Well, yes, it is actually pretty normal for suspected criminal businesses. What's unusual is that this one has their own publicity engine. Americans are just having trouble coping with the idea of a corporation being held liable for crimes.

More normally it looks like e.g. this in the UK: https://news.sky.com/video/police-raid-hundreds-of-businesse...

CyberGEND more often seem to do smalltime copyright infringement enforcement, but there are a number of authorities with the right to conduct raids.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, physical investigation is the common procedure. You need a reason _not_ to do it, and since "it's all digital" is not a good reason we go back to doing the usual thing.

Isn't it both necessary and normal if they need more information about why they were generating CSAM? I don't know why the rule of law shouldn't apply to child pornography or why it would be incorrect to normalize the prosecution of CSAM creators.

I agree but so far at all places I have ever worked, I have access to the local hardware, disk, etc... if that's an actuality it's extremely rare.

Exactly, but that's outdated, what's the current equivalent?

>Unlike the current American administration who condones raids on homes without warrants and justifies violence with lies, this France raid follows something called rule of law.

Iffy on that front, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

Not only that but iirc he was one of the early “creators program” folks. Musk unbanned the guy that posted CSAM and started paying him to post.

If the tool generates it automatically or spuriously, then yes. But if it is the users asking it to, then I'm not sure there is a big difference.

Not exactly. Reddit always took down CSAM (how effectively I don't know, but I've been using the site consistently since 2011 and I've never come across it).

What Reddit did get a lot of negative public publicity for were subreddits focused on sharing non-explicit photos of minors, but with loads of sexually charged comments. The images themselves, nobody would really object to in isolation, but the discussions surrounding the images were all lewd. So not CSAM, but still creepy and something Reddit tightly decided it didn't want on the site.

Reddit was forced to clean it up when they started eyeballing an IPO.

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Filtering on the platform or Grok output though? If the filtering / flagging on X is insufficient then that is a separate issue independent of Grok. If filtering output of Grok, while irresponsible in my view, I don’t see why that’s different from say photoshop not filtering its output.

Edited to add clarification.

Agreed. Let's try to be less divisive. Everyone has got a fair point.

Yes, AI chatbots have to do everything in their power to avoid users easily generating such content.

AND

Yes, people that do so (even if done so on your self-hosted model) have to be punished.

I believe it is OK that Grok is being investigated because the point is to figure out whether this was intentional or not.

Just my opinion.

>But that doesn’t remove responsibility from tool providers when harm is predictable, scalable, and preventable by design.

Platforms moderating illegal content is exactly what we are arguing about, so you can't use it as an argument.

The rest cases you list are harms to the people using the tools/products. It is not harms that people using the tools inflict on third parties.

We are literally arguing about 3d printer control two topics downstream. 3d printers in theory can be used for CSAM too. So we should totally ban them - right? So are pencils, paper, lasers, drawing tablets.

Behind door number 4 is whenever you find a crime, start investigation and get a warrant. You will only need a couple of cases to send chilling enough effects.

People defending allowing CSAM content was definitely not on my bingo card for 2026.

Corporations are also people.

(note that this isn't a raid on Musk personally! It's a raid on X corp for the actions of X corp and posts made under the @grok account by X corp)

Court order, ip of users, sue the users. It is not X job to bring justice.

> There is no content like that on [...] Mast(o)don.

How can you say that nobody is posting CSAM on a massive decentralized social network with thousands of servers?

https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-17-2025-moderation-2024

"In 2024, Bluesky submitted 1,154 reports for confirmed CSAM to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Reports consist of the account details, along with manually reviewed media by one of our specialized child safety moderators. Each report can involve many pieces of media, though most reports involve under five pieces of media."

If it wasn't there, there would be no reports.

> What's new is that X automated the production of obscene or sexualised images by providing grok.

Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.

So let me make a suggestion: maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?

Hit them hard at the money level... it wouldn't be more authoritarian than something like ChatControl or restricting access to VPNs.

And actually all the mechanisms are already in place to implement something like that.

> Uncontrolled profileration of AI-CSAM makes detection of "genuine" data much harder

I don't follow. If the prosecutor can't find evidence of a crime and a person is not charged, that is considered harmful? As such the 5th amendment would fall under the same category and so would encryption. Making law enforcement have to work harder to find evidence of a crime cannot be criminalized unless you can come up with a reason why the actions themselves deserve to be criminalized.

> specifically in many of the grok cases it harms young victims that were used as templates for the material.

What is the criteria for this? If something is suitably transformed such that the original model for it is not discernable or identifiable, how can it harm them?

Do not take these as an argument against the idea you are arguing for, but as rebuttals against arguments that are not convincing, or if they were, would be terrible if applied generally.

More to the point, now that most productions are using intimacy coordinators, there's a degree of certainty around the consent of R-rated images.

There's basically no consent with what Grok is doing.

There still needs to be sexual abuse depicted, no? Just naked kids should not be an issue, right?

A generated picture of a family member in a bikini is an issue?

I don't see it...

Exactly! This should not be ok

> name of freedom

Speaking of freedom, I lost posting permission yesterday after my earlier post. Even though vile replies were insinuating vile things, my right of reply was taken away. We should never diminish the "name of freedom" as you've just done.

It should go without saying that CSAM is revolting. Who wants to see that stuff? Not me, not most people. Grok can't make that content. Maybe someone got around it temporarily. I've always thought Grok heavily censored, it refuses to analyse an image of the Statue of David because "naughty bits". The ironic and sad thing is a fig leaf gets around that restriction. So the accusation that Grok has no guardrails and can generate CSAM seems at best an anomaly or a lie.

>Yes, if you don't follow EU laws prepare to not do business in Europe.

Sure, that's what laws are for. Surely we can still point at those laws and question their motives though.

Spanish PM plainly stated a sort of editor framework of responsibility for platforms. This is the same country that strongly advocates for Chat Control within the EU, also looking for a similar under-16 ban on social media.

So the same government is at once looking to deanonimize social media users, revoke their privacy regarding communications, and to enforce moderation standards never seen before. This is, supposedly, a center-left + left coalition mind you.

Same country that blocks a chunk of the internet when a LALIGA football match is on, too. Lawfully of course. All of this is preposterous, making it the law doesn't make that better it makes it far far worse.

If X/Twitter was to be banned in the EU, and some of its citizens still wanted to access X/Twitter, let us say for the sake of getting alternative points of view on politics and news, would it be a good or a bad thing if accessing X/Twitter by IP was stopped?

As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?

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that was decades later, but yea I don't think for a second that was justifiable - not even considering that China had completely closed shop for America decades earlier and this was a 1-way openness relationship for a long time; they could have sold this as a reciprocity issue but they didn't

esp. when America already controls the main outlets through Android Play Store and Apple Store, and yep, they have proven to control them not just happen to host them as a country

arguably America did have valid security concerns with Huawei though, but if those are the rules then you cannot complain later on

The old “Rules for thee but not for me”.

Even earlier: PokerStars.

> It's worth pointing out that in France and the UK, the authorities involved are arms length independent of the political bodies

As someone who has lived in (and followed current affairs) in both of these countries, this is a very idealistic and naïve view. There can be a big gap between theory and practice

> There are statutory instruments (in France, constitutional clauses), that determine the independence of these authorities.

> They are tasked - and held to account by respective legislative bodies -

It's worth nothing here that the UK doesn't have separation of powers or a supreme court (in the US sense)

European courts have repeatedly said that in France the procureur (public prosecutor) isn’t an “independent judicial authority”.

The European Court of Human Rights has reminded this point (e.g. 29 Mar 2010, appl. no. 3394/03), and the Court of Justice of the European Union reaches a very similar conclusion (2 Mar 2021, C-746/18): prosecutors are part of the executive hierarchy and can’t be treated as the neutral, independent judicial check some procedures require.

For a local observer, this is made obvious by the fact that the procureur, in France, always follows current political vibes, usually in just a few months delay (extremely fast, when you consider how slowly justice works in the country).

There's a dissonance between the claim that it's "independent of the political bodies" and "held to account by respective legislative bodies". Are the legislative bodies not political? In the sense of aren't they elected through a political process?

This is kind of a genuine question from me since I have no idea how these authorities are set up in France or the UK...

It wouldn't be called CSAM in France because it would be called a French word. Arguing definitions is arguing semantics. The point is, X did things that are illegal in France, no matter what you call them.

> And I think this is part of the issue – xAI's executives are likely focused on compliance with US law on these topics, less concerned with complying with non-US law

True, but outright child porn is illegal everywhere (as you said) and the borderline legal stuff is something most of your audience is quite happy to have removed. I cannot imagine you are going to get a lot of complaints if you remove AI generated sexual images of minors, for example so it seems reasonable to play it safe.

> That's less of an issue for Anthropic/Google/OpenAI, since their executives don't have the same "anything that's legal" attitude which xAI often has.

This is also common, but it is irritating too as it means the rest of the world is stuck with silly American attitudes about things like nudity and alcohol - for example Youtube videos blurring out bits of Greek statues because they are scared of being demonetised. These are things people take kids to see in museums!

To me, the most worrying part of the whole discussion is that your comment is pretty much the most "daring", if you can call it that, attempt to question if there even is a crime. Everyone else is worried about raids (which are normal whenever there is an ongoing investigation, unfortunate as it may be to the one being investigated). And no one dares to say, that, uh, perhaps making pictures on GPU should not be considered a crime in the same sense as human-trafficking or production of weapons are... Oh, wait. The latter is legal, right.

This is like comparing the danger of a machine gun to that of a block of lead.

They don’t provide a large platform for political speech.

This isn’t about AI or CSAM (Have we seen any other AI companies raided by governments for enabling creation of deepfakes, dangerous misinformation, illegal images, or for flagrant industrial-scale copyright infringement?)

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Don't forget polaroid in that.

It is very different. It is YOUR 3d printer, no one else is involved. You might print a knife and kill somebody with it, you go to jail, not third party involved.

If you use a service like Grok, then you use somebody elses computer / things. X is the owner from computer that produced CP. So of course X is at least also a bit liable for producing CP.

I don't have an answer, but the theme that's been bouncing around in my head has been about accessibility.

Grok makes it trivial to create fake CSAM or other explicit images. Before, if someone spent a week on photoshop to do the same, It won't be Adobe that gets the blame.

Same for 3D printers. Before, anyone could make a gun provided they have the right tools (which is very expensive), now it's being argued that 3D printers are making this more accessible. Although I would argue it's always been easy to make a gun, all you need is a piece of pipe. So I don't entirely buy the moral panic against 3D printers.

Where that threshold lies I don't know. But I think that's the crux if it. Technology is making previously difficult things easier, to the benefit of all humanity. It's just unfortunate that some less-nice things have also been included.

The 3D printers don't generate the plans for the gun for you though. If someone sold a printer that would – happily with no guardrails – generate 3D models of CSAM from thin air and then print them, I bet they'd be investigated too. Or for that matter a 3D printer that came bundled with a built-in library of gun models you could print with very little skill...

i don't see any need for guardrails, other than making the prompter responsible for the output of the bot, particularly when it's predictable

you cannot elaborately use a software to produce an effect that is patently illegal and accurate to your usage, and then pretend the software is to blame

Grok is publishing the CSAM photos for everyone to see. It is used as a tool for harassment and abuse, literally.

In fact, Gemini could bikinify any image just like Grok. Google added guardrails after all the backlash Grok received.

Not really, they put a shit ton of effort in to make sure you can't create any kind of nude/suggestive pictures of anyone. I imagine they have strict controls on making images of children, but I don't feel inclined to find out.

That's why this is an investigation looking for evidence and not a conviction.

This is how it works, at least in civil law countries. If the prosecutor has reasonable suspicious that a crime is taking place they send the so-called "judiciary police" to gather evidence. If they find none (or they're inconclusive etc...) the charges are dropped, otherwise they ask the court to go to trial.

On some occasions I take on judiciary police duties for animal welfare. Just last week I participated in a raid. We were not there to arrest anyone, just to gather evidence so the prosecutor could decide whether to press charges and go to trial.

Did you miss the numerous news reports? Example: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/08/ai-chatbo...

For obvious reasons, decent people are not about to go out and try to general child sexual abuse material to prove a point to you, if that’s what you’re asking for.

Grok do seem to have tons of useless guardrails. Reportedly you can't prompt it directly. But also reportedly they tend to go for almost nonsensically off-guardrail interpretation of prompts.

It would be an interesting idea that people would have get a "drivers license" before they are allowed to use an AI.

Car manufacturers are required to add features to make it less likely that cars kill babies.

What would happen if Volvo made a special baby-killing model with extra spikes?

Let's raid car companies too. We were all born into this. We never had a vote. Thomas Jefferson is said to have written Constitutions ought to be re-written every so often or the dead rule by fiat decree. Let's.

The rich can join in the austerity too. No one voted for them. We been conditioned to pick acquiescence or poverty. We were abused into kowtowing to a bunch of pants shitting dementia addled olds educated in religious crack pottery. Their economic and political memes are just that, memes, not immutable physical truth.

In America, as evidenced by the public not in the streets protesting for single payer comprehensive healthcare, we clearly don't want to be on the hook for each other's lives. That's all platitudes and toxic positivity.

Hopes and prayers, bloodletting was good enough for the Founders!

So fuck the poor and the rich. Burn it all down.

Cars have uses and aren't primarily used or build,to kill babies. So what's a viable use for CSAM in your opinion?

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Eh? The thing I linked to was a policy document on what was allowed.

