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by causality0 730 days ago
Barfbagginus' comment is dead so I will reply to it here.

I suspect that you are not an AI engineer,

I am not. But I did spend several years as as forum moderator and in doing so encountered probably more pieces of CSAM than the average person. It has a particular soul-searing quality which, frankly, lends credence to the concept of a cogito-hazard.

Can we agree that if we implement systems specially designed to create harmful content, then we become legally and criminally liable for the output?

That would depend on the legal system in question, but in answer, I believe models trained on actual CSAM material qualify as CSAM material themselves and should be illegal. I don't give a damn how hard it is to filter them out of the training set.

Are you seriously going to sit here and defend the right are people to create sexual abuse material simulation engines?

If no person was at any point harmed or exploited in the creation of the training data, the model, or with its output, yes. The top-grossing entertainment product of all time is a murder simulator. There is no argument for the abolition of victimless simulated sexual assault that doesn't also apply to victimless simulated murder. If your stance is that simulating abhorrent acts should be illegal because it encourages those acts, etc then I can respect your position. But it is hypocrisy to declare that only those abhorrent acts you personally find distasteful should be illegal to simulate.