the $1 is profit and the owner can do what he wants with it. But if I get a grant from NLnet I have to spend it on what the grant proposal says. Though a lot of NLnet grants are for living costs while doing a project, so I can do what I like for that time if the project gets done.
CSAM in space! At least he isn’t reinventing the cross town bus.
The lack of legal/regulatory reaction US side on CSAM is pretty bewildering. And ominously mirrors the Epstein saga - other countries seem to be moving fast while US seems to be trying very hard to not move at all
I’m sure Musk is going to say this is about free speech in an attempt to gin up his supporters. It isn’t. It’s about generating and distributing non consensual sexual imagery, including of minors. And, when notified, doing nothing about it. If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this.
(it’ll be interesting to see if this discussion is allowed on HN. Almost every other discussion on this topic has been flagged…)
> when notified, doing nothing about it
When notified, he immediately:
Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people, but it seems the media is ignoring that and focussing their ire only on Musk's companies...You and I must have different definitions of the word “immediately”. The article you posted is from January 15th. Here is a story from January 2nd:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98p1r4e6m8o
> Have the other AI companies followed suit? They were also allowing users to undress real people
No they weren’t? There were numerous examples of people feeding the same prompts to different AIs and having their requests refused. Not to mention, X was also publicly distributing that material, something other AI companies were not doing. Which is an entirely different legal liability.
> Which is an entirely different legal liability.
In UK, it is entirely the same. Near zero.
Making/distributing a photo of a non-consenting bikini-wearer is no more illegal when originated by computer in bedroom than done by camera on public beach.
I thought this was about France
It was... until it diverted. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46870196
The part of X’s reaction to their own publishing I’m most looking forward to seeing in slow-motion in the courts and press was their attempt at agency laundering by having their LLM generate an apology in first-person.
“Sorry I broke the law. Oops for reals tho.”
Kiddie porn but only for the paying accounts!
Who's going to provide their payment details and then generate kiddie porn?
This is a pretty pragmatic move by Musk.
It's basically a honey trap, the likes of which authorities legitimately use to catch criminals.
Nah, Musk put out a public challenge in January asking anyone able to generate illegal / porno images to reply and tell him how they were able to bypass the safegaurds. Thousands of people tried and failed. I think the most people were able to get is stuff you'd see in an R-rated movie, and even then only for fictional requests as the latest versions of Grok refuse to undress or redress any real person into anything inappropriate.
Here's the mentioned thread: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011527119097249996
Who is going to generate kiddie porn on it in the first place? It's not as if a a lack of a credit card is preventing the authorities from figuring anything out. This is beyond ridiculous.
The other LLMs probably don't have the training data in the first place.
Er...
"Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset"
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/.
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> If anything it should be an embarrassment that France are the only ones doing this.
As mentioned in the article, the UK's ICO and the EC are also investigating.
France is notably keen on raids for this sort of thing, and a lot of things that would be basically a desk investigation in other countries result in a raid in France.
Full marks to France for addressing its higher than average rate of unemployment.
/i
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Why would X have offices in France? I'm assuming it's just to hire French workers? Probably leftover from the Pre Acquisition era.
Or is there any France-specific compliance that must be done in order to operate in that country?
X makes its money selling advertising. France is the obvious place to have an office selling advertising to a large European French-speaking audience.
Yes, Paris is an international capital and centrally located for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Many tech companies have sales offices there.
I suppose those are the offices from SpaceX now that they merged.
So France is raiding offices of US military contractor?
How is that relevant? Are you implying that being a US military contractor should make you immune to the laws of other countries that you operate in?
The onus is on the contractor to make sure any classified information is kept securely. If by raiding an office in France a bunch of US military secrets are found, it would suggest the company is not fit to have those kind of contracts.
I know it's hard to grasp for you. But in France, french laws and jurisdiction applies, not those of the United States
It's not at all hard to grasp for me. I think it's great actually.
To be fair, it is common confusion. In other comments, you see people arguing by US constitution.
Even if it is, being affiliated with the US military doesn't make you immune to local laws.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/us...
So what?
Another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872894
I remember encountering questionable hentai material (by accident) back in the Twitter days. But back then twitter was a leftist darling
I think there's a difference between "user uploaded material isn't properly moderated" and "the sites own chatbot generates porn on request based on images of women who didn't agree to it", no?
But it doesn’t. Group has always had Aggressive filters on sexual content just like every other generative AI tool.
People who have found exploits, just like other generative AI tool.
Not really?
Did you report it or just let it continue doing harm?
Hentai has different legal status to realistic pictures of real people
Define leftist for back in the twitter days? I used twitter early in release. Don’t recall it being a faction specific platform.
I think they're using it in the American sense, which means "anywhere in the political spectrum of the leftmost 60% of the population".
> The prosecutor's office also said it was leaving X and would communicate on LinkedIn and Instagram from now on.
I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms, and start treating the communication with the public that funds your existence in different terms. The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.
I agree with you. In my opinion it was already bad enough that official institutions were using Twitter as a communication platform before it belonged to Musk and started to restrict visibility to non-logged in users, but at least Twitter was arguably a mostly open communication platform and could be misunderstood as a public service in the minds of the less well-informed. However, deciding to "communicate" at this day and age on LinkedIn and Instagram, neither of which ever made a passing attempt to pretend to be a public communications service, boggles the mind.
> official institutions were using Twitter as a communication platform before it belonged to Musk and started to restrict visibility to non-logged in users
... thereby driving up adoption far better than Twitter itself could. Ironic or what.
>I mean, perhaps it's time to completely drop these US-owned, closed-source, algo-driven controversial platforms
I think we are getting very close the the EU's own great firewall.
There is currently a sort of identity crisis in the regulation. Big tech companies are breaking the laws left and right. So which is it?
- fine harvesting mechanism? Keep as-is.
- true user protection? Blacklist.
Or the companies could obey the law
This. We don't have to accept that they behave that way. They enter our economies so they need to adhere to our laws. And we can fine them. No one wants to lose Europe as a market, even if all the haters call us a shithole.
I support the EU harvesting money from evil companies
In an ideal world they'd just have an RSS feed on their site and people, journalists, would subscribe to it. Voilà!
This. What a joke. Im still waiting on my tax refund from NYC for plastering "twitter" stickers on every publicly funded vehicle.
>The goal should be to reach as many people, of course, but also to ensure that the method and medium of communication is in the interest of the public at large.
Who decides what communication is in the interest of the public at large? The Trump administration?
You appear to have posted a bit of a loaded question here, apologies if I'm misinterpreting your comment. It is, of course, the public that should decide what communication is of public interest, at least in a democracy operating optimally.
I suppose the answer, if we're serious about it, is somewhat more nuanced.
To begin, public administrations should not get to unilaterally define "the public interest" in their communication, nor should private platforms for that matter. Assuming we're still talking about a democracy, the decision-making should be democratically via a combination of law + rights + accountable institutions + public scrutiny, with implementation constraints that maximise reach, accessibility, auditability, and independence from private gatekeepers. The last bit is rather relevant, because the private sector's interests and the citizen's interests are nearly always at odds in any modern society, hence the state's roles as rule-setter (via democratic processes) and arbiter. Happy to get into further detail regarding the actual processes involved, if you're genuinely interested.
That aside - there are two separate problems that often get conflated when we talk about these platforms:
- one is reach: people are on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, so publishing there increases distribution; public institutions should be interested in reaching as many citizens as possible with their comms;
- the other one is dependency: if those become the primary or exclusive channels, the state's relationship with citizens becomes contingent on private moderation, ranking algorithms, account lockouts, paywalls, data extraction, and opaque rule changes. That is entirely and dangerously misaligned with democratic accountability.
A potential middle position could be ti use commercial social platforms as secondary distribution instead of the authoritative channel, which in reality is often the case. However, due to the way societies work and how individuals operate within them, the public won't actually come across the information until it's distributed on the most popular platforms. Which is why some argue that they should be treated as public utilities since dominant communications infrastructure has quasi-public function (rest assured, I won't open that can of worms right now).
Politics is messy in practice, as all balancing acts are - a normal price to pay for any democratic society, I'd say. Mix that with technology, social psychology and philosophies of liberty, rights, and wellbeing, and you have a proper head-scratcher on your hands. We've already done a lot to balance these, for sure, but we're not there yet and it's a dynamic, developing field that presents new challenges.
Public institutions can use any system they want and make the public responsible for reading it.
I remember in some countries there's an official government newspaper. Laws reference publishing things in this paper (e.g. tax rate changes, radio frequency allocations) and the law is that you must follow it once it's published.
In practice the information is disseminated through many channels once it's released in the official newspaper. Mass media reports on anything widely relevant, niche media reports on things nichely relevant, and there's direct communication with anyone directly affected (recipient of a radio frequency allocation) so nobody really subscribes to the official government newspaper, but it's there and if there was a breakdown of communication systems that would be the last resort to ensure you are getting government updates.
This is a show of resolve.
"Uh guys, little heads up: there are some agents of federal law enforcement raiding the premises, so if you see that. That’s what that is."
Once you've worked long enough in the software industry, you start to understand it's all just a fully planned economy.
Finally, someone is taking action against the CSAM machine operating seemingly without penalty.
It's also a massive problem on Meta. Hopefully this action isn't just a one-off.
Does Meta publish it themselves or is it user–generated?
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CSAM does not have a universal definition. In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response. If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.
No abuse of a real minor is needed.
> CSAM does not have a universal definition.
Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning.
> In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response.
No corroboration found on web. Quite the contrary, in fact:
"Sweden does not have a legislative definition of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)"
https://rm.coe.int/factsheet-sweden-the-protection-of-childr...
> If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.
> No abuse of a real minor is needed.
Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is considered a record of a crime, emphasizing that its existence represents the abuse of a child."
Putting a bikini on a photo of a child may be distasteful abuse of a photo, but it is not abuse of a child - in any current law.
In Swedish:
https://www.regeringen.se/contentassets/5f881006d4d346b199ca...
> Även en bild där ett barn t.ex. genom speciella kameraarrangemang framställs på ett sätt som är ägnat att vädja till sexualdriften, utan att det avbildade barnet kan sägas ha deltagit i ett sexuellt beteende vid avbildningen, kan omfattas av bestämmelsen.
Which translated means that the children does not have to be apart of sexual acts and indeed undressing a child using AI could be CSAM.
I say "could" because all laws are open to interpretation in Sweden and it depends on the specific image. But it's safe to say that many images produces by Grok are CSAM by Swedish standards.
Thanks, but CSAM includes abuse, and the offence of your quote (via Google Translate) does not.
Your quote's offence looks like child porn. Max. 2 years jail. CSAM goes up to life, at least here in UK. Quite a difference.
> But it's safe to say that many images produces by Grok are CSAM by Swedish standards.
So the Govt/police would have acted against Grok, right? Have they?
" Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning. "
Are you from Sweden? Why do you think the definition was clear across the world and not changed "before AI"? Or is it some USDefaultism where Americans assume their definition was universal?
> Are you from Sweden?
No. I used this interweb thing to fetch that document from Sweden, saving me a 1000-mile walk.
> Why do you think the definition was clear across the world and not changed "before AI"?
I didn't say it was clear. I said there was no disagreement.
And I said that because I saw only agreement. CSAM == child sexual abuse material == a record of child sexual abuse.
"No. I used this interweb thing to fetch that document from Sweden, saving me a 1000-mile walk."
So you cant speak Swedish, yet you think you grasped the Swedish law definition?
" I didn't say it was clear. I said there was no disagreement. "
Sorry, there are lots of different judical definitions about CSAM in different countries, each with different edge cases and how to handle them. I very doubt it, there is a disaggrement.
But my guess about your post is, that an American has to learn again there is a world outside of the US with different rules and different languages.
> So you cant speak Swedish, yet you think you grasped the Swedish law definition?
I guess you didn't read the doc. It is in English.
I too doubt there's material disagreement between judicial definitions. The dubious definitions I'm referring to are the non-judicial fabrications behind accusations such as the root of this subthread.
" I too doubt there's material disagreement between judicial definitions. "
Sources? Sorry , your gut feeling does not matter. Esspecially if you are not a lawyer
I have no gut feeling here. I've seen no disagreeing judicial definitions of CSAM.
Feel free to share any you've seen.
> Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is [...]"
Please don't use the "knowledge" of LLMs as evidence or support for anything. Generative models generate things that have some likelihood of being consistent with their input material, they don't "know" things.
Just last night, I did a Google search related to the cell tower recently constructed next to our local fire house. Above the search results, Gemini stated that the new tower is physically located on the Facebook page of the fire department.
Does this support the idea that "some physical cell towers are located on Facebook pages"? It does not. At best, it supports that the likelihood that the generated text is completely consistent with the model's input is less than 100% and/or that input to the model was factually incorrect.
Thanks. For a moment I slipped and fell for the "AI" con trick :)
This is the actual law (Brottsbalken 16:10a)
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...
A person who
1. depicts a child in a pornographic image,
2. disseminates, transfers, provides, exhibits, or otherwise makes such an image of a child available to another person,
3. acquires or offers such an image of a child,
4. facilitates contacts between buyers and sellers of such images of children or takes any other similar measure intended to promote trade in such images, or
5. possesses such an image of a child or views such an image to which he or she has gained access
shall be sentenced for a child pornography offense to imprisonment for at most two years.
Then there's Proposition 2009/10:70, which is a clarifying document on how the law should be interpreted:
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/prop...
Let me quote (translated):
"To depict a child in a pornographic image entails the production of such an image of a child. An image can be produced in various ways, e.g., by photographing, filming, or drawing a real child. Through various techniques, more or less artificial images can also be created. For criminal liability, it is not required that the image depicts a real child; images of fictitious children are also covered. New productions can also be created by reproducing or manipulating already existing depictions, for example, by editing film sequences together in a different order or by splicing an image of a child’s head onto an image of another child’s body."
Not only that. This law exists like this because of a EU directive.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2011/93/oj/eng
Let me quote again: Pay attention to c.iv specifically:
(c) ‘child pornography’ means:
(i) any material that visually depicts a child engaged in real or simulated sexually explicit conduct;
(ii) any depiction of the sexual organs of a child for primarily sexual purposes;
(iii) any material that visually depicts any person appearing to be a child engaged in real or simulated sexually explicit conduct or any depiction of the sexual organs of any person appearing to be a child, for primarily sexual purposes; or
(iv) realistic images of a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct or realistic images of the sexual organs of a child, for primarily sexual purposes;
Thanks. I paid attention but still didn't see how:
realistic images of a child engaged in sexually explicit conduct or realistic images of the sexual organs of a child, for primarily sexual purposes;
covers the example in question:
If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.
How about you?
> This is the actual law (Brottsbalken 16:10a)
Thanks, but what "the" actual law? Your one doesn't contain the purported Swedish CSAM definition, or any for that matter. Nor does it even mention abuse.
> a child pornography offense to imprisonment for at most two years.
That underlines the extreme difference w.r.t. CSAM, which can get you life, at least here in UK.
> - in any current law.
It has been since at least 2012 here in Sweden. That case went to our highest court and they decided a manga drawing was CSAM (maybe you are hung up on this term though, it is obviously not the same in Swedish).
The holder was not convicted but that is besides the point about the material.
> It has been since at least 2012 here in Sweden. That case went to our highest court
This one?
"Swedish Supreme Court Exonerates Manga Translator Of Porn Charges"
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/swedish-supreme-court-exoner...
It has zero bearing on the "Putting a bikini on a photo of a child ... is not abuse of a child" you're challenging.
> and they decided a manga drawing was CSAM
No they did not. They decided "may be considered pornographic". A far lesser offence than CSAM.
You are both arguing semantics. A pornographic image of a child. That's illegal no matter what it's called. I say killing, you say murder, same law though, still illegal.
> I say killing, you say murder, same law though
Not in any European law I know. See suicide and manslaughter.
"Sweden does not have a legislative definition of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)"
Because that is up to the courts to interpret. You cant use your common law experience to interpret the law in other countries.
> You cant use your common law experience to interpret the law in other countries.
That interpretation wasn't mine. It came from the Court of Europe doc I linked to. Feel free to let them know its wrong.
So aggressive and rude, and over... CSAM? Weird.
chrisjj has some atrocious takes. But supporting CSAM is the worst he has done by far.
I'm not supporting CSAM. I'm supporting the defence of the term CSAM from attempts at dilution and diminution which downplay the true severity of this appaling crime.
You just seem incredibly argumentative and unreasonable and do not seem to care about "this appalling crime" at all.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
That's the problem with CSAM arguments, though. If you disagree with the current law and think it should be loosened, you're a disgusting pedophile. But if you think it should be tightened, you're a saint looking out for the children's wellbeing. And so laws only go one way...
Where do these people come from???
As good as Australia's little boobie laws.
https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/28/australian_censors/
You don't see a huge difference between abusing a child (and recording it) vs drawing/creating an image of a child in a sexual situation? Do you believe they should have the same legal treatment? In Japan for instance the latter is legal.
He made no judgement in his comment, he just observed the fact that the term csam - in at least the specified jurisdiction - applies to generated pictures of teenagers, wherever real people were subjected to harm or not.
I suspect none of us are lawyers with enough legal knowledge of the French law to know the specifics of this case
This comment is a part of the chain that starts with a very judgemental comment and is an answer to a response challenging that starting one. You don't need legal knowledge of the French law to want to distinguish real child abuse from imaginary. One can give arguments why the latter is also bad, but this is not an automatic judgment, should not depend on the laws of a particular country and I, for one, am deeply shocked that some could think it's the same crime of the same severity.
Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI?
You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools. Just because these images are "fake" doesn't mean they're not abuse, and that there aren't real victims.
> Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI?
Not at all. I am saying just it is not CSAM.
> You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools.
Its terrible. And when "AI"s are found spreading deepfakes around schools, do let us know.
CSAM: Child Sexual Abuse Material.
When you undress a child with AI, especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated. Therefore CSAM.
> When you undress a child with AI,
I guess you mean pasting a naked body on a photo of a child.
> especially publicly on Twitter or privately through DM, that child is abused using the material the AI generated.
In which country is that?
Here in UK, I've never heard of anyone jailed for doing that. Whereas many are for making actual child sexual abuse material.
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It doesn't mention grok?
Sure does. Twice. E.g.
Musk's social media platform has recently been subject to intense scrutiny over sexualised images generated and edited on the site using its AI tool Grok.
CTRL-F "grok": 0/0 found
You're using an "AI" browser? :)
I found 8 mentions.
It's cool that not every law enforcement agency in the world is under the complete thumb of U.S. based billionaires.
Raid all of them. Raid Google. Raid Facebook. Raid Apple. Raid Microsoft. Big tech has gotten away with everything from fraud[0] to murder[1] for decades. Black outfits. Rappel lines. Automatics. Touch that server Prakesh, and you won't live to touch another.
[0] https://nypost.com/2025/12/15/business/facebook-most-cited-i... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchir_Balaji
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Maybe you should look up child pornography laws in Europe. In Sweden, the mere act of scrolling by an image depicting (real or not) a child in a sexual position, and having it stored in the browser cache, is a crime with up to 2 years of prison time.
How does that negate my initial comment?
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It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to create, own, distribute or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent, regardless if they are underage or not.
Grok is a platform that is enabling this en masse. If xAI can't bring in guardrails or limit who can access these capabilities, then they deserve what's coming to them.
>It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to create, own, distribute or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent, regardless if they are underage or not.
Arguably morally reprehensible but it has not always been illegal (and still isn't in many places) if you're talking about images of adults.
"Argually" morally reprehensible? I don't think that's very cash money to be honest.
This comment chain isn't about a difference of opinion, but a difference in morality - there's no debating possible about morals I think.
Did you miss the "without their consent" part?
I think Gary is just reaching back to antiquity.
>> or store sexually explicit material that represents a real person without their consent
Who told you that? Go ask Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton about that one. There are rules about material created without consent, but people do not retain a perpetual right to have formerly consentual material taken down. Hollywood, let alone the porn industry, would collapse overnight if every disgruntled star could have movies removed whenever they feel like it simply by withdrawing "consent" years after creation.
And for copyright, generally the person on camera is not holding the camera and so is not the creator/owner of the material. That is a regular issue where people attempt to use the dmca to remove images of themselves from websites.
> Paris Hilton
She can't withdraw consent when she never gave it in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Night_in_Paris
She claimes, later, to have not consented but given the sophistication of the production no reasonable person could believe she had no idea it was being filmed. She might not consent to the exact public release but she was certainly well aware of being filmed on the day. She consented to the creation.
Same issue decades later during the iphone hacks/leaks. They did not consent to public release, but did consent to creation and private distribution, sometimes even taking and initially sharing the photos themselves.
I think you are going a bit too far.
Let's start from the beginning, create and own:
You're sketching out some nude fanart on a piece of paper. You created that and own that. Thas has always been illegal?!
(This is apart from my feelings on Mechahitler/Grok, which aren't positive.)
You can _almost_ do anything you want in the privacy of your home; but in this case Twitter was actively and directly disseminating pictures publicly on their platform.
And profiting from it, though less directly than "$ for illegal images". Even if it wasn't behind a paywall (which it mostly is) driving more traffic for more ads for more income is still profiting from illegal imagery.
> You're sketching out some nude fanart on a piece of paper.
Is twitter a piece of paper in your desk? No, it's not.
Right.
OP had "It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to create, own, distribute or store "
It would make more sense then to instead say:
"It has always been illegal and morally reprehensible to distribute "
Again, AI deepfakes are not sketches in a piece of paper. There's a massive difference between drawing your coworker naked on a piece of paper (weird, but certainly not criminal), and going "grok generate a video of my coworker bouncing on my d*ck". Not to mention the latter is generated and stored god knows where, against the consent of the depicted person.
In which broken society do you live where this is true? I would say drawing sexually explicit pictures of real persons without their consent and keeping them in your drawer is neither illegal nor morally reprehensible in most of the world.
I am with you on publishing these...
Not morally reprehensible? Do you tell your coworkers “hey, last night I sketched you nude, but it’s cool, it’s in my bedside drawer…”
I would personally not tell them because not everyone likes to know what/that others think about them. But I do not see the moral issue if I don't tell them.
What if I only thought about it? Still morally reprehensible? Or only if I tell others I think about them? Then you could argue it's sexual harassment.
I've had a coworker tell me something very close to that before. I could have been morally outraged but instead I just propositioned them for a date.
Personally I think it's just embarrassing, not immoral.
I don't think one internet commenter can know or decide what is or isn't "morally reprehensible" in "most of the world". I don't speak for "most of the world" but I'm fairly sure "I drew nudes of your mom lol" will not go down well anywhere.
then we are both sure of different things that are hard to check ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At my kids school the children have been using grok to create pics of other children without clothes on - chatgpt etc won’t let you do that - grok needs some controls and x seem unable to do that themselves.
What would raiding the office achieve in this case apart from just showing off power.
In such a case specifically: Uncover internal communication that shows the company was aware of the problem and ignored it, which presumably affects liability a lot.
I wonder what they will find. They seemed to have acknowledged working on the problem before.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011432649353511350
Have you seen some of the stuff in the Enron or Epstein emails? They can be rather candid and act as if there is nothing to hide or they will never get caught
Elites need a reckoning
Do you think they communicate via paper? Raiding office doesn't automatically gives them access to mail/slack etc. And internal comms could be asked for without the nuclear option of raiding the office
I'd expect to find most of the incriminating stuff in emails and short messages.
> And internal comms could be asked for without the nuclear option of raiding the office
Relying on the accused to compile and provide evidence seems naive to me.
Companies are required by law to enable persistence. And in any case if we assume malice how would the police even get access to all emails by raiding if the message and mails are stored in cloud.
AFAIK police can just ask google/slack for the mails with proper warrant.
This is the cyber crime unit. They will exfiltrate any data they want. They will use employee account to pivot into the rest of the X network. They don't just go in, grab a couple of papers, laptops and phones. They hook into the network and begin cracking.
Why are you defending X here?
It sounds like they are following due process.
> Why are you defending X here?
What a strange question.
Normally getting raided by the police causes people and organizations to change their behavior.
Enforcing the law usually is an inhibitor for criminals
But, isn't that bad for the criminals?
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That's crossing into personal attack, and that's not allowed here, so please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> How about you come back when your daughter has a fake AI nude passed around school.
Like any bad behaviour, the grown-up response should be discipline and education.
There's a million ways kids can misbehave. The idea is to get kids ready for the real world, not pretend there's nothing bad out there.
Obviously we don't want "point and click" AI nudes in the hands of minors, or kids having their own AI accounts in the first place. Parents and educators pay for their kid's devices and internet connections. If they're not being responsible, you take away the privilege until they learn about respectful behaviour.
If the kid is allowed to stay out after dark but ends up doing crime at those times, we don't ask the government to impose a curfew on every kid. We discipline the kids involved. And that's my last comment in this thread thank God, what a struggle.
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Not the same - the barrier to entry was too high. Most people don't have the skills to edit photos using Photoshop. Grok enabled this to happen to scale for users who are complete non techies. With grok, anyone who could type in a half-coherent sentence in English could generate and disseminate these images.
Edit: clarified the last sentence
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I see what you’re getting at. You’re trying to draw a moral equivalence between photoshop and grok. Where that falls flat for me is the distribution aspect: photoshop would not also publish and broadcast the illegal material.
But police don’t care about moral equivalence. They care about the law. For the legal details we would need to consult French law. But I assume it is illegal to create and distribute the images. Heck, it’s also probably against Twitter’s TOS too so by all rights the grok account should be banned.
> This is a political action by the French
Maybe. They probably don’t like a foreign company coming in, violating their children, and getting away with it. But what Twitter did was so far out of line that I’d be shocked if French companies weren’t treated the same way.
> But I assume it is illegal to create and distribute the images.
I very much so expect it to be illegal to distribute the images, of course (creating them, not so much).
But the illegality, in a sane world (and until 5 minutes ago) used to be attached to the person actually distributing them. If some student distributes fake sexualized images of their colleague, I very much expect the perpetrator to be punished by the law (and by the school, since we are at it).
Is Twitter not the one distributing it? You make a request to their servers, and in the comment section there is a link to an image (also hosted on Twitter’s server) containing illegal content.
If a student printed the pictures out and distributed them at school you’d have maybe 1000 violations. Twitter likely has hundreds of millions if not billions. So it makes sense to go after the most severe violator.
Creating, possessing, and distributing CSAM is illegal in the US and many other countries. Can you explain why you think it should be legal to create something that is illegal to possess or distribute?
I didn't say creating isn't illegal. I said I think it probably shouldn't be illegal.
Any crime that doesn't cause victims is just another way for an oppressive collectivist state to further control their citizens. If you are not harming anyone (like when creating but not sharing these pictures) then it simply shouldn't be a crime. Otherwise, what are you actually punishing? Thoughtcrimes?
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In your hypothetical scenario, why aren't the school kids making and distributing fake nudes of his daughter be the ones getting in trouble?
Have we a outsourced all accountability for the crimes of humans to AI now?
It's not hypothetical. And in fact the girl who was being targeted was expelled not the boys who did it [1].
Those boys absolutely should be held accountable. But I also don't think that Grok should be able to quickly and easily generate fake revenge porn for minors.
[1] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/girl-...
>And in fact the girl who was being targeted was expelled not the boys who did it [1].
And the AI is at fault for this sentencing, not the school authorities/prosecutors/judges dishing justice? WTF.
How is this an AI problem and not a legal system problem?
You can’t “undo” a school shooting, for instance, so we tend to have gun laws.
You can’t just “undo” some girl being harassed by AI generated nude photos of her, so we…
Yes, we should have some protections or restrictions on what you can do.
You may not understand it, either because you aren’t a parent or maybe just not emotionally equipped to understand how serious this actually can be, but your lack of comprehension does not render it a non-issue.
Having schools play whack-a-mole after the photos are shared around is not a valid strategy. Never mind that schools primarily engage in teaching, not in investigation.
As AI-generated content gets less and less distinguishable from reality, these incidents will have far worse consequences and putting such power in the hands of adolescents who demonstrably don’t have sound judgment (hence why they lack many other rights that adults have) is not something most parents are comfortable with - and I doubt you’ll find many teachers, psychiatrists and so on who would support your approach either.
>You can’t just “undo” some girl being harassed by AI generated nude photos of her, so we…
No, but if you send those people who made and distributed the AI nude of her to jail, these problems will virtually disappear overnight, because going to jail is a hugely effective deterrent for most people.
But if you don't directly prosecute the people doing it, and instead just ban Grok AI, then those people will just use other AI tools, outside of US jurisdiction, to do the same things and the problem persists.
And the issues keeps persisting, because nobody ever goes to jail. Everyone only gets a slap on the wrist, deflects accountability by blaming the AI, so the issue keeps persisting and more people end up getting hurt because those who do the evil are never held directly accountable.
Obviously Grok shouldn't be legally allowed to generate fakes nudes of actual kids, but in case such safeguards can and will be bypassed, that doesn't absolve the humans from being the ones knowingly breaking the law to achieve a nefarious goal.
That’s just not how the world works.
Youths lack judgment, so they can’t vote, drink, drive, have sex or consent to adults.
A 14-year-old can’t be relied to understand the consequences of making nudes of some girl.
Beyond that, we regulate guns, speed limits and more according to principles like “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose”.
We do that not only because shoving kids into jails is something we want to avoid, but because regulating at the source of the problem is both more feasible AND heads off a lot of tragedy.
And again, you fail to acknowledge the investigative burden you put on society to discover who originated the photo after the fact, and the trauma to the victim.
If none of that computes for you, then I don’t know what to say except I don’t place the right to generate saucy images highly enough to swarm my already overworked police with requests to investigate who generated fake underage porn.
>A 14-year-old can’t be relied to understand the consequences of making nudes of some girl.
Teenagers do stupid shit all the time. But they still get prosecuted or convicted when they do crimes. They go to juvy or their parents get punished. Being 14 is not a get out of jail free card.
In that case, why not allow teenagers to carry firearms as well? Sure, some will die, others will go to jail, but at least that ought to teach the rest of them a lesson, right?
I am in agreement with you, but as a kid, we DID carry guns, regularly. Gun racks in our cars/trucks, and strapped to our backs as we walked down the street.
The problem stems from parents lack of parenting, a huge lack of real after-school programs, and the tiktokification of modern society.
30 years ago, we had a lot of the same "slap on the wrist" punishments because it was assumed when you got home your parent was going to beat your ass. That isn't a thing anymore (rightfully), because parenting through threat of violence just leads to those kids becoming violent parents.
Our problem is we never transitioned from violent parenting into any other kind. I watched my nieces and nephews get parented by YouTube and get social media accounts before they were 10. COVID created a society of chronically online children who don't know how to interact offline.
And yes, the tools to create bad shit are more accessible than ever, and I always come off as some angry gate keeper, but so much of the internet as it is today has become too easy to access by people incapable of the critical thinking required for safe use.
In the last 5 years, generative AI has taken over most of the "public facing" internet, and with internet literacy at the same level it was 20-30 years ago, we are back in the "walled garden" AOL era, but it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok that are the gardens.
Wut? I carried guns regularly from about age 7. Without my parents around. The USA at one point embraced radical freedom. That is the childhood I had, and I thank "god" for it on a regular basis. "Live free or die."
I'm similarly repulsed by the idea of Grok generating images of kids, but if you draw a nude of an adult woman she's not going to get raped by that existing, and you don't have a right to not be embarrassed. Tough shit, deal with it.
The way you are arguing makes it really hard to understand what you are trying to say. I am guessing you are upset that non-human entity is being used as a boogie man while the actual people are going free? But your argumentation reads like someone who is very upset at AI producing CSAM is being persecuted. I won’t be surprised if people think you are defending CSAM.
In good faith, a few things - AI generated imagery and Photoshop are not the same. If someone can mail Adobe and a photo of a kid and ask for a modified one and Adobe sent it back, yes Adobe’s offices will be raided. That’s the equivalent here. It’s not a tool. It’s a service. You keep using AI, without taking a moment to give the “intelligence” any thought.
Yes, powerful people are always going to get by, as you say. And the laws & judicial system are for the masses. There is definitely unfairness in it. But that doesn’t change anything here - this is a separate conversation.
If not Grok then someone else will do it - is a defeatist argument that can only mean it can’t be controlled so don’t bother. This point is where you come across as a CSAM defender. Govt’s will/should do whatever they can to make society safe, even if it means playing whack a mole. Arguing that’s “not efficient” is frankly confusing. Judicial system is about fairness and not efficiency.
frankly, I think you understand all of this and maybe got tunnel visioned in your anger at the unfairness of people scapegoating technology for its failings. That’s the last thing I want to point out, raiding an office is taking action against the powerful people who build systems without accountability. They are not going to sit the model down and give a talking to. The intention is to identify the responsible party that allows this to happen.
> No, but if you send those people who made and distributed the AI nude of her to jail, these problems will virtually disappear overnight, because going to jail is a hugely effective deterrent for most people.
Actually you'll see the opposite happen a lot - after Columbine, the number of school shootings went up [0] for example, because before people didn't consider it an option. Same with serial killers / copycats, and a bunch of other stuff.
Likewise, if it hadn't been in the news, a lot of people wouldn't have known you can / could create nudes of real people with Grok. News reporting on these things is its own kind of unfortunate marketing, and for every X people that are outraged about this, there will be some that are instead inspired and interested.
While a lot of punishments for crimes is indeed a deterrent, it doesn't always work. Also because in this case, it's relatively easy to avoid being found out (unlike school shootings).
[0] https://www.security.org/blog/a-timeline-of-school-shootings...
> And the issues keeps persisting, because nobody ever goes to jail.
Yes, let's just jail every kid who makes a mistake, ya know, instead of the enablers who should know better as adults...
except for that one guy, let's put him in the white house
"outside of US jurisdiction"
Did you see the part in the article about "raided in France" and "UK opens fresh investigation"?
You cannot offload all problems to the legal system. It does not have the capacity. Legal issues take time to resolve and the victims have to have the necessary resource to pursue legal action. Grok enabled abuse at scale, which no legal system in the world can keep up with. It doesn't need explanation that generating nudes of people without their consent is a form of abuse. And if the legal system cannot keep up with protecting victims, the problem has to be dealt with at source.
>You cannot offload all problems to the legal system. It does not have the capacity.
You definitely can. You don't have to prosecute and send a million people to jail for making and distributing fake AI nudes, you just have to send a couple, and then the problem virtually goes away.
People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time. That's how you fix all issues in society and enforce law abiding behavior. You make the cost of the crime greater than the gains from it, then crucify some people in public to set an example for everyone else.
Do people like doing and paying their taxes? No, but they do it anyway. Why is that? Because THEY KNOW that otherwise they go to jail. Obviously the IRS and legal system don't have the capacity to send the whole country to jail if they were to stop paying taxes, but they send enough to jail in order for the majority of the population to not risk it and follow the law.
It's really that simple.
None of what you've said is true. Deterrence is known to have a very limited effect on behaviour.
In this case, it's far simpler to prosecute the source.
Increased severity of punishment has little deterrent effect, both individually and generally.
The certainty or likelihood of being caught if a far more effevtive deterrent, but require effort, focus, and resources by law enforcement.
It's a resource constraint problem and a policy choice. If "they" wanted to set the tone that this type of behavior will not be tolerated, it would require a concerted multi agency surge of investigative and prosecutorial resources. It's been done before, if there's a will there's a way.
>None of what you've said is true.
Everything I said is true.
>Deterrence is known to have a very limited effect on behaviour.
It is insanely effective when actually enforced. It's not effective when the goal is to make it seem ineffective so that people can evade the system.
>In this case, it's far simpler to prosecute the source.
The "source" is a tool that tomorrow can be in Russia or CHina and you can't prosecute.
> People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time. That's how you fix all issues in society and enforce law abiding behavior. You make the cost of the crime greater than the gains from it, then crucify some people in public to set an example for everyone else
And yet criminals still commit crimes. Obviously jail is not the ultimate deterrent you think it is. Nobody commits crimes with the expectation that they'll get caught, and if you only "crucify some people", then most criminals are going to (rightfully) assume that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
> You don't have to prosecute and send a million people to jail for making and distributing fake AI nudes, you just have to send a couple, and then the problem virtually goes away.
I genuinely cannot tell if you are being comically naïve or extremely obtuse here. You need only look at the world around you to see that this does not, and never will, happen.
As another commenter said, this argument is presenting itself as apologia for CSAM and you come across as a defender of the right for a business to create and publish it. I assume you don't actually believe that, but the points you made are compatible.
It is as much the responsibility of a platform for providing the services to create illegal material, and also distributing said illegal material. That it happens to be an AI that generates the imagery is not relevant - X and Grok are still the two services responsible for producing and hosting it. Therefore, the accountability falls on those businesses and its leadership just as much as it does the individual user, because ultimately they are facilitating it.
To compare to other situations: if a paedophile ring is discovered on the dark web, the FBI doesn't just arrest the individuals involved and leave the website open. It takes the entire thing down including those operating it, even if they themselves were simply providing the server and not partaking in the content.
Actually research shows people regularly overestimate how effective deterrence-based punishment is. Particularly for children and teenagers. How many 14-year-olds do you really think are getting prosecuted and sent to jail for asking Grok to generate a nude of their classmate..? How many 14-year-olds are giving serious thought about their long-term future in the moment they are typing a prompt into to Twitter..? Your argument is akin to suggesting that carmakers should sell teenagers cars to drive, because the teenager can be punished if they cause an accident.
Have you considered that it is possible for two things to be problems?
No, because the comment is in bad faith, it just introduced an unrelated issue (poor sentencing from authorities) as an argument for the initial issue we are discussing (AI nudes), derailing the conversation, and then using the new issue they themselves introduced to legitimize their poor argument when one has nothing to do with the other and both can be good/bad independently of each other.
I don't accept this as good faith argumentation nor does HN rules.
You are the only one commenting in bad faith, by refusing to understand/acknowledging that the people using Grok to create such pictures AND Grok are both part of the issue. It should not be possible to create nudes of minors via Grok. Full stop.
>You are the only one commenting in bad faith
For disagreeing on the injection of offtopic hypothetical scenarios as an argument derailing the main topic?
>It should not be possible to create nudes of minors via Grok.
I agree with THIS part, I don't agree with the part where the main blame is on the AI, instead of on the people using it. That's not a bad faith argument, it's just My PoV.
If Grok disappears tomorrow, there will be other AIs from other parts of the world outside of US/EU jurisdiction, that will do the same since the cat is out of the bag and the technical barrier to entry is dropping fast.
Do you keep trying to whack-a-mole the AI tools for this, or the humans actually making and distributing fake nudes of real people?
> Do you keep trying to whack-a-mole the AI tools for this, or the humans actually making and distributing fake nudes of real people?
Both, obviously. For example, you go after drug distributors and drug producers. Both approaches are effective in different ways, I am not sure why you are having such trouble understanding this.
This is textbook whataboutery. The law is perfectly clear on this, and Musk is liable.
Other AIs have guardrails. If Musk chooses not to implement them, that's his personal irresponsibility.
Then log off.
You know there is no such thing as the world police or something of that sort.
If the perpetrator is in another country / jurisdiction it is virtually impossible to prosecute let alone sentence.
It is 100% regulatory problem in this case. You just cannot allow this content to be generated and distributed in the public domain by anonymous users. It has nothing to do with free speech but with civility and common understanding of what is morally wrong / right.
Obviously you cannot prevent this in private forums unless it is made illegal which is a completely different problem that requires a very different solution.
Grok made the pictures.
The school authorities messed up.
Both are accuntable.
>Grok made the pictures.
Correction: kids made the pictures. Using Grok as the tool.
If kids were to "git gud" at photoshop and use that to make nudes, would you arrest Adobe?
In the spirit of shitty "If's ..."
If kids ask a newspaper vendor for cigarettes and he provides them .. that's a no-no.
If kids ask a newspaper vendor for nudes and he provides them .. that's a no-no.
If kids ask Grok for CSAM and it provides them .. then ?
The existence and creation of cigarettes and adult nude magazines is fully legal, only their sale is illegal to kids. If kids try to illegally obtain those LEGAL items, it doesn't make the existence of those items illegal, just the act of sale to them.
Meanwhile, the existence/creation CSAM of actual people isn't legal, for anyone no matter the age.
Grok created those images.
And when the magazines get sold who is breaking the law and gets convicted it is not the children but the shop supplying the children.
So when Grok provides the illegal pictures then by the same logic it is Grok that is breaking the law.
If parents or school let children play with explosives or do drugs and they get hurt, that's a no-no.
If parents or school let children roam the internet unsupervised... then?
> If parents or school let children play with explosives or do drugs
The explosive sellers that provide explosives to someone without a certification (child or adult) get in trouble (in this part of the world) .. regardless of whether someone gets hurt (although that's an upscale).
If sellers provide ExPo to certified parents and children get access .. that's on the parents.
In that analagy of yours, if grok provided ExPo or CSAM to children .. that's a grok problem,
(Ditto drugs).
It's on the provider to children. ie Grok.
If MechaGrok sells explosives to children, that's a go-go?
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You're suggesting an inconsistency where there isn't one. A country can ban guns and allow rope, even though both can kill.
> A country can ban guns and allow rope, even though both can kill.
That's actually a good argument. And that's how the UK ending up banning not just guns, but all sorts of swords, machetes and knives, meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.
So maybe dangerous knives are not the problem, but the people using them to kill other people. So then where do we draw the line between lethal weapons and crime correlation. At which cutting/shooting instruments?
Same with software tools, that keep getting more powerful with time lowering the bar to entry for generating nudes of people. Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
You’re absolutely right that it is a difficult question where to draw the line. Different countries will do it differently according to their devotion to individual freedoms vs communal welfare.
The knife (as opposed to sword) example is interesting. In the U.K. you’re not allowed to sell them to children. We recognise that there is individual responsibility at play, and children might not be responsible enough to buy them, given the possible harms. Does this totally solve their use in violent crime? No. But if your alternative is “it’s up to the individuals to be responsible”, well, that clearly doesn’t work, because some people are not responsible. At a certain point, if your job is to reduce harm in the population, you look for where you can have a greater impact than just hoping every individual follows the law, because they clearly don’t. And you try things even if they don’t totally solve the problem.
And indeed, the same problem in software.
As for the violent crime rates in the U.K., I don’t have those stats to hand. But murder is at a 50 year low. And since our post-Dunblane gun laws, we haven’t had any school shootings. Most Britons are happy with that bargain.
> meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.
The rate of school shootings has dropped from one (before the implementation of recommendations from the Cullen report) to zero (subsequently). Zero in 29 years - success by any measure.
If you choose to look at _other_ types of violent crime, why would banning handguns have any effect?
> Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
You can ban tools which enable bad outcomes without sufficient upside, while also holding the people who use them to account.
it's surprising how far people will go to defend CSAM
"Correction: kids made the pictures. Using Grok as the tool."
No. That is not how AI nowdays works. Kids told the tool what they want and the tool understood and could have refused like all the other models - but instead it delivered. And it only could do so because it was specifically trained for that.
"If kids were to "git gud" at photoshop "
And what is that supposed to mean?
Adobe makes general purpose tools as far as I know.
You're beating it around the bush not answering the main question.
Anyone skilled at photoshop can do fake nudes as good or even better than AI, including kids (we used it to make fun fakes of teachers in embarrassing situations back in the mid 00s and distribute them via MSN messenger), so then why is only the AI tool the one to blame for what the users do, but not Photoshop if both tools can be used to do the same thing?
People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?
Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things? This is the answer I'm looking for and I don't think there is an easy one, yet people here are too quick to pin blame based on their emotional responses and subjective biases and word views on the matter and the parties involved.
> Anyone skilled at photoshop
So let's say there are two ways to do something illegal. The first requires skills from the perpetrator, is tricky to regulate, and is generally speaking not a widespread issue in practice. The second way is a no brainer even for young children to use, is easy to regulate, and is becoming a huge issue in practice. Then it makes sense to regulate only the second.
> People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?
Tricky question, but a more accurate comparison would be with a company that runs a service to 3D print guns (= generating the image) and shoot with them in the street (= publishing on X) automatically for you and keeps accepting illegal requests while the competitors have no issue blocking them.
> Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things?
That's also a tricky question, but generally you don't really need to know precisely where to draw the line. It suffices to know that something is definitely on the wrong side of the line, like X here.
A 3D printer needs a blueprint. AI has all the blueprints built-in. It can generalize, so the blueprints cannot simply be erased, however at least what we can do is forbid generation of adult content. Harm should be limited. Photoshop requires skill and manual work, that's the difference. In the end, yes, people are the ones who are responsible for their actions. We shouldn't let kids (or anyone else) harm others with little to no effort. Let's be reasonable.
You don't even have to be good at photoshop. /r/ has been around for 20+ years and usually gets some decent free work so long as the requests aren't for under hs aged kids.
This happens all the time with abusive children in schools, they're rarely punished at all even with extreme abuse and violence.
The police got it right.
> When the sheriff's department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who'd been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
Punishing kids after the fact does not stop the damage from occurring. Nothing can stop the damage that has already occurred, but if you stop the source of the nudes, you can stop future damage from occurring to even more girls.
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I'm sorry, did the article or anyone in this subthread suggest banning AI? That seems like quite a non-sequitur. I'm pretty sure the idea is to put a content filter on an online platform for one very specific kind of already-illegal content (modified nude images of real people, especially children), which is a far cry from a ban. Nothing can stop local diffusion or Photoshop, of course, but the hardware and technical barriers are so much higher that curtailing Grok would probably cut off 99% or more of the problem material. I suppose you'll tell me if any solution is not 100% effective we should do nothing and embrace anarchy?
Edit for the addition of the line about bullying: "Bullying has always happened, therefore we should allow new forms of even worse bullying to flourish freely, even though I readily acknowledge that it can lead to victims committing suicide" is a bizarre and self-contradictory take. I don't know what point you think you're making.
Child sexual abuse material is literally in the training sets. Saying "banning AI" as though it's all the same thing, and all morally-neutral, is disingenuous. (Yes, a system with both nudity and children in its dataset might still be able to produce such images – and there are important discussions to be had about that – but giving xAI the benefit of equivocation here is an act of malice.)
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I'm not defending CP, WTF is wrong with you? You're just hallucinating/making stuff up in bad faith.