> “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” the standards state. The document also notes that it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”

This is not a bug report; this is the _rules_ (or was the rules; Facebook say they have changed them after the media found out about them).

>I mean, the example you link is probably an engineer doing their job of signalling to hierarchy that something went deeply wrong.

and? is that not evidence?

Wouldn't surprise me, but they would have to be very incompetent to say that outside of attorney-client privledge convo.

Otoh it is musk.

They could shut it off out of a sense of decency and respect, wtf kind of defense is this?

My computer has a copy of all the source code I work on

US uses English - quite a lot actually.

As for how it relates, well if the French do find that "Grok's CSAM Plan" file, they'll need to know what that acronym stands for. Right?

You are mistaken. Item #1 is "images of children of a pornographic nature".

Wheras "CSAM isn’t pornography—it’s evidence of criminal exploitation of kids." https://rainn.org/get-informed/get-the-facts-about-sexual-vi...

Those images are generated from a training set, and it is already well known and reported that those training sets contain _real_ CSAM, real violence, real abuse. That "generated" face of a child is based on real images of real children.

> Uh, let's distinguish between generated images, however revolting, and actual child sexual abuse.

If you want. In many countries the law doesn’t. If you don’t like the law your billion dollar company still has to follow it. At least in theory.

> let's distinguish between generated images, however revolting, and actual child sexual abuse.

Can't because even before GenAI the "oh its generated in photoshop" or "they just look young" excuse was used successfully to allow a lot of people to walk free. the law was tightend in the early 2000s for precisely this reason

Pro-tip: if you are actively assisting someone in doing illegal things then you are an accomplice.

Exactly!

The law is concrete on this.

In the UK, you must take "reasonable" steps to remove illegal content.

This normally means some basic detection (ie fingerprinting which is widely used from a collaborative database) or if a user is consistently uploading said stuff, banning them.

Allowing a service that you run to continue to generate said illegal content, even after you publicly admit that you know its wrong, is not reasonable.

The for-profit part may or may not be a qualifier, but the architecture of a centralized service means they automatically become the scene of the crime -- either dissemination or storing of illegal material. Whereas if Stability creates a model, and others use their model locally, the relationship of Stability to the crime is ad-hoc. They aren't an accessory.

He said that child pornography is funny? Do you have a link by any chance?

Although I despise it, I respect your right to lie through your teeths.

It's not about 'hosting a model'

And the sign out front says "X-Ray camera photographs anyone naked — no age limits!"

And the camera is pointing out the window so you can use it on strangers walking by.

There is a point in law where you make something so easy to misuse that you become liable for the misuse.

In the USA they have "attractive nuisance", like building a kid's playground on top of a pit of snakes. That's so obviously a dumb idea that you become liable for the snake–bitten kids — you can't save yourself by arguing that you didn't give the kids permission to use the playground, that it's on private property, that the kids should have seen the snakes, or that it's legal to own snakes. No, you set up a situation where people were obviously going to get hurt and you become liable for the hurt.

Not knowing any better, and not having seen any of the alleged images, my default guess would be they used the exact same CSAM filtering pipeline already in place on X regardless of the origin of the submitted images.

Could not possibly agree more. When did we accept, "Users are doing the scamming, not the company" as an excuse? If it's your platform, you should be held responsible for all the illegal actions that it enabled.

If a magazine published a page with a scam, they're responsible. Same should apply to social media.

I literally don't care if it puts them out of business because the moderation would be too severe.

They were downvoted for completely misunderstanding the comment they replied to.

If libeling real people is a harm to those people, then altering photos of real children is certainly also a harm to those children.

That's not what we are discussing here. Even less when a lot of the material here is edits of real pictures.

> The point of banning real CSAM is to stop the production of it, because the production is inherently harmful. The production of AI or human generated CSAM-like images does not inherently require the harm of children, so it's fundamentally a different consideration.

Quite.

> That's why some countries, notably Japan, allow the production of hand-drawn material that in the US would be considered CSAM.

Really? By what US definition of CSAM?

https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...

"Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is not “child pornography.” It’s evidence of child sexual abuse—and it’s a crime to create, distribute, or possess. "

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Freedom of one starts where it confirms freedom of others.

Of course everybody is going to find a point when freedom of speech have to be limited. Otherwise, anyone can justify that cutting the head of their neighbour with a katana while dancing is part of an artistic performance, and absolute free speech is only possible if all artistic expression is given complete license. Those who pretend otherwise will have no ground to defend themselves on legal basis from being wiped out of existence by the very same logic.

The issue is still not really speech.

Durov wasn't arrested because of things he said or things that were said on his platform, he was arrested because he refused to cooperate in criminal investigations while he allegedly knew they were happening on a platform he manages.

