For her safety, Doe has opted to receive alerts from the US Department of Justice Victim Notification System any time she may be a victim in a new criminal investigation. Although she has received countless alerts, she was shocked when the CCCP notified her that it had identified AI-generated CSAM on xAI that depicted her. This re-traumatized Doe, whose complaint alleged that messages were found on online forums “between offenders chatting about creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”
Now, Doe fears that xAI has not only made it easier to make more violative images of the most distressing time in her life, but also that xAI allegedly has stored the images that Grok generates and uses those outputs to further train Grok. Because of this, she believes that Grok has been trained on both the initial set of images that have haunted her for more than 20 years and the more recent AI-generated ones.
This is the first case to accuse xAI of training on CSAM, and the complaint does not go into great detail on that claim. Previously, Ars reported on a controversial dataset that was later scrubbed after researchers found CSAM in the training data, but there’s no indication xAI trained on that data. In a press release from lawyers representing Doe, it explained that Doe’s images were included in a CSAM Hash List maintained by NCMEC, and “that same material” allegedly “was part of the dataset xAI used to build Grok’s image and video generating capabilities.” The complaint similarly only alleged that “CSAM depicting Plaintiff with its longstanding well-known hash values has been used as a part of the dataset used by xAI.”
Well, like I said, that comes down to whether, legally, that stenographic embedding would constitute “reproduction” or not. That’s what the German case hinges on. Obviously not relevant to US law, but a) a similar case could be made in the US, and b) X operates in the EU.
To play devil’s advocate, SpaceX would most certainly argue that what they’re doing is equivalent to storing a hash, like how Microsoft’s PhotoDNA system works. PhotoDNA can detect CSAM without storing CSAM because it only stores the image hashes, not the images themselves. So there’s pretty clear legal precedent for them to point to.
(NB: There has been work done by security researchers on reverse engineering images from hashes, so even that isn’t absolute.)
It’s a legally complex area where we’re likely to see case law evolving rapidly.
You can’t reproduce an approximation from any type of hash, so that argument is dead in the water.
Do you understand what I mean by stenographically embedded?