Y Combinator supports doing anything that makes money
Nobody wants to ban AI they want to regulate it. Which is what we do with all new technology.
To paraphrase "your tech bros were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they never considered if they should"
They may well get in trouble, but in that takes time, in the meantime photos will have been seen by most kids in school + you might get a year of bullying.
Education might be so disrupted you have to change schools.
But they are getting in trouble. However, for every one that gets in trouble, there's more that don't get discovered, or that don't get in trouble for it.
Besides, getting in trouble for something is already after the fact, the damage has been done. If it can't be done in the first place, or the barrier is too high for most, then the damage would have been prevented.
But this is a recurring dilemma.
children do dumb things and make mistakes all the time, teenagers push the boundaries as far as they can (and they have a role model in the white house now)
We fault and "fine" companies for providing products that harm society all the time
Are you not going to consider the company providing a CSAM machine to be the major one at fault here?
> why aren't the school kids making and distributing fake nudes of his daughter be the ones getting in trouble?
"Boys will be boys", and so on. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture)
This is accountability for the crimes of humans.
The crime is creating a system that lets schoolboys create fake nudes of other minors.
You don't just get to build a CSAM-generator and then be like "well I never intended for it to be used...".
The humans running a company are liable for the product that their company builds, easy as that.
>The crime is creating a system that lets schoolboys create fake nudes of other minors.
So like Photoshop? Do you want to raid Adobe's HQ?
Does Photoshop have a "let me jerk off to this minor" button?
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I don't want to.
But I don't want others to be easily able to either.
In your scenario, yes, you are guilty as well. But so is the one that actually did the deed, i.e. Grok in this case.
You're arguing my point for me. Just because you do something for someone else doesn't mean you're absolved of responsibility.
You can't build a tool with a "create child porn" button and then expect not to get into trouble for helping people make child porn.
I really find this kind of appeal quite odious. God forbid that we expect fathers to have empathy for their sons, sisters, brothers, spouses, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, etc. or dare we hope that they might have empathy for friends or even strangers? It's like an appeal to hypocrisy or something. Sure, I know such people exist but it feels like throwing so many people under the bus just to (probably fail) to convince someone of something by appealing to an emotional overprotectiveness of fathers to daughters.
You should want to protect all of the people in your life from such a thing or nobody.
So making CSAM of real people is ok if an AI is involved?
Yes. All because sexual harassment and images depicting child sexual abuse.
You're defending X/Grok as if it's a public social platform.
It is a privately controlled public-facing group chat. Being a chat-medium does not grant you the same rights as being a person. France isn't America.
If a company operates to the detriment and against the values of a nation, e.g. not paying their taxes or littering in the environment, the nation will ask them to change their behavior.
If there is a conspiracy of contempt, at some point things escalate.
If you bothered to do any research instead of downplaying it, you’d know why. It’s embarrassing you even typed that out
In other words: "I know a thing, but I won't say what. I condemn you for not knowing the thing."
Grok is censored, there's no question. Try it yourself. It can't even handle analysing a 19th century woodcut engraving containing topless mythical beings[1]. Grok refused because Grok has guardrails.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wood_of_the_Self-Murderers...
Largely a left-wing echo chamber here (and also seems to be much more European here than the average forum), so everyone here all thinks Musk is doing something illegal just because he's right-wing.
These raids are entirely political.
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You want the French authorities to focus on the Epstein files to the exclusion of all other corporate misbehaviour?
Also, it seems pretty likely that Musk is tangled up with the Epstein shit. First Musk claimed he turned down offer to go to the island. Now it turns out Musk repeatedly sought to visit, including wanting to know when the "wildest" party was happening, after Epstein was already known as a child sex abuser. Musk claimed that Epstein had never been given a tour of SpaceX but it turns out he did in 2013. It's the classic narcissistic "lie for as long as possible" behaviour. Will be interesting to see what happens as more is revealed.
>You want the French authorities to focus on the Epstein files to the exclusion of all other corporate misbehaviour?
No i said no such thing, what I said was that the resources of authorities is a finite pie. If most of it goes towards petty stuff like corporate misbehavior that hurts nobody, there won't be enough for the grave crimes like actual child abuser that actually hurt real people.
Same how police won't bother with your stolen phone/bike because they have bigger crimes to catch. I'm asking for the same logic be applied here.
There's no indication that this investigation would draw resources away from investigating the Epstein files. It's happening in France, for starters, whilst the vast majority of Epstein's crimes appear to have happened in US territories. Speaking about "the authorities" as if they're a unified global entity sounds a little conspiratorial.
> If most of it goes towards petty stuff like corporate misbehavior that hurts nobody, there won't be enough for the grave crimes like actual child abuser that actually hurt real people.
1.) That is not how it works, even if we ignore the fact that France is not USA.
2.) Lack of resources was not the issue with Epstein prosecution. The prosecutor was literally told to not investigate by her superiors who were trying to stop the case. She was told she is unsubordinated for doing it. Acosta giving Epstein sweetheart deal or seeking to stop the prosecutor is not the resources issue.
It is billionaires (Thiel, Musk, Gates), politicians (Clinton, Luthnic ) media darlings (Summers, Kraus and the rest of sexism is totally not a thing anymore crowd literally partying with Epstein) are to be protected at all cost issue. Even now, people implicated in Epstein files are still getting influential positions with explicit "it would be cancel culture to not give these people more influence" argument.
The UK is also opening investigations into the Esptein stuff.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/starmers-government-aids-po...
Unlike the US administration which seems to be fine with what epstein and X are doing
Except Starmer is making sure that the "investigation" is hobbled - anything seemed important to "national security" will be excluded!
The UK's "investigation" is a farce.
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What's this comment about? Do you think no other CSAM distribution should be investigated until the stuff in Epstein files is sorted?
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I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more epsteins. In some way.
How?
THat's like the 1993 moral panic that video games like Doom cause mass shootings, or the 1980's mass panic that metal music causes satanist, or the 1950s moral panic that superhero comic book violence leads to juvenile delinquency. Politicians are constantly looking for an external made up enemy to divert attention to from the real problems.
People like Epstein and mass woman/child exploitation have existed for thousands of years in the past, and will exist thousands of years in the future. It's part of the nature of the rich and powerful to execute on their deranged fetishes, it's been documented in writing since at least the Roman and Ottoman empires.
Hell, I can guarantee you there's other Epsteins operating in the wild right now, that we haven't heard of (yet), it's not like he was in any way unique. I can also guarantee you that 1 in 5-10 normal looking people you meet daily on the street have similar deranged desires as the guests on Epstein's island but can't execute on them because they're not as rich and influential to get away with it, but they'd do it if they could.
> THat's like the 1993 moral panic that video games like Doom cause mass shootings,
Apart from doom wasn't producing illegal content.
the point is that grok is generating illegal content for those jurisdictions. In france you can't generate CSAM, in the UK you can't distribute CSAM. Those are actual laws with legal tests, none of them need to be of actual people, they just need to depict _children_ to be illegal.
Moral panics require new laws to enforce, generally. This is just enforcing already existing laws.
More over, had it been any other site, it would have been totally shut down by now and the servers impounded. Its only because musk is close to trump and rich that he's escaped the fate than you or I would have had if we'd done the same.
>Apart from doom wasn't producing illegal content.
Sure but where's the proof that Grok is actually producing illegal content? I searched for news sources, but they're just all parroting empty accusations not concrete documented cases.
See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo
Note that IWF is not a random charity it works with the Police on these matters.
I found this as the first item in Kagi search - perhaps you should try non AI searches
> but they're just all parroting empty accusations not concrete documented cases.
In the UK it is illegal to create, distribute and store CSAM. A news site printing a photo CSAM would make them legally up the shitter.
However, the IWF, who are tasked with detecting this stuff have claimed to have found evidence of it, along with multiple other sources, Ofcom who are nominally supposed to police this have an open investigation, so do the irish police.
The point is, law has a higher threshold of proof than news, which takes time. If there is enough evidence, then a court case (or other instrument) will be invoked.
Another line of reasoning is that with more fake CP it is more difficult to research the real CP hunt down the perpetrators and consequently save children.
Oh yeah, because the main reason why EPstein and his guests got away with it for so long, is because there was so much low hanging CP out there confusing authorities and prosecutors, not because of the corruption, cronyism and political protection they enjoyed at the highest levels of government.
Do you guys even hear yourselves?
But how about the "1 in 5-10 normal looking people you meet daily on the street have similar deranged desires as the guests on Epstein's island but can't execute on them because they're not as rich and influential to get away with it, but they'd do it if they could."
Some of those might still try.
>Some of those might still try.
And what does AI have to do with this? Haven't child predators existed before AI?
Where's the proof that AI produces more child predators?
You're just going in circles without any arguments.
It has to do with AI because:
> Another line of reasoning is that with more fake CP it is more difficult to research the real CP hunt down the perpetrators and consequently save children.
(own quote)
Yes, the predators existed before AI, but also:
> I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more offenders (edited).
(own quote, edited)
To be clear, I don't think this line of reasoning is entirely convincing, but apparently some people do.
No, 20% of population is not seeking to abuse children nor teens. If you think so, you are moving in weird circles. In fact, what we also have are people who noped out of Epstein circle or even openly criticized it for years.
Also, framing the issue of sexual abuse by untouchable issue as the same as superhero comic issue (which itself was not just about superhero comic and you should know it) is spectacularly bad faith.
Yes, there were always people who were stealing, abusing, murdering for own gain and fun. That is not an argument for why we should accept and support it as normalized state of world. It is a good reason to prevent people from becoming too powerful and for building accountable institutions able to catch and punish them.
That isn't reasoning, it's wild speculation
I seem to remember there was research behind this, but I'm not sure.
"Grok" is part of the Epstein network, connected through Elon Musk.
The same guy responsible for creating child porn that you are defending is also in the Epstein's list. Also, don't abbreviate child pornography, it shows you have a side on this
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I'm sure it's comforting to believe that people you disagree with do so for silly reasons, but many people will support this just because we like the rule of law.
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if a user uses a tool to break the law it's on the person who broke the law not the people who made the tool. knife manufacturers aren't to blame if someone gets stabbed right?
This seems different. With a knife the stabbing is done by the human. That would be akin to a paintbrush or camera or something being used to create CSAM.
Here you have a model that is actually creating the CSAM.
It seems more similar to a robot that is told to go kill someone and does so. Sure, someone told the robot to do something, but the creators of the robot really should have to put some safeguards to prevent it.
one time is perhaps excusable as the robot's creators didn't know that would happen. If it happens and the creator then advertises the robot can kill people, of course he's now a criminal
If the knife manufacturer willingly broke the law in order to sell it, then yes.
If the manufacturer advertised that the knife is not just for cooking but also stabbing people, then yes.
if the knife was designed to evade detection, then yes.
Text on the internet and all of that, but you should have added the "/s" to the end so people didn't think you were promoting this line of logic seriously.
If a knife manufacturer constructs an apparatus wherein someone can simply write "stab this child" on a whim to watch a knife stab a child, that manufacturer would in fact discover they are in legal peril to some extent.
I mean, no one's ever made a tool who's scope is "making literally anything you want," including, apparently CSAM. So we're in a bit of uncharted waters, really. Like mostly, no I would agree, it's a bad idea to hold the makers of a tool responsible for how it's used. And, this is an especially egregious offense on the part of said tool-maker.
Like how I see this is:
* If you can't restrict people from making kiddie porn with Grok, then it stands to reason at the very least, access to Grok needs to be strictly controlled.
* If you can restrict that, why wasn't that done? It can't be completely omitted from this conversation that Grok is, pretty famously, the "unrestrained" AI, which in most respects means it swears more, quotes and uses highly dubious sources of information that are friendly to Musk's personal politics, and occasionally spouts white nationalist rhetoric. So as part of their quest to "unwoke" Grok did they also make it able to generate this shit too?