If you own a bar, you know people are dealing drugs in the backroom and you refuse to assist the police, you are guilty of aiding and abetting. Well, it's the same for Durov except he apparently also helped them process the money.

"I've been told by FBI agents that they believe assassination markets are legal in the US - protected speech."

I don't believe you. Not sure what you mean by "assassination markets" exactly, but "Solicitation to commit a crime of violence" and "Conspiracy to murder" are definitely crimes.

In some shady corners of the internet I still see advertisements for child porn through Telegram, so they must be doing a shit job at it

ok thank you! I did not know that, I'm ashamed to admit! sort of like studying physics at university a decade later forgetting V=IR when I actually needed it for some solar install. I took "technical hiatus" about 5 years and recently coming back.

Anyway cut to the chase, I just checked out Mathew Greens post on the subject, he is on my list of default "trust what he says about cryptography" along with some others like djb, nadia henninger etc

Embarrased to say I did not realise, I should of known! 10+ years ago I used to lurk the IRC dev chans of every relevant cypherpunk project, including of text secure and otr-chat when I saw signal being made and before that was witnessing chats with devs and ian goldberg and stuff, I just assumed Telegram was multiparty OTR,

OOPS!

Long winded post because that is embarrassing (as someone who studied cryptography undergrad in 2009 mathematics, 2010 did postgrad wargames and computer security course and worse - whose word once about 2012-2013 was taken on these matters by activists, journalists, researchers with pretty knarly threat model - like for instance - some guardian stories and former researcher into torture - i'm also the person that wrote the bits of 'how to hold a crypto party' that made it a protocol without an organisation and made clear the threat model was anyone could be there, oops oops oops

Yes thanks for letting me know I hang my head in shame for missing that one or some how believing that one without much investigation, thankfully it was just my own personal use to contact like friend in the states where they aren't already on signal etc.

EVERYONE: DON'T TRUST TELEGRAM AS END TO END ENCRYPTED CHAT https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...

Anyway as they say "use it or lose it" yeah my assumptions here no longer valid or considered to have educated opinion if I got something that basic wrong.

In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”.

“Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk...

I think there's just as much evidence Clinton did as Musk. Gates on the other hand.

... Eh? This isn't about Musk's association with Epstein, it's about his CSAM generating magic robot (and also some other alleged dodgy practices around the GDPR etc).

Maybe you could start by expanding on what you mean?

It's a statement that could be taken to favor xenophobia and isolationism.

It hadn't occurred to me that might be the reason they picked 420

Oh, that was 100% in my mind when I wrote that. I was wondering how explicit to be with Musk's celebrating being for someone's birthday.

Wouldn't celebrating hitler's birthday be good for his far-right bromance?

We'll know he's gone too far if he has to take another "voluntary" trip to Israel

you would perhaps be shocked to learn how right-leaning the money folks behind the legal and legacy cannabis markets actually are. money is money.

This isn't the 90s. The right doesn't give a shit about weed.

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They'll make a judgement without him if he doesn't turn up.

Also, csam and pornographic content using the likeness of unwilling people. Grok’s recent shit was bound to have consequences.

Is "it" even a thing which can be guilty of that?

The way chatbots actually work, I wonder if we shouldn't treat the things they say more or less as words in a book of fiction. Writing a character in your novel who is a plain parody of David Irving probably isn't a crime even in France. Unless the goal of the book as such was to deny the holocaust.

As I see it, Grok can't be guilty. Either the people who made it/set its system prompt are guilty, if they wanted it to deny the holocaust. If not, they're at worst guilty of making a particularly unhinged fiction machine (as opposed to the more restrained fiction machines of Google, Anthropic etc.)

Well yes, if France24 was using "20 April 2026" as we write here, there would be no misunderstanding.

I believe people are looking too much into 20 April → 4/20 → 420

I mean it's not like people get advanced notice of search warrants of that police ask pretty please. I agree that the way people use the term it's a fine usage but the person using is trying to paint a picture of a SWAT team busting down the door by calling it that.

Agreed its a stretch, my experience comes from Google when I worked there and they set up a Chinese office and they were very carefully trying to avoid anything on premises that could searched/exploited. It was a huge effort, one that wasn't done for the European and UK offices where the government was not an APT. So did X have the level of hygiene in France? Were there IT guys in the same vein as the folks that Elon recruited into DOGE? Was everyone in the office "loyal"?[1] I doubt X was paranoid "enough" in France not to have some leakage.

[1] This was also something Google did which was change access rights for people in the China office that were not 'vetted' (for some definition of vetted) feeling like they could be an exfiltration risk. Imagine a DGSE agent under cover as an X employee who carefully puts a bunch of stuff on a server in the office (doesn't trigger IT controls) and then lets the prosecutors know its ready and they serve the warrant.

Under GDPR if a company processes European user data they're obligated to make a "Record of Processing Activities" available on demand (umbrella term for a whole bunch of user-data / identity related stuff). They don't necessarily need to store them onsite but they need to be able to produce them. Saying you're an internet company doesn't mean you can just put the stuff on a server in the Caribbean and shrug when the regulators come knocking on your door

That's aside from the fact that they're a publicly traded company under obligation to keep a gazillion records anyway like in any other jurisdiction.

I'm guessing you're asking this because you have a picture of a 'server' as a thing in a large rack? Nearly every tech business has a bunch of machines, everything from an old desk top to last year's laptop, which have been reinstalled with Linux or *BSD and are sitting on the network behaving, for all intents and purposes, as a 'server.' (they aren't moving or rebooting or having local sessions running on them, Etc).

No, state decides on the rules of the game any business is playing by.

From what I hear, Ma made 1 speech critical of the government and Xi showed him his place. It was a few years, a year of total disappearance followed by slow rehab.

But China is different. Not sure most of western europe will go that far in most cases.

In France it's possible without legal consequences (though immoral), if you call 119, you can push to have a baby taken from a family for no reason except that you do not like someone.

Claim that you suspect there may be abuse, it will trigger a case for a "worrying situation".

Then it's a procedural lottery:

-> If you get lucky, they will investigate, meet the people, and dismiss the case.

-> If you get unlucky, they will take the baby, and it's only then after a long investigation and a "family assistant" (that will check you every day), that you can recover your baby.

Typically, ex-wife who doesn't like the ex-husband, but it can be a neighbor etc.

One worker explains that they don't really have time to investigate when processing reports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG9y_-4kGQA and they have to act very fast, and by default, it is safer to remove from family.

The boss of such agency doesn't even take the time to answer to the journalists there...

-> Example of such case (this man is innocent): https://www.lefigaro.fr/faits-divers/var-un-homme-se-mobilis...

but I can't blame them either, it's not easy to make the right calls.

I heard there's a country where they can even SWAT you out of existence with a simple phone call, but it sounds so outrageous this must be some evil communist dictatorship third-world place. I really don't remember.

France has Ariane, which was good enough to send Jame Web Telescope to some Lagrange point with extra precision. It's all fun and and games until the French finish their cigarette, arms French Guyana and fire ze missiles.

> defendents have rights and due process.

As they say: you can beat the rap but not the ride. If a state wants to make your life incredibly difficult for months or even years they can, the competent ones can even do it while staying (mostly) on the right side of the law.

> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.

As we're seeing with the current US President... the government doesn't (have to) care.

In any case, CSAM is the one thing other than Islamist terrorism that will bypass a lot of restrictions on how police are supposed to operate (see e.g. Encrochat, An0m) across virtually all civilized nations. Western nations also will take anything that remotely smells like Russia as a justification.

> Also, they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.

It's a nice sentiment, if true. ICE is out there, right now today, ignoring both individual rights as well as due process.

>> they are restricted in how they use it, and defendents have rights and due process.

That due process only exists to the extent the branches of govt are independent, have co-equal power, and can hold and act upon different views of the situation.

When all branches of govt are corrupted or corrupted to serve the executive, as in autocracies, that due process exists only if the executive likes you, or accepts your bribes. That is why there is such a huge push by right-wing parties to take over the levers of power, so they can keep their power even after they would lose at the ballot box.

> lawfare is... good now?

Well, when everything is lawfare it logically follows that it won't always be good or always be bad. It seems Al Capone being taken down for tax fraud would similarly be lawfare by these standards, or am I missing something? Perhaps lawfare (sometimes referred to as "prosecuting criminal charges", as far as I can tell, given this context) is just in some cases and unjust in others.

fighter jets ARE a threat of violence, and it is widely understood and acknowledged.

Again: the threat is so clear that you rarely have to execute on it.

One can also say we do too little for children who get mistreated. Taking care of other peoples children is never easy the decision needs to be fast and effective and no one wants to take the decision to end it. Because there are those rare cases were children dies because of a reunion with their parents.

French has a password disclosure law.

The authorities will request the keys for local servers and will get them. As for remote ones (outside of France jurisdiction) it depends where they are and how much X wants to make their life difficult.

I knew someone who was involved in an investigation (the company and person was the victim not the target of the investigation), their work laptop got placed into a legal hold, the investigators had access to all of their files and they weren't allowed delete to anything (even junk emails) for several years.

