cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/4500908
In the past months, there’s a been a issue in various instances where accounts would start uploading blatant CSAM to popular communities. First of all this traumatizes anyone who gets to see it before the admins get to it, including the admins who have to review to take it down. Second of all, even if the content is a link to an external site, lemmy sill caches the thumbnail and stores it in the local pict-rs, causing headaches for the admins who have to somehow clear that out. Finally, both image posts and problematic thumbnails are federated to other lemmy instances, and then likewise stored in their pict-rs, causing such content to be stored in their image storage.
This has caused multiple instances to take radical measures, from defederating liberaly, to stopping image uploads to even shutting down.
Today I’m happy to announce that I’ve spend multiple days developing a tool you can plug into your instance to stop this at the source: pictrs-safety
Using a new feature from pictr-rs 0.4.3 we can now cause pictrs to call an arbitary endpoint to validate the content of an image before uploading it. pictrs-safety builds that endpoint which uses an asynchronous approach to validate such images.
I had already developed fedi-safety which could be used to regularly go through your image storage and delete all potential CSAM. I have now extended fedi-safety to plug into pict-rs safety and scan images sent by pict-rs.
The end effect is that any images uploaded or federated into your instance will be scanned in advance and if fedi-safety thinks they’re potential CSAM, they will not be uploaded to your image storage at all!
This covers three important vectors for abuse:
- Malicious users cannot upload CSAM to for trolling communities. Even novel GenerativeAI CSAM.
- Users cannot upload CSAM images and never submit a post or comment (making them invisible to admins). The images will be automatically rejected during upload
- Deferated images and thumbnails of CSAM will be rejected by your pict-rs.
Now, that said, this tool is AI-driven and thus, not perfect. There will be false positives, especially around lewd images and images which contain children or child-topics (even if not lewd). This is the bargain we have to take to prevent the bigger problem above.
By my napkin calculations, false positive rates are below 1%, but certainly someone’s innocent meme will eventually be affected. If this happen, I request to just move on as currently we don’t have a way to whitelist specific images. Don’t try to resize or modify the images to pass the filter. It won’t help you.
For lemmy admins:
- pictrs-safety contains a docker-compose sample you can add to your lemmy’s docker-compose. You will need to your put the .env in the same folder, or adjust the provided variables. (All kudos to @[email protected] for the docker support).
- You need to adjust your pict-rs ENVIRONMENT as well. Check the readme.
- fedi-safety must run on a system with GPU. The reason for this is that lemmy provides just a 10-seconds grace period for each upload before it times out the upload regardless of the results. A CPU scan will not be fast enough. However my architecture allows the fedi-safety to run on a different place than pictrs-safety. I am currently running it from my desktop. In fact, if you have a lot of images to scan, you can connect multiple scanning workers to pictrs-safety!
- For those who don’t have access to a GPU, I am working on a NSFW-scanner which will use the AI-Horde directly instead and won’t require using fedi-safety at all. Stay tuned.
For other fediverse software admins
fedi-safety can already be used to scan your image storage for CSAM, so you can also protect yourself and your users, even on mastodon or firefish or whatever.
I will try to provide real-time scanning in the future for each software as well and PRs are welcome.
Divisions by zero
This tool is already active now on divisions by zero. It’s usage should be transparent to you, but do let me know if you notice anything wrong.
Support
If you appreciate the priority work that I’ve put in this tool, please consider supporting this and future development work on liberapay:
All my work is and will always be FOSS and available for all who need it most.
disappointed that this uses AI instead of something like Microsoft’s PhotoDNA that compares image hashes. AI has too much (unnecessary & unacceptable) risk of false positives that results in overbroad censorship.
PhotoDNA requires a lot more bureaucratic work than most instance admins can handle, but if you really want it, you can easily plug it into pictrs-safety instead.
However PhotoDNA will not catch novel generativeAI CSAM.
there’s no such thing as “AI-generated CSAM”. CSAM literally is created by abusing a real human child. There’s no such thing as an “AI child”. It would be a much better idea to protect *ACTUAL existing children instead of wasting resources on *checks notes* fiction
You and especially your users won’t know a photorealistic generative AI image is real or not.
so you admit that like most people you don’t actually give a shit about protecting anyone. You would rather protect imaginary fake fictional characters because it’s easier and makes you “feel good about yourself”. I genuinely hate performative assholes (which is 99% of humans, let’s be honest. 99% of people only care about their feelings and making themselves feel good by thinking that they are doing something good, not actually doing a good thing). There’s no evidence that fictional material is harmful, in fact, quite the opposite there is some evidence that access to fictional material may actually protect kids and prevent abuse from occurring, by serving as a harmless sexual outlet. I mean let’s put it this why, go ask a victim of sexual abuse “If you had a choice, would you prefer that your abuser abused you or that your abuser relieved their pent-up sexual frustration to some fictional material” I guarantee 100% of them will say that they would prefer to have not been abused.
I think you were merely being pedantic, but there are some interesting points in there.
Is it a crime to generate fake “csam”?
Should it be a crime?
How can prosecutors get convictions against a defense of “no, your honour, that video is AI-generated”?
What we have now is still miles off general AI, but it’s going to take years for society to catch up. Interesting times.
Ah the kinds of comments I quit reddit to no longer see…
Well on the bright side, at least they get downvoted here.
My issue with these services is that they aren’t available for non-US people. db0’s project can be deployed anywhere (provided you have a capable GPU).
ok then use Cloudflare’s
That also isn’t available for non-US people.
It’s available to every Cloudflare user, US or global.
PhotoDNA is also available for every website in the world.
It isn’t. I already tried applying for both. You need NCMEC credentials which is only available for those in the US.
edit: Here’s a comment I made about it.
PhotoDNA is very proprietary…
I don’t see the problem here. What makes you think that the false positives in this case is “unacceptable”? So what if Joe Bloggs isn’t able to share a picture of a random kid (why tho) or an image of a child-like person?
false positives not only leads to unnecessary censorship, but it also wastes resources that would be better used to protect *ACTUAL victims and children (although, the optimal solution is protecting people before any harm is done so that we don’t even need these “band-aid” solutions for reacting afterward)
Again, what you’re saying isn’t relevant to Lemmy at all. Please elaborate how would a graphics card on some random server help protect actual victims?
Unnecessary censorship is fine when it’s clearly a underaged person. You don’t need to check their ID to tell if it’s CSAM, and you don’t need to as well with generated child stuff. If you want to debate it’s legality, that’s a diff conversation, but even an AI generated version is enough to mentally scar the viewer, so there is still harm being done.
an imaginary person has no ID because an imaginary person doesn’t exist. Why do you care about protecting imaginary characters instead of protecting actual real existing human beings?
deleted by creator
PhotoDNA isn’t run by Microsoft anymore, but by the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
My friend, you haven’t heard about Oracle.
Microsoft at least gave the world Powershell, to balance out their sins. I can also name other good things they have done. Oracle is pure and deliberate evil.
I believe that the human race will end in one of three ways: