In which broken society do you live where this is true? I would say drawing sexually explicit pictures of real persons without their consent and keeping them in your drawer is neither illegal nor morally reprehensible in most of the world.

I am with you on publishing these...

I think you are going a bit too far.

Let's start from the beginning, create and own:

You're sketching out some nude fanart on a piece of paper. You created that and own that. Thas has always been illegal?!

(This is apart from my feelings on Mechahitler/Grok, which aren't positive.)

What would raiding the office achieve in this case apart from just showing off power.

So, when they were doing it for the last 3 decades in Photoshop (I was in high-school and this already existed) you would be just fine with the tool being used to do it and with the boys and the school?

Is that your argument? Did you ever expect the government to go after Adobe for "enabling" this?

Is that what it would have taken for you to support the Patriot Act?

In your hypothetical scenario, why aren't the school kids making and distributing fake nudes of his daughter be the ones getting in trouble?

Have we a outsourced all accountability for the crimes of humans to AI now?

I really find this kind of appeal quite odious. God forbid that we expect fathers to have empathy for their sons, sisters, brothers, spouses, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, etc. or dare we hope that they might have empathy for friends or even strangers? It's like an appeal to hypocrisy or something. Sure, I know such people exist but it feels like throwing so many people under the bus just to (probably fail) to convince someone of something by appealing to an emotional overprotectiveness of fathers to daughters.

You should want to protect all of the people in your life from such a thing or nobody.

You want the French authorities to focus on the Epstein files to the exclusion of all other corporate misbehaviour?

Also, it seems pretty likely that Musk is tangled up with the Epstein shit. First Musk claimed he turned down offer to go to the island. Now it turns out Musk repeatedly sought to visit, including wanting to know when the "wildest" party was happening, after Epstein was already known as a child sex abuser. Musk claimed that Epstein had never been given a tour of SpaceX but it turns out he did in 2013. It's the classic narcissistic "lie for as long as possible" behaviour. Will be interesting to see what happens as more is revealed.

I think the reasoning is that the AI contributes to more epsteins. In some way.

The UK is also opening investigations into the Esptein stuff.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/starmers-government-aids-po...

Unlike the US administration which seems to be fine with what epstein and X are doing

"Grok" is part of the Epstein network, connected through Elon Musk.

The same guy responsible for creating child porn that you are defending is also in the Epstein's list. Also, don't abbreviate child pornography, it shows you have a side on this

>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.

> 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.

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"?

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

> 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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?)

Don't forget polaroid in that.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

> 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

> 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.

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.

Exactly!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

>> 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.

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.