Make sure the anon hate is actually good

>look inside

>its liberal capitalist welfare and raising the minimum wage

>no part of this process including seizing the means of production or a socialist revolution/takeover of the government

>country is capitalist

so I KNOW i'm being unreasonable or overcautious, but i can't help it because I don't want to wake up one morning and find out the wrong person made some tweet with a screenshot of me and now thousands of strangers want to kill me personally. or to be watching a fave youtuber and find out they're a part of this, too. watching this purity culture mindset spread more and more online makes me scared for the future and for what it means in the real world, and I get really bad anxiety, pacing around the house making up doom spiral senerios until Seán breaks me out of it.

Link the original tweet with more info

The LAION dataset has had ethical concerns raised over its contents before, but the public now has proof that there was CSAM used in it.

The dataset was essentially created by scraping the internet and using a mass tagger to label what was in the images. Many of the images were already known to contain identifying or personal information, and several people have been able to use EU privacy laws to get images removed from the dataset.

However, LAION itself has known about the CSAM issue since 2021.

The database doesn't actually contain images, it contains metadata that points to where the images can be found. There isn't literally CSAM in the database, there's metadata that points to links that may or may not contain CSAM. Sites like the Internet Archive or Common Crawl also have similar issues, because they're crawling/archiving the entire internet.

The researchers conducted the study in a country where its completely illegal to view CSAM even for research. Basically, they were legally not allowed to verify if there was actual CSAM at the links that the database pointed to. They only referenced the links contained in the LAION database against a database of known CSAM links. They got a few thousand matches in a database that contains about 5 billion image links - less than 1 percent of all images.

I know StableDiffusion was not trained on every single image in the database, and I assume Midjourney wasn't either. It's possible that no CSAM was included in the training data that the image generators actually used. I think this is something that Stability AI (the company that owns Stable Diffusion) would have to confirm for themselves.

The reporters who broke this story are explicitly anti-open source AI. There is a very big likelihood that privately owned databases meant for training AI by companies like Google or Microsoft also contain CSAM, but those databases are closed-source and cannot be investigated. Their bias doesn't mean that we should reject their findings, but it does mean that their recommendations for the future should be taken with a grain of salt.

Alright, devil advocacy over. We still need better mass data-tagging tools. The LAION database should have been cross-referenced for the known CSAM database a lot sooner. Manually getting people to review images is almost impossible when it comes to datasets this large, so its absolutely crucial that we create tools that don't further exploit vulnerable children.