You don't get to say no to these things.

If you're a database administrator or similar working at X in France, are you going to going to go to jail to protect Musk from police with an appropriate warrant for access to company data? I doubt it.

> if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?

They had a sweet deal with Macron. Prosecution became hard to continue once he got involved.

It is aggressive compliance. The legality would be determined by the courts as usual.

It's not illegal to head a subsidiary of a company that did bad things, but I'm sure he will be intensely questioned. If he did something illegal, he may be punished.

> but then the company will be closed in the country. Whether this matters for the mothership is another story.

Elon would love it. So it won't happen.

Of course they will not lock the data but hide it, and put some redacted or otherwise innocent files in their place.

You know police are not all technically clueless, I hope. The French have plenty of experience dealing with terrorism, cybercrime, and other modern problems as well as the more historical experience of being conquered and occupied, I don't think it's beyond them to game out scenarios like this and preempt such measures.

As France discovered the hard way in WW2, you can put all sorts of rock-solid security around the front door only to be surprised when your opponent comes in by window.

From HN, of course! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32057651

> Sure it might be on the device, but they would need a password to decrypt the laptop's storage to get any of the data.

In these situations, refusing to provide those keys or passwords is an offense.

The employees who just want to do their job and collect a paycheck aren’t going to prison to protect their employer by refusing to give the password to their laptop.

The teams that do this know how to isolate devices to avoid remote kill switches. If someone did throw a remote kill switch, that’s destruction of evidence and a serious crime by itself. Again, the IT guy isn’t going to risk prison to wipe company secrets.

It wouldn't be the first time a Musk company knowingly does something illegal.

I think as far as Musk is concerned, laws only apply in the "don't get caught" sense.

I'm sure an intelligent person such as yourself can think of ways around that possibility.

What a strange assumption. The training is "summon the lawyers immediately", "ensure they're accompanied at all times while on company premises", etc.

>withholding evidence from the prosecution, you are going to jail if you follow.

Prosecution must present a valid search warrant for *specific* information. They don't get a carte blanche, so uber way is correct. lock computers and lets the courts to decide.

The training is very much the opposite.

mine had a scene where some bro tried to organise the resistance. A voice over told us that he was arrested for blocking a legal investigation and was liable for being fired due to reputational damage.

X's training might be like you described, but everywhere else that is vaguely beholden to law and order would be opposite.

First thing a public spacex would want to do is sell off all the non-spacex crap

Money comes with strings, such as when forming an ongoing relationship with a company you expect them to not merge with other companies you are actively prosecuting. I suspect the deal is going so fast to avoid some sort of veto being prepared. Once SpaceX and xAI are officially the same, you lose the ability to inflict meaningful penalties on xAI without penalizing yourself as an active business partner with SpaceX.

> Which is an entirely different legal liability.

In UK, it is entirely the same. Near zero.

Making/distributing a photo of a non-consenting bikini-wearer is no more illegal when originated by computer in bedroom than done by camera on public beach.

The part of X’s reaction to their own publishing I’m most looking forward to seeing in slow-motion in the courts and press was their attempt at agency laundering by having their LLM generate an apology in first-person.

“Sorry I broke the law. Oops for reals tho.”

Who's going to provide their payment details and then generate kiddie porn?

This is a pretty pragmatic move by Musk.

It's basically a honey trap, the likes of which authorities legitimately use to catch criminals.

Er...

"Study uncovers presence of CSAM in popular AI training dataset"

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/20/csam_laion_dataset/.

It's not at all hard to grasp for me. I think it's great actually.

To be fair, it is common confusion. In other comments, you see people arguing by US constitution.

This. We don't have to accept that they behave that way. They enter our economies so they need to adhere to our laws. And we can fine them. No one wants to lose Europe as a market, even if all the haters call us a shithole.

Public institutions can use any system they want and make the public responsible for reading it.

> CSAM does not have a universal definition.

Strange that there was no disagreement before "AI", right? Yet now we have a clutch of new "definitions" all of which dilute and weaken the meaning.

> In Sweden for instance, CSAM is any image of an underage subject (real or realistic digital) designed to evoke a sexual response.

No corroboration found on web. Quite the contrary, in fact:

"Sweden does not have a legislative definition of child sexual abuse material (CSAM)"

https://rm.coe.int/factsheet-sweden-the-protection-of-childr...

> If you take a picture of a 14 year old girl (age of consent is 15) and use Grok to give her bikini, or make her topless, then you are most definately producing and possessing CSAM.

> No abuse of a real minor is needed.

Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is considered a record of a crime, emphasizing that its existence represents the abuse of a child."

Putting a bikini on a photo of a child may be distasteful abuse of a photo, but it is not abuse of a child - in any current law.

As good as Australia's little boobie laws.

You don't see a huge difference between abusing a child (and recording it) vs drawing/creating an image of a child in a sexual situation? Do you believe they should have the same legal treatment? In Japan for instance the latter is legal.

> Are you implying that it's not abuse to "undress" a child using AI?

Not at all. I am saying just it is not CSAM.

> You should realize that children have committed suicide before because AI deepfakes of themselves have been spread around schools.

Its terrible. And when "AI"s are found spreading deepfakes around schools, do let us know.

Sure does. Twice. E.g.

Musk's social media platform has recently been subject to intense scrutiny over sexualised images generated and edited on the site using its AI tool Grok.

one time is perhaps excusable as the robot's creators didn't know that would happen. If it happens and the creator then advertises the robot can kill people, of course he's now a criminal

I'm not talking about video editing software; that's a different class of software. I'm talking about other generative AI models, which you can download today onto your computer, and have it do the same thing as Grok does.

> How is this exoneration?

I don't know; you tell me where I said it was? I'm just stating a fact that Grok isn't unique here, and if you want to ban Grok because of it then you need to also ban open weight models which can do exactly the same thing.

Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.

We don't go after Adobe for doing that. We go after the person who did it.

No. I'm just saying that people should be consistent and if they apply a certain standard to Grok then they should also apply the same standard to other things. Be consistent.

Meanwhile what I commonly see is people dunking on anything Musk-related because they dislike him, but give a free pass on similar things if it's not related to him.

Grok does try to prevent it. They even publicly publish their safety prompt. It clearly shows they have disallowed the system from assisting with queries that create child sexual abuse material.

The fact that users have found ways to hack around this is not evidence of X committing a crime.

https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/grok_4_saf...

What makes Grok special compared to random "AI gf generator 9001" which is hosted specifically with the intent of generating NSFW content?

Every artist is capable of drawing CSAM. Every 3D modeler can render CSAM. Ban all computers !!

You can use photoshop to create CSAM too, should that be banned?

So you think writing a review is somehow on the same magnitude as social media platforms with 300 million-3 billion users?

And how is that different from TV channels/media en large having laws to abide by? Slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes..

I believe the context I was proposing would be at the scale of world-wide manipulation. Rigging elections and such. There is a Netflix documentary called "The Great Hack" that gets into what I am discussing though from the perspective of social media algorithm. This only gets more effective when people are chatting with an AI bot that mimics a human and they think is their significant other that laughs at all their jokes and strokes their ego.

I think your interpretation would be more along the line of making 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid's Tale a reality.

Few laws have bright lines. Can I be jailed for murder if I crash a car into someone? It depends greatly upon the specific circumstances.

> hold on, are you saying that you should be able to be jailed for manipulation?

Its the usual deal from the that crowd:

- when the left does it, it’s just them using their civil liberties

- when the right does it, its illegal manipulation, election interference, fascism and/or Russian disinformation.

It’s the same crowd which keeps using the phrase “our democracy”.

Behaviour like this really makes me wonder who they are, and who they deem not worthy to be included in “their” democracy.

Broader still.

and fraudulent data extraction by an organised group.

Are you talking about this [1]? I don't know the answer to your question whether or not the EU has the same policy. That is talking about control by a foreign adversary.

I think that would delve into whether or not the USA would be considered a foreign adversary to France. I was under the impression we were allies since like the 1800s or so despite some little tiffs now and again.

[1] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521

What does it say? I can't read French

Have you ever seen an actual EU-wide decision on such matters and an actual application?

The closest I can think of is GDPR which has its great aspects and also the cookies law (which is incorrectly interpreted). And some things like private IPs being PIIs which promotes nonsnsical "authorities notifications" that are not used afterwards.

We have consulting companies doing yearly audits on companies to close the books. And yet hacks happen all the time. Without consequences.

There is an ocean between what is announced and lives on paper vs. the reality of the application. If you work in compliance and cubersecurity you see this everyday.

They said blocking a website

Deep packet inspection? What do you mean? Are you talking about domain name confiscation or building a Great Firewall of EU?

There is no law that would permit the EU to do this. This would be a huge thing to introduce and implement, probably a 2-3 year project, and would almost certainly be strongly opposed by multiple member countries.

The EU has DNS servers?

The DNS servers take incoming connections to anything other than the DNS servers?

The EU has deep packet inspection tools?

What's your source for this? I can't find anything online. They banned doing business with the organization, not access to the website.