Headline, July 15 2022/ A.I. : ''' '' POTENTIAL* SCOURGE POCKMARKS '' '''

A.I. : ''' '' POTENTIAL*

 SCOURGE POCKMARKS '' '''

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Sam Daily Times. Org : '' The Voice Of The Voiceless '' - The World Students Society worries that the future AIS may have goals that do not align with those of human creators.

THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY'S EARLY WARNING ON A POTENTIAL A.I. SCOURGE.  Companies in the field see how social media failed to block child sexual abuse.

In a newly published paper by the Stanford Internet Observatory and Thorn, a nonprofit organization that fights the spread of child sexual abuse online, researchers found that since last August, there had been a small but meaningful increase in the amount of photorealistic A.I. generated child sexual abuse material circulating on the dark web.

According to Thorn's researchers, this has been, for the most part, imagery that uses the likeness of real victims but visualizes them in new poses and being subjected to new and increasingly egregious forms of sexual violence.

The majority of these images, the researchers found, have been generated not by Dall-E but by open-source tools that were developed and released with few protections built in.

In their paper, the researchers reported that less than 1 percent of child sexual abuse material found in a sample of known predatory communities appeared to be photorealistic A.I.generated images. But given the breakneck pace of development of these generative A.I. tools, the researchers predict that number will only grow.

Dave Willner has had a front-row seat to watch the evolution of the worst things on the internet. He started working at Facebook in 2008, when social media companies were making up their rules as they went along.

As the company's head of content policy, it was Mr. Willner who wrote Facebook's first official communication standards more than a decade ago, turning what he has said was an informal one-page list that mostly boiled down to ban on :

 '' Hitler and naked people '' into what is now a voluminous catalog of slurs, crimes and other grotesqueries that are banned across all of Meta's platforms.

So last year, when the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab OpenAI was preparing to introduce Dall-E, a tool that allows anyone to create an image instantly by describing it in a few words, the company tapped Mr. Willner to be its head of trust and safety.

Initially that meant sifting through all of the images and prompts that Dall-E's filters flagged as potential violations and figuring out ways to prevent would-be violators from succeeding.

It didn't take him long in the job for Mr. Willner to find himself considering a familiar threat.

Just as child predators had for years used Facebook and other major tech platforms to disseminate pictures of child sexual abuse, they were now attempting to use Dall-E to create entirely new ones.

'' I am not surprised that it was a thing that people would attempt to do, '' Mr.Willner said. '' But to be very clear, neither were the folks at OpenAI.''

For all the recent talk of the hypothetical existential risks of generative A.I., experts say it is the immediate threat - child predators' use of new A.I. tools already - that deserves the industry's undivided attention.

'' Within a year, we're going to be reaching very much a problem state in this area,'' said David Thiel, the chief technologist of the Stanford Internet Observatory, who co-wrote the paper with Thorn's director of data science, Dr. Rebecca Portnoff, and Thorn's head of research, Melissa Stroebel.

'' This is absolutely the worst case scenario for machine learning that I can think of.''

Dr. Portnoff has been working on machine learning  and child safety for more than a decade.

To her, the idea that a company like OpenAI is already thinking about this issue speaks to the fact that this field is at least on a faster learning curve than the social media giants were in their earlier days.

'' The posture is different today,'' said Dr. Portnoff.

Still, she added, '' If I could rewind the clock, it would be a year ago.''

The Serving of this Publishing continues regularly into the future. The World Society thanks author  Issie Lapowsky.

With most respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of !WOW!, the exclusive ownership of every student in the world, and then Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless