When it comes to restrictions and rules for artificial intelligencel, it is with the intention of avoiding horrific situations such as those that are happening under the shadows of technology. A pedophilia network is growing day by day on the Internet generating and commercializing images of child abuse, created by machine learning mechanisms.
It is illegal, even if they mistakenly believe otherwise based on the fact that “there is no presence of a real person” in the image. Mere representation violates the policies of mainstream platforms. Therefore, when services such as Patreon detected the existence of one of these accounts, they were completely removed.
The BBC makes a complete report on this modality that stains the development of Artificial Intelligence; puts her on a dark side. During all these months we have been entertaining ourselves with funny or parodic images referring to characters from series, movies, comics or anime.
However, the use of technology without controls causes this unfortunate situation in which child sexual abuse is represented, through images generated by Artificial Intelligence.
According to the BBC report, the pedophile ring uses the platform of stable diffusion to generate the images. As you may recall, this service creates illustrations from descriptive text, the original purpose of which was to create art.
“The BBC has found that it is being used to create realistic images of child sexual abuse, including the rape of babies and minors,” they reported in their web portal.
Experts such as NPCC child protection director Ian Critchley say it would be wrong to claim someone is not being harmed because there are no actual minors in the footage.
Critchley says that a pedophile could “progress along that scale of offense from thought, to synthetic, to actually abusing a real child.”
Another of the platforms that have been used to market this type of image is Pixiv. This is a social network from Japan in which users share sexual content related to anime. This practice is not illegal in the land of the Rising Sun.
However, a spokesperson for this social network states that the company does not tolerate content that involves minors.
Both Pixiv and Patreon modified their policies to establish in their rules the prohibition of synthetic images (the real ones were already prohibited) on their platforms.