This is really amusing to watch, because everything that Grok is accused of is something which you can also trigger in currently available open-weight models (if you know what you're doing).
There's nothing special about Grok in this regard. It wasn't trained to be a MechaHitler, nor to generate CSAM. It's just relatively uncensored[1] compared to the competition, which means it can be easily manipulated to do what the users tell it to, and that is biting Musk in the ass here.
And just to be clear, since apparently people love to jump to conclusions - I'm not excusing what is happening. I'm just pointing out the fact that the only special thing about Grok is that it's both relatively uncensored and easily available to a mainstream audience.
[1] -- see the Uncensored General Intelligence leaderboard where Grok is currently #1: https://huggingface.co/spaces/DontPlanToEnd/UGI-Leaderboard
> everything that Grok is accused of is something which you can also trigger in currently available open-weight models (if you know what you're doing)
Well, yes. You can make child pornography with any video-editing software. How is this exoneration?
I'm not talking about video editing software; that's a different class of software. I'm talking about other generative AI models, which you can download today onto your computer, and have it do the same thing as Grok does.
> How is this exoneration?
I don't know; you tell me where I said it was? I'm just stating a fact that Grok isn't unique here, and if you want to ban Grok because of it then you need to also ban open weight models which can do exactly the same thing.
> that's a different class of software. I'm talking about other generative AI models
And the article is talking about a social media site. A different class of software and company.
> if you want to ban Grok
Straw man. Nobody has suggested this.
I think he is talking about France who does very much seem like they want to ban X and Grok?
If Grok is a child pornography tool then it will be banned. If Elon doesn't want Grok to be banned, he can disable the child pornography feature.
Agreed, thankfully, there is no CSAM feature, and they patched it in a couple of days so that it would stop obeying requests to do so and banned the users abusing Grok for that purpose. Once they prove they have put the appropriate mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again it's fine and dandy, no?
> Agreed, thankfully, there is no CSAM feature, and they patched it in a couple of days so that it would stop obeying requests to do so and banned the users abusing Grok for that purpose.
The order, over several days, was:
* banned users and took down tweets requesting the content, without taking down the content that they clearly knew of, since they responded against the requests that generated it.
* Made the feature paid-only.
* Took down content and restricted the functionality.
> Once they prove they have put the appropriate mechanisms in place to make sure it doesn't happen again it's fine and dandy, no?
I’m not sure all jurisdictions involved will see knowing generation and dissemination of nonconsensual, including child, pornography as the kind of thing where “I promise not to do itt again, so we’re cool, right?” works, but we’ll see.
If by patched you mean he made it cost money.
Can you go on Twitter right now and generate CSAM using Grok?
> France who does very much seem like they want to ban X and Grok?
Source? I’m not seeing that in the French-language press.
Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.
We don't go after Adobe for doing that. We go after the person who did it.
Maybe tying together an uncensored AI model and a social network just isn't something that's ethical / should be legal to do.
There are many things where each is legal/ethical to provide, and where combining them might make business sense, but where we, as a society have decided to not allow combining them.
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No. I'm just saying that people should be consistent and if they apply a certain standard to Grok then they should also apply the same standard to other things. Be consistent.
Meanwhile what I commonly see is people dunking on anything Musk-related because they dislike him, but give a free pass on similar things if it's not related to him.
Every island is capable of hosting pedophiles, but they don't. The one island that's famous for pedos is the one Musk wanted to be invited to. Find me more pedo islands, I'll dunk on them too very consistently. Whether it's AI with CSAM or islands with pedos, Musk is definitely consistent.
You cannot build a CSAM generator, period. CSAM means Child Sexual Abuse Material -- material created through the sexual abuse of children. If it came out of a generator, it is not, by definition, Child Sexual Abuse Material.
CSAM is the woke word for child pornography, and it's a bad word, like how pedophiles should be called pedophiles and not MAPs. The original term, child pornography, is better.
Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. The only thing this proves is that you can't upset the French government or they'll go on a fishing expedition through your office praying to find evidence of a crime.
>Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user.
There is no way this is true, especially if the system is PaaS only. Additionally, the system should have a way to tell if someone is attempting to bypass their safety measures and act accordingly.
> if requested by a savvy user
Grok brought that thought all the way to "... so let's not even try to prevent it."
The point is to show just how aware X were of the issue, and that they chose to repeatedly do nothing against Grok being used to create CSAM and probably other problematic and illegal imagery.
I can't really doubt they'll find plenty of evidence during discovery, it doesn't have to be physical things. The raid stops office activity immediately, and marks the point in time after which they can be accused of destroying evidence if they erase relevant information to hide internal comms.
Grok does try to prevent it. They even publicly publish their safety prompt. It clearly shows they have disallowed the system from assisting with queries that create child sexual abuse material.
The fact that users have found ways to hack around this is not evidence of X committing a crime.
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/grok_4_saf...
Is there evidence this is the real prompt?
Grok makes it especially easy to do so.
What makes Grok special compared to random "AI gf generator 9001" which is hosted specifically with the intent of generating NSFW content?
> What makes Grok special
X. xAI isn’t being raided. X is. If Instagram bought a girlfriend generator and built it into its app, it would face liability as well.
If AI GF Generator 9001 is producing unwilling deepfake pornography of real people, especially if of children, feel free to raid their offices as well.
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>Every AI system is capable of generating CSAM and deep fakes if requested by a savvy user. The only thing this proves is that you can't upset the French government or they'll go on a fishing expedition through your office praying to find evidence of a crime.
If every AI system can do this, and every AI system in incapable of preventing it, then I guess every AI system should be banned until they can figure it out.
Every banking app on the planet "is capable" of letting a complete stranger go into your account and transfer all your money to their account. Did we force banks to put restrictions in place to prevent that from happening, or did we throw our arms up and say: oh well the French Government just wants to pick on banks?
Every artist is capable of drawing CSAM. Every 3D modeler can render CSAM. Ban all computers !!
Well every human can be an artist with some training. I guess the solution is to ban humans.
And the artist is punished for doing so. Thank you for proving my point.
But we don't ban pencils do we?
right and X isn't having it's GPUs banned
You can use photoshop to create CSAM too, should that be banned?
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In my opinion I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM would be there are laws on the books for CSAM and not for social manipulation. If people could be jailed for manipulation there would be no social media platforms, lobbyists, political campaign groups or advertisements. People are already being manipulated by AI.
On a related note given AI is just a tool and requires someone to tell it to make CSAM I think they will have to prove intent possibly by grabbing chat logs, emails and other internal communications but I know very little about French law or international law.
hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation? Where would that end? could i be jailed if i post a review for a restaurant if you feel it manipulated you? or anyone stating an opinion could be construed as manipulation. that is beyond a slippery slope, that is an authoritarian nightmare.
So you think writing a review is somehow on the same magnitude as social media platforms with 300 million-3 billion users?
And how is that different from TV channels/media en large having laws to abide by? Slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes..
The TV station thing, talking about the US here, only applies to broadcast TV and it is a condition of getting their a frequency allotment from the government.
No, i am not saying that it is the same. I am saying that it would start as "We are just going after the tech companies" but if you give the government an inch they will take a mile. They would take that and expand upon the hate speech stuff you are already see around the world as an excuse to arrest whoever they wanted.
I am a free market person, so i think these sites are providing something to the market that people like or they wouldn't be there. If you wanted to rein them in, fine but you have to be careful how you word stuff or it gets pretty scary pretty quickly.
Hate speech laws exist in most of Europe and they are not abused at all. And it's not like media wouldn't already have a bunch of laws applied to it, even in the US - e.g. libel and the like. Surely you can slippery slope with that as well, right?
And the free market only works if there is a well-defined market with proper laws that are upheld. Otherwise it's a running competition where Meta/X just shoot every other competitor at the start and drive to the goal with a car. This has been known by Adam Smith already - you can't be a "free market person" while being happy with these giga-corporations trampling on laws left and right.
> they are not abused at all
In Germany, support for Palestine is considered hate speech since it's antisemitic.
I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.
I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.
Yeah i get that. I just hesitate to give any government even more power than they do now to silence people, which they would definitely use any law like that to do.
I will have to check that out, it sounds interesting. It was also pretty obvious how all the social media companies pushed the same narrative through COVID.
I don't like how these social networks and the media try to manipulate things but I don't think giving the government even more power will fix anything. It will probably make it worse. I think even if you had those laws on the books, you would still get manipulation through selective enforcement.
I think the only solution is education and individuals saying no to these platforms' and their algorithmic feeds. I think we are already seeing a growing movement towards people either not using social media or using it way less than they did previously. I know for me personally, I use X but only follow tech people i like and only look at the "following" tab. It is a much better experience than the "for you" tab
Few laws have bright lines. Can I be jailed for murder if I crash a car into someone? It depends greatly upon the specific circumstances.
> hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation?
Its the usual deal from the that crowd:
- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties
- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.
It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.
Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.
It's broader and mentioned in the article:
>French authorities opened their investigation after reports from a French lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms on X likely distorted the functioning of an automated data processing system. It expanded after Grok generated posts that allegedly denied the Holocaust, a crime in France, and spread sexually explicit deepfakes, the statement said.
Broader still.
and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.
I had to make a choice to not even use Grok (I wasn't overly interested in the first place, but wanted to review how it might compare to the other tools), because even just the Explore option shows photos and videos of CSAM, CSAM-adjacent, and other "problematic" things in a photorealistic manner (such as implied bestiality).
Looking at the prompts below some of those image shows that even now, there's almost zero effort at Grok to filter prompts that are blatantly looking to create problematic material. People aren't being sneaky and smart and wordsmithing subtle cues to try to bypass content filtering, they're often saying "create this" bluntly and directly, and Grok is happily obliging.
Given America passed PAFACA (intended to ban TikTok, which Trump instead put in hands of his friends), I would think Europe would also have a similar law. Is that not the case?
Are you talking about this [1]? I don't know the answer to your question whether or not the EU has the same policy. That is talking about control by a foreign adversary.
I think that would delve into whether or not the USA would be considered a foreign adversary to France. I was under the impression we were allies since like the 1800s or so despite some little tiffs now and again.
[1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
EngineerUSA needs to vastly change his tone to avoid being flagged. I vouched it because it's broadly true but the wording could be a LOT better.
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> I think the reason they raided the offices for CSAM
Sigh. The French raid statement makes no mention of CSAM.
What does it say? I can't read French
Going from the BBC:
Among potential crimes it said it would investigate were complicity in possession or organised distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature, infringement of people's image rights with sexual deepfakes and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.
Distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature sounds like child porn to me. CSAM is a woker word for child porn.
> Distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature sounds like child porn to me.
To me too.
> CSAM is a woker word for child porn.
Indeed some people would like it diluted thus. But it generally remains (an initialism not word) for something quite distinct - about abuse rather than just porn.
CSAM is not a woker word. It was created to be more explicit as the original term was CP which stood for child pornography but there are too many common things that when abbreviated are "CP".
I am not surprised at all. Independent of whether this is true, such a decision from the EU would never be acted upon. The number of layers between the one who says "ban it" somewhere in Bruissels and the operator blackholing the DNS and filtering traffic is decades.
Why do you think that? It can take a few years for national laws bring in place, but that also depends on how much certain countries push it. Regarding Internet traffic I assume a few specific countries that route most of the traffic would be enough to stop operation for the most part.
Have you ever seen an actual EU-wide decision on such matters and an actual application?
The closest I can think of is GDPR which has its great aspects and also the cookies law (which is incorrectly interpreted). And some things like private IPs being PIIs which promotes nonsnsical "authorities notifications" that are not used afterwards.
We have consulting companies doing yearly audits on companies to close the books. And yet hacks happen all the time. Without consequences.
There is an ocean between what is announced and lives on paper vs. the reality of the application. If you work in compliance and cubersecurity you see this everyday.
There's no tool, technological or legal, to block/ban a website EU-wide.
They banned Russia Today EU-wide.
What's your source for this? I can't find anything online. They banned doing business with the organization, not access to the website.
The EU can declare a company a criminal enterprise and the financial industry must then prevent EU citizens from transacting with them.
They said blocking a website
They will set their DNS servers to drop all incoming connections to X. That can be done in each country. They can use Deep Packet inspection tools and go from there. If the decision is EU wide then they will roll that out.
Deep packet inspection? What do you mean? Are you talking about domain name confiscation or building a Great Firewall of EU?
There is no law that would permit the EU to do this. This would be a huge thing to introduce and implement, probably a 2-3 year project, and would almost certainly be strongly opposed by multiple member countries.
The EU has DNS servers?
The DNS servers take incoming connections to anything other than the DNS servers?
The EU has deep packet inspection tools?
Almost like the EU can't just ban speech on a whim the way US far right people keep saying it can.
Simply because if you were to ban this type of platform you wouldn't need Musk to "move it towards the far right" because you would already be the very definition of a totalitarian regime.
But whatever zombie government France is running can't "ban" X anyway because it would get them one step closer to the guillotine. Like in the UK or Germany it is a tinderbox cruising on a 10-20% approval rating.
If "French prosecutor" want to find a child abuse case they can check the Macron couple Wikipedia pages.
What do you mean with "this type of platform"? Platforms that don't follow (any) national laws have been banned in multiple countries over the years.
By itself this isn't extraordinary in a democracy.
and France is known for filtering internet access where domains are blocked (over 4000 added per year), including porn, but also news websites
Which news websites?
RT for example
RT is a propaganda website to make you like Russia
> if you were to ban this type of platform you wouldn't need Musk to "move it towards the far right" because you would already be the very definition of a totalitarian regime
Paradox of tolerance. (The American right being Exhibit A for why trying to let sunlight disinfect a corpse doesn’t work.)
> The child abuse feels like a smaller problem compared to that risk.
I think we can and should all agree that child sexual abuse is a much larger and more serious problem than political leanings.
It's ironic as you're commenting about a social media platform, but I think it's frightening what social media has done to us with misinformation, vilification, and echo chambers, to think political leanings are worse than murder, rape, or child sexual abuse.
In fairness, AI-generated CSAM is nowhere near as evil as real CSAM. The reason why possession of CSAM was such a serious crime is because its creation used to necessitate the abuse of a child.
It's pretty obvious the French are deliberately conflating the two to justify attacking a political dissident.
Definitely agree on which is worse! To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with the French raid. Just that statements about severe crimes (child sexual abuse for the above poster - not AI-generated content) being "lesser problems" compared to politics is a concerning measure of how people are thinking.
> The reason why possession of CSAM was such a serious crime is because its creation used to necessitate the abuse of a child.
Used to? Still does. A convincing fake is still only a fake.
> It's pretty obvious the French are deliberately conflating the two to justify attacking a political dissident.
Agreed. But the same conflation in the comments hereabouts is ... puzzling.
I mean, abuse of a photo == abuse of a child? Like, voodoo dolls? Creepy.
It may not be worse "objectively" and in direct harm.
However - it has one big problem that is rarely discussed... Normalizing of behaviour, interests and attitudes. It just becomes a thing that Grok can do - for paid accounts, and people think - ok, "no harm, no problem"... Long-term, there will be harm. This has been demonstrated over decades of investigation of CSAM.
>Normalizing of behaviour, interests and attitudes.
That's why all media depicting violence should be banned.
/s
Those innocent "political leanings" get people killed. See the ICE killings in Minneapolis.
Big platforms and media are only good if they try to move the populace to the progressive, neoliberal side. Otherwise we need to put their executives in jail.
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> fairly open platform where people can choose what to post and who to follow.
It is well known Musk amplifies his own speech and the words of those he agrees with on the platform, while banning those he doesn’t like.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
> could you clarify what the difference is between the near right and the far right?
It’s called far-right because it’s further to the right (starting from the centre) than the right. Wikipedia is your friend, it offers plenty of examples and even helpfully lays out the full spectrum in a way even a five year old with a developmental impairment could understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-right_politics
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I was surprised by your claim that Wikipedia would categorize mild restrictions on immigration as an element of far-right politics, so I read that article to see it for myself. I didn't see anything about mild restrictions. Would you care to point out where you saw that?
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Well, far right is a spectrum, obviously. But a party that equates immigration of a particular religion as terrorism is not "mild immigration restrictions" in my reading.
I cross-checked Wikipedia's information with another source: https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/french-election-is-it-c...
I don't know about that party, but National Rally doesn't say that, and also polls around 34% of French people. So it remains that the Wikipedia "far right" definition is a very wide spectrum.
Um, the article I posted was about the same party. The BBC considers them far-right [1], Politico considers them far-right [2], Reuters considers them far-right [3], AP News considers them far-right [4], NBC News considers them far-right [5], the New York Times considers them far-right [6], Deutsche Welle considers them far-right [7].
I don't think the Wikipedia characterization is far off a pretty commonly held sentiment. You are of course, able to disagree and consider them far-left, center, or whatever label you want.
You stated earlier that because Wikipedia called mild immigration reform far-right (which it did not to my reading, so you pointed to National Rally as an example) words don't mean anything. But words do mean things by consensus, and from my reading the consensus is that National Rally is far-right.
Of course, many far-right (and far-left) thinkers consider themselves centrists or mild, so there will be disagreement.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxeee385en1o [2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/france-far-right-faces-inter... [3]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/le-pens-far-right-waiti... [4]: https://apnews.com/article/france-election-le-pen-national-r... [5]: https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/france-raid-far-right-n... [6]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/world/europe/france-natio... [7]: https://www.dw.com/en/france-far-right-rally-after-marine-le...
The article you posted said, "we just call them that because everyone else does".
But there's also an obvious semantic fail when 34% of the electorate is "far right". This means (16% - half the moderate percentage) is on the non-far right. It implies that "far" is just meaningless cant.
Where are you getting 34% of the electorate identify as far right from? I tried to find numbers and failed.
I googled National Rally polling, top result:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/france/
Got it. I was looking at world-wide numbers but it makes sense to limit to just France. I didn't know that 34% of France held far-right views, but you learn something new every day.
This is obviously diversion but anyway: Bunch of "American and European" "patriots" that he retweets 24/7 turned out to be people from Iran, Pakistan, India and Russia. These accounts generate likes by default by accounts with "wife of vet" in bio and generic old_blonde_women.jpeg aka bots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj38m11218xo
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People having different opinions other than globalists elites is destabilizing to their reign :))
Are we implying that Musk isn’t part of the global elite?
You meant to write "Literal russian state-sponsored bots"
They can’t fathom that their opinions are unpopular and probably wrong.
Elon fiddles with the algorithm to boost certain accounts. Some accounts are behind an auth wall and others are not. It’s open but not even.
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It's pretty obvious, media is called the 4th power.
Control the media, you control the information that a significant part of Europeans get. Elections aren't won by 50%, you only need to convince 4 or 5% of the population that the far right is great.
Schrödingers social network: It's somehow irrelevant but somehow "destablizies our democracy" ;)
Irrelevant to most ordinary people in the sense that few directly use it, but popular with the source of much of our discourse / culture. Think journalists, taste makers, meme creators etc.
It gives people who aren't aware of the bot accounts / thumb on the scale the perception that insane crackpot delusions are more popular than they are.
There is a reason Musk paid so much for Twitter. If this stuff had no effect he wouldn't have bought it.
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Social media should not allow algorithms to actively AMPLIFY disinformation to the public.
If people want to post disinformation that's fine, but the way that these companies push that information onto users is the problem. There either needs to be accountability for platforms or a ban on behavior driven content feeds.
People lying on the internet is fine. Social media algorithms amplifying the lie because it has high engagement is destroying our society.
The same way that social media has destabilized the USA.
By exposing people to a flood of misinformation and politically radicalizing content designed to maximize engagement via emotion (usually anger).
Remember when Elon Musk alleged that he was going to find a trillion dollars (a year) in waste fraud and abuse with DOGE? Did he ever issue a correction on that statement after catastrophically failing to do so? Do you think that kind of messaging might damage the trust in our institutions?
> Did he ever issue a correction on that statement after catastrophically failing to do so?
To be 'fair', finding fraud never was the real purpose of DOGE, just some fake argument that enough citizen would find plausible.
> where people can choose
How true is this really?
We certainly have data points to show Musk has put his thumb on the scale
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While there may be some feeds on Xitter that are basic algorithms, (1) it's not the only one (2) there may still be less mechanical algorithmic choices within following (what order, what mix, how much) (3) evidence to the contrary exists, are you freeing yourself of facts?
I haven't dug into whatever they open sourced about the algorithm to make definitive statements. Regardless, there are many pieces out there where you can learn about the evidence for direct manipulation.
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> You can just go on the app yourself and verify this
That's not how science and statistics works. Comprehensive evidence and analysis is a search or chat bot away. The legal cases will go into the details as well, by nature of how legal proceedings work
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In case you're not playing dumb, the term you're looking for would be centre right.
Far right to me is advocating for things that discriminate based on protected traits like race, sex, etc. So if you’re advocating for “white culture” above others, that’s far right. If you’re advocating for the 19th amendment (women’s right to vote) to be repealed (as Nick Fuentes and similar influencers do), that’s also far right. Advocating for ICE to terrorize peaceful residents, violate constitutional rights, or outright execute people is also far right.
Near right to me is advocating for things like lower taxes or different regulations or a secure border (but without the deportation of millions who are already in the country and abiding by laws). Operating the government for those things while still respecting the law, upholding the constitution, defending civil rights, and avoiding the deeply unethical grifting and corruption the Trump administration has normalized.
Obviously this is very simplified. What are your definitions out of curiosity?
I think your definition is mostly fine, although deporting illegal immigrants is a moderate position, not near right.
And I would agree with the other reply that Musk is not far right by that definition.
By your definition Musk is not far right.
> Avoiding the deeply unethical grifting and corruption the Trump administration has normalized.
Care to give examples of these?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-pr...
I hate to wade into this cesspool. How about some of the real obvious ones:
This is with two minutes of thought while waiting for a compile. I'm open to hearing how I am wrong.[dead]
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de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today. Many aspects of Bush (assuming GW here) would be considered not in line with America's far-right today.
Assume good intent. It helps you see the actually interesting point being made.
They wrote "Bush was right wing" (unless it was edited), so what's your point in saying "Many aspects of Bush (assuming GW here) would be considered not in line with America's far-right today." ?
Nope no stealth edit, my bad.
My point still stands, "politics change and assessments of politicians change accordingly".
Bill Clinton's crime bill would be considered far right today.
Ronald Regean's amnesty bill would be considered far left today.
Even at the time Bill Clinton was already very much right-wing. When he was in power, he oversaw the destruction of public services and the introduction of neoliberalism. Is that not right-wing?
It's not just me saying this. Ask anyone who was politically active (as a leftist) in the 90s. I'm not sure what was the equivalent of the Democratic Socialists of America (center-left) at that time, but i'm sure there was an equivalent and Bill Clinton was much more right-wing. That's without mentioning actual left-wing parties (like communists, anarchists, black panthers etc).
> Even at the time Bill Clinton was already very much right-wing.
He raised taxes, lowered military spending, and pursued universal healthcare. Those are not, and have never been, right-wing stances in the US.
Not a single of those three things is either left-wing or right-wing. It depends on the actual implementation.
For example, universal health-care is only left-wing if it's a public service. Taking money out of the State's pockets to finance private healthcare and pharmaceutical for-profit corporations is very much a definition of right-wing policy.
Everything depends on actual implementation. In healthcare, for example, we already had a system where state money was sent to private healthcare and pharmaceutical companies corporations. The problem was that the poorest people still had trouble getting covered. This proposal would have broadened the scope of who can afford that by providing poorer folks with direct government subsidies for coverage. Nobody is calling subsidize childcare in Scandinavian countries a "right-wing policy" because private providers exist.
Lowering military spending by aggressively shrinking active duty troop levels and eliminating weapons programs is certainly left-wing. Raising income taxes on the highest earners and raising the corporate tax rate have always been associated with left-wing policies in the US.
Very fair points, thanks.
>Is that not right-wing?
I don't think many self-described "right-leaning" people would have called Clinton "right wing" in the 90s.
I 100% see your point and agree with you that he had major policies that I would call right wing today.
> de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today
As much as it pains me to say this, because i myself consider de Gaulle to be a fascist in many regards, that's far from a majority opinion (disclaimer: i'm an anarchist).
I think de Gaulle was a classic right-wing authoritarian ruler. He had to take some social measures (which some may view as left-wing) because the workers at the end of WWII were very organized and had dozens of thousands of rifles, so such was the price of social peace.
He was right-wing because he was rather conservative, for private property/entrepreneurship and strongly anti-communist. Still, he had strong national planning for the economy, much State support for private industry (Elf, Areva, etc) and strong policing on the streets (see also, Service d'Action Civique for de Gaulle's fascist militias with long ties with historical nazism and secret services).
That being said, de Gaulle to my knowledge was not really known for racist fear-mongering or hate speech. The genocides he took part in (eg. against Algerian people) were very quiet and the official story line was that there was no story. That's in comparison with far-right people who already at the time, and still today, build an image of the ENEMY towards whom all hate and violence is necessary. See also Umberto Eco's Ur-fascism for characteristics of fascist regimes.
In that sense, and it really pains me to write this, but de Gaulle was much less far-right than today's Parti Socialiste, pretending to be left wing despite ruling with right-wing anti-social measures and inciting hatred towards french muslims and binationals.
While de Gaulle being far-right is not a majority opinion (except in some marginal circles), he would undoubtedly be considered far-right if he was governing today, which is what GP seems to have meant.
I think that, for most Western people today, far-right == bad to non-white people, independent of intention (as you demonstrated with your remark about the PS), so de Gaulle's approach to Algeria, whether he's loud about it or not, would qualify him as far-right already.
All this to say, the debate is based on differing definitions of far-right (for example you conflate fascism and far-right and use Eco, while GP and I seem to think it's about extremely authoritarian + capitalist), and has started from an ignorant comment by an idiot who considers Bush (someone who is responsible for the death of around a million Iraqis, the creation of actual torture camps, large-scale surveillance, etc.) not far-right because, I assume, he didn't say anything mean about African-Americans.
Bad assumptions are just another form of stupidity.
No one can assume good intent with such question, at best it's bait.
But then again people on this very forum will argue Sanders is a literal communist so we circle back to the sub 70iq problem
Idk I see a bunch of great commentary in response. Noted that I should not assume good intent from you.
It used to be a principle of the left to believe in free speech. Now that is called right wing.
MAGA talks about free speech but doesn't believe in or practice it.
Believing in free speech is neither left nor right, it's on the freedom/authority axis which is perpendicular. Most people on the left never advocated to legalize libel, defamation, racist campaigns, although the minority that did still do today.
The "free-speechism" of the past you mention was about speaking truth to power, and this movement still exists on the left today, see for example support for Julian Assange, arrested journalists in France or Turkey, or outright murdered in Palestine.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised free speech, he very soon actually banned accounts he disagreed with, especially leftists. Why free speech may be more and more perceived as right wing is because despite having outright criminal speech with criminal consequences (such as inciting violence against harmless individuals such as Mark Bray), billionaires have weaponized propaganda on a scale never seen before with their ownership of all the major media outlets and social media platforms, arguing it's a matter of free speech.
There’s no such thing as free speech and there never has been. To believe there is, is to fundamentally fail to understand what a society even is.
Reddit and BlueSky would be the first to go if that were actually the criteria for banning a platform.
Why? Has Reddit given their users tools to generate CSAM and non-consensual sexualized imagery? Bluesky certainly hasn't
Are you illiterate? The comment I was replied to said X should be banned for trying to manipulate public opinion. It said nothing about CSAM.
God I hope so
You prefer those be shut down to the one run by a pedo who happens to be the richest person in the world and meddles in elections across the global personally with money?
Why not all 3?
Yet another nail
> They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning.
Good luck with that...
the thing is a lot of recent legal preceding surrounding X is about weather X fulfilled the legally required due diligence and if not what level of negligence we are speaking about
and the things about negligence which caused harm to humans (instead of e.g. just financial harm) is that
a) you can't opt out of responsibility, it doesn't matter what you put into your TOS or other contracts
b) executives which are found responsible for the negligent action of a company can be hold _personally_ liable
and independent of what X actually did Musk as highest level executive personal did
1) frequently did statements that imply gross negligence (to be clear that isn't necessary how X acted, which is the actual relevant part)
2) claimed that all major engineering decisions etc. are from him and no one else (because he love bragging about how good of an engineer he is)
This means summoning him for questioning is legally speaking a must have independent of weather you expect him to show up or not. And he probably should take it serious, even if that just means he also could send a different higher level executive from X instead.
I guess he could just never enter the EU ever again. Maybe he can buy Little St. James.
and count on Trump to disrespect the extradition treaties. Which might be a reasonable expectation, but will have consequences, and Trump might not hold power forever.
I mean at this point, with a trillion dollars, apparently, why not just buy a small nation.
Elon's in the files asking Epstein about "wild parties" and then doesn't seem to care about all this. Easy to draw a conclusion here.
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As far as I can tell from the reporting:
* They exchanged various emails between 2012 and 2014 about Elon visiting the island
* They made plans for Elon to visit the island
* We don't know if Elon actually followed through on those plans and he denies it
I think it's premature to say he didn't go, and the latest batches of emails directly contradict the claim he wasn't ever invited.
See https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/30/epstein-files-show-elon-musk...
Unless I'm mistaken reading this, it looks like they never set a date and this this is the prior conversation to him trying to invite himself over and being told no. I don't see any plans in this article, just Epstein saying he'll send a heli and then never setting a date or making actual plans. I feel like if there's no evidence he went, Elon denies it, and Elon was a big supporter of releasing the files then it would probably be premature to suggest he went.
> In a December 2013 email, Musk again wrote to Epstein saying, “Christmas and New Year’s, will be in the BVI /St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?”
> “I will send heli for you,” Epstein responded, with Musk writing back, “Thanks.”
> In a follow-up email on Dec. 25, Musk said, “Actually, I could fly back early on the 3rd. We will be in St Bart’s.” He asked if he and Riley should head to the island the day before.
> CNBC hasn’t confirmed whether Musk ever visited the Island, though Musk has denied ever traveling there.
> Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
To me “I will send heli for you” does not mean "being told no".
Elon is literally in the files, talking about going to the island. It's documented
Who knows who did what on this island, and I hope we'll figure it out. But in the meantime, going to this island or/and being friend with Epstein doesn't automatically make someone a pedo or rapist.
As part of the irrational mob that is out to find the witch, you are just being too rational. Down vote!
It's odd to be so prim about someone who is notorious for irrational trolling for the sake of mob entertainment.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
Ignoring mountains of circumstantial evidence isn't rational either.
No, but they all knew he was a pedo/rapist, and were still friends with him and went to the island of a pedo/rapist, and introduced the pedo/rapist to their friends...
We don't know how many were pedo/rapists, but we know all of them liked to socialize with one and trade favours and spread his influence.
Yes yes such a complex situation and so hard to tell whether the guy with the pedo non-con site wanted to go to the pedo non-con island.
Neither does your wife divorcing you at about the same time things started to go through legal process...
Oops... yeah, in retrospect it was even worse... no... you can and should be judged by the friends you keep and hang-out with... The same ones who seem to be circling the wagons with innocuous statements or attempts to find other scapegoats (DARVO)... hmm, what was that quote again:
"We must all hang together or we will all hang separately"
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Obama is not in the flight logs and there is no evidence he was ever on the island.
Elon Musk has his own planes, he would not have needed a ride had Epstein invited him. Recently released emails also show people (like commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who asserted at great length last year that he hadn't had any contact with Epstein since meeting him in 2005) arranging to visit Epstein at his island and taking their own yacht over there.
He was only going to the island to get rid of bots on Twitter. Just like OJ spent the rest of his life looking for the real killer.
It's timestamped like 2013, I think. Years before he bought Twitter (yes, I know you're joking)
He was planning way ahead, like a real genius.
Good and honestly it’s high time. There used to be a time when we could give corps the benefit of the doubt but that time is clearly over. Beyond the CSAM, X is a cesspool of misinformation and generally the worst examples of humanity.
I don't know how we even allowed these companies to not be responsible for everything on their platform.
The entirety of the social media platform is based on the idea that the company isn't responsible for what the users post, which is just wrong. If you own a magazine, you should be held responsible for everything published.
You shouldn't be allowed to profit from publishing anything, then hide behind "the users did it, not us".
And in this case, Elon should be held responsible for every single image of CSAM published on X. Same with Zuck. Same with Truth Social, whatever you want.
I guess this means that building the neverending 'deepfake CSAM on demand machine' was a bad idea.
I feel like whoever downvoted this comment should probably be on a watchlist of some kind.
Good old HN. Users losing their collective minds over rule of law and CSAM being bad.
extremely cursed userbase sometimes
Found the guy who supports digital ID and involuntary phone database scanning
HN is capable of a better discussion without personal attacks.
Found the cheese pizza enjoyer.
HN is capable of a better discussion without personal attacks.
> CSAM being bad.
Agreed. It's why it's difficult to support France who has sheltered Roman Polanski for decades.
It's strange how people like you only think it's bad when it suits your political agenda.
Until the EU gets their act together on free speech, it's high time the united states hits them with aggressive economic sanctions.
Settings aside this is about CSAM, the US is the only one of the two to shut down a foreign social network because it dislikes what was said on it. The US doesn't get to play that card anymore.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
Europe/EU should have whatever free speech they want. But we should annex all european controlled territory in the western hemisphere. The amount of territory that european empires still control in this hemisphere is alarming and frankly embarrassing. From greenland to "french" guyana to the falklands, it should all be seized.
Is this sarcasm ? because sounds like sarcasm. If Grok generating naked images of children is your ideea of free speech no wonder nobody takes a stand against Trump and Co., you somehow managed turn your common sense to dust...
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E.U is replacing their citizens with unvetted violent criminals. They have to vote for whoever gives them free stuff. The powers doing this are upset a company in the U.S allows their citizens to protest it.
Read that on X?
Do you honestly not believe it is likely that EU is importing votes?
Also, haven't you seen the general push towards censorship, attempts to ban VPNs, and all the other shenanigans happening in the EU? Do you believe this is disconnected from the legal attempts on Twitter and Telegram?
Is it really a conspiracy theory at this point? Politicians do all kinds of evil shit, but these playbook tactics are where you draw the line?
I'm European and live here, before you say I'm getting these takes on X.
+1 from an European, it's beyond obvious and I don't understand why people are letting {politics, mainstream media painting of X} shape their belief on these extremely pressing and important issues.
A Russian in a French prison says my country isn't free. Well, let that message spread to other criminals. You're not welcome in France.
The man that is friends with a bunch of pedophiles owns a website that is becoming known for generating CSAM? What are the chances?