Technology

I'm morbidly curious about the engineers Musk hires, because overwhelmingly the most intelligent engineers and scientists I know wouldn't dream of applying to work at one of his companies. Even the ones that don't care about the Nazi shit have still read the many reports about how badly he treats his staff.

What? That's not even remotely how that works.

A human being is also shaped by the information they've encountered throughout their life. You've encountered racism, stupidity, misinformation, and countless other forms of bad information. That doesn't mean you automatically become racist, stupid, or incapable of distinguishing good information from bad information.

AI works similarly in the sense that its training data contains an enormous amount of contradictory, inaccurate, biased, and outright terrible information. The mere presence of that information in the training data does not logically imply that the resulting model possesses those characteristics.

And AI isn't "dumb" or "smart" in the way you're describing. Those are human cognitive attributes. The relevant question is what a model can actually do, what patterns it has learned, and how reliably it performs a given task.

You don't like AI. Fine. But you clearly don't understand how it works, and this is an unfortunately constant problem on this platform. People make an assumption about AI, then present that assumption as though they've discovered some fundamental truth about the technology.

Misinformation is misinformation. It doesn't become correct because you think the conclusion is morally justified. You didn't figure out anything about AI here. You made an assumption and called it true.

All, I'm saying if you're going to critique something, at least know what you're critiquing or criticizing.

Also before anybody makes any more assumptions, what happen here is absolutely mind-blowingly horrific. Using csam to train anything is just terrible and exploitive. I'm very sorry for doe for having to continuously go through this.

Also also the people responsible for this should be charged with possession of CSAM and prosecuted in a court of law.

Disclaimer: Disagreeing with someone's argument, pointing out flaws in their reasoning, or interpreting their position differently does not automatically make it a straw man. For example, if I say, "I think we should reduce military spending," and you respond, "You think we should completely eliminate the military," you have created a straw man. You are arguing against a position I never actually took.

Unfortunately that's not really how the actual data is stored. Functionally there is no CSAM at all in its "databanks". Once Info goes through training what comes out the other side is just a mass of goop.

It's like if you took an entire cow ran it though a meat grinder. Then demanded that you remove only the chuck from the resulting ground beef.

It's not physically possible.

You can demand it's retrained entirely from the ground up with vetted data. To produce a higher quality clean dataset. And I would agree that is what should be done.

But you can't unground the beef

on the one hand, it makes sense if your goal is to train AI to recognize child porn as a simple binary state (bool isCP). Social media sites used to have humans looking at that stuff moderating from afar and it really takes a horrendous toll on their employees.

On the other hand, Elon has repeatedly shown he refuses to censor child porn. They didn’t train it to stop making kiddie porn. They trained it to create more kiddie porn. And that’s why he’s rich. Elon won’t say no. He doesn’t care.

In all seriousness, there are some very interesting legal questions that will be raised if this case makes it that far.

The problem is that there's no existing law that would effect this on its own. To my knowledge, no country in the world has a law on the books specifically dealing with AI models trained on CSAM. So the question, under existing laws, would turn on whether the data stored within the model itself would constitute CSAM.

The problem, in no small part, is that we have serious gaps in our public consensus knowledge about how LLMs actually work.

There's a case that, AFAIK, is still being argued in Germany pushing the theory that LLMs actually do, in effect, store a copy of all their training data, just in a compressed form. This certainly seems to hold some water given both the tests they relied on, and the situation with this Jane Doe where the model produced images so alike to real images of her that they tripped hash detections.

The German case argues that this is analogous to the difference between an MP3 and a WAV, or a JPEG and a PNG. That sharing a lossy copy of a work is no less infringing just because it's imperfect.

If the underlying claim - that LLMs function as a form of lossy compression - can be substantiated then there would be a real argument that the model itself would constitute CSAM. Since there would be no realistic method that I'm aware of for removing the offending material from the model - and presumably SpaceX would have to somehow prove that they've done so - that would make the entire model contraband. They'd have to retrain on a clean dataset.

Of course I said "if the case makes it that far" at the top because I don't think it will. SpaceX will do anything and everything to avoid handing over meaningful discovery in this case, including, I suspect, outright destruction of evidence. If there is anything that actually proves that they used CSAM in the training data then they are so far beyond fucked that there's simply no downside to further illegality in pursuit of concealing their crimes. They have the world's wealthiest asshole in a position to throw literal billions at making this go away. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if people turn up dead off the back of this if that's what it takes.

Yep, shut that shit down. Also, pay her a shit ton of money.

He was invited.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk-epstein-files-island-visits

Elon was too creepy for Epstein

if we could expand this conversation, i think that to a degree the reverse is true.

i think the neurotypes (we might call them paraphilias actually but you'd be surprised how many people can be reduced to a paraphilia) that connect sex with power imbalance (age, wealth, intelligence, strength, or just legal context like contracts and political relationships) also tend to hoard (valuable things, money, information, connections, data, favors) and these tendencies strengthen each other in a stronger way than most people understand

if you're interested in what I'm saying, look up "impunity architecture", especially if you're Marxist because i think a lot of people think this is inherent to capitalism and it isn't at all.

Backward comments like this are why the conversation doesn't move.

I thought that Google used a similar dataset, possibly borrowing images from the NCVIP in order to create an analytic rule-set for which to omit images from Google Image Search. (A larger, similar rule-set is used to omit legal pornography when safe-search is on.)

Mind you, this was before the hyperscale AI era, when LLMs were things like SIRI and Google Now. And Google search still focused on websearch hits and not AI summaries.

Fun story: This was an area of study of mine during the early 2010s, since every image search engine would filter porn hits whether or not you had safe-search on or off. If it was turned off, porn would be filtered to the end of the list unless the engine decided you were intentionally looking for porn in which case the porn hits would be shown at the top of the list. There was no way to get results that ignored the ID-as-porn status of the images. I would enter ambiguously risqué terms to see how explicit I needed to be before the engine decided I was looking for porn.

"You don't understand! I need my 400 terabytes of child pornography to keep the kids safe!"