Technology

Elon was too creepy for Epstein

He was invited.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/30/elon-musk-epstein-files-island-visits

In all seriousness, there are some very interesting legal questions that will be raised if this case makes it that far.

The problem is that there's no existing law that would effect this on its own. To my knowledge, no country in the world has a law on the books specifically dealing with AI models trained on CSAM. So the question, under existing laws, would turn on whether the data stored within the model itself would constitute CSAM.

The problem, in no small part, is that we have serious gaps in our public consensus knowledge about how LLMs actually work.

There's a case that, AFAIK, is still being argued in Germany pushing the theory that LLMs actually do, in effect, store a copy of all their training data, just in a compressed form. This certainly seems to hold some water given both the tests they relied on, and the situation with this Jane Doe where the model produced images so alike to real images of her that they tripped hash detections.

The German case argues that this is analogous to the difference between an MP3 and a WAV, or a JPEG and a PNG. That sharing a lossy copy of a work is no less infringing just because it's imperfect.

If the underlying claim - that LLMs function as a form of lossy compression - can be substantiated then there would be a real argument that the model itself would constitute CSAM. Since there would be no realistic method that I'm aware of for removing the offending material from the model - and presumably SpaceX would have to somehow prove that they've done so - that would make the entire model contraband. They'd have to retrain on a clean dataset.

Of course I said "if the case makes it that far" at the top because I don't think it will. SpaceX will do anything and everything to avoid handing over meaningful discovery in this case, including, I suspect, outright destruction of evidence. If there is anything that actually proves that they used CSAM in the training data then they are so far beyond fucked that there's simply no downside to further illegality in pursuit of concealing their crimes. They have the world's wealthiest asshole in a position to throw literal billions at making this go away. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if people turn up dead off the back of this if that's what it takes.

I wish that were my reaction to this. Instead, it's a "DUH. No shit."

on the one hand, it makes sense if your goal is to train AI to recognize child porn as a simple binary state (bool isCP). Social media sites used to have humans looking at that stuff moderating from afar and it really takes a horrendous toll on their employees.

On the other hand, Elon has repeatedly shown he refuses to censor child porn. They didn’t train it to stop making kiddie porn. They trained it to create more kiddie porn. And that’s why he’s rich. Elon won’t say no. He doesn’t care.

Unfortunately that's not really how the actual data is stored. Functionally there is no CSAM at all in its "databanks". Once Info goes through training what comes out the other side is just a mass of goop.

It's like if you took an entire cow ran it though a meat grinder. Then demanded that you remove only the chuck from the resulting ground beef.

It's not physically possible.

You can demand it's retrained entirely from the ground up with vetted data. To produce a higher quality clean dataset. And I would agree that is what should be done.

But you can't unground the beef

"You don't understand! I need my 400 terabytes of child pornography to keep the kids safe!"

They probably let it just eat the internet without any humans looking at the training data. And yeah - there probably is some CSAM somewhere on the internet. Maybe, they used an agent swarm to specifically search for stuff not yet in the dataset and forgot to a blocklist. It's not like the tech bros are genuinely careful in what they do. Recklessness seems to be a common trait.

I'm morbidly curious about the engineers Musk hires, because overwhelmingly the most intelligent engineers and scientists I know wouldn't dream of applying to work at one of his companies. Even the ones that don't care about the Nazi shit have still read the many reports about how badly he treats his staff.

*ensure. Ensure means 'to make secure', and insure means 'to have an insurance policy'.

But you're right. Unfortunately, the biggest weakness with AI is that it's a funhouse mirror. Problem is, none of us are having fun.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection is a front for the Soviet Union returning like in the Simpsons

No, this was the CCCP, not the СССР

if we could expand this conversation, i think that to a degree the reverse is true.

i think the neurotypes (we might call them paraphilias actually but you'd be surprised how many people can be reduced to a paraphilia) that connect sex with power imbalance (age, wealth, intelligence, strength, or just legal