Several months ago Beehaw received a report about CSAM (i.e. Child Sexual Abuse Material). As an admin, I had to investigate this in order to verify and take the next steps. This was the first time in my life that I had ever seen images such as these. Not to go into great detail, but the images were of a very young child performing sexual acts with an adult.
The explicit nature of these images, the gut-wrenching shock and horror, the disgust and helplessness were very overwhelming to me. Those images are burnt into my mind and I would love to get rid of them but I don’t know how or if it is possible. Maybe time will take them out of my mind.
In my strong opinion, Beehaw must seek a platform where NO ONE will ever have to see these types of images. A software platform that makes it nearly impossible for Beehaw to host, in any way, CSAM.
If the other admins want to give their opinions about this, then I am all ears.
I, simply, cannot move forward with the Beehaw project unless this is one of our top priorities when choosing where we are going to go.
Wonder whether in theory one could use a dataset of… everything else, have the AI exclude what it does not recognise, then run the exclusions against a dataset to see whether or not they contain children. There could be an additional layer of running the exclusions against a dataset of regular sexual content.
One issue is that admin of any site would still want to report any CSAM to authorities. That could be automated by an AI checker, but one would have to have a lot of faith that the AI was decently accurate and not generating many false reports. The workaround I described to avoid using datasets of abuse is unlikely to be particularly accurate - ok for the purposes of protecting admin, but leaves them in an odd spot when it comes to banning a user, especially where a user’s livelihood could be impacted, or things like paid online courses. I guess specialist police departments probably would have to use highly relevant datasets, along with review by humans, but still - nobody wants to inadvertently clog up that system with false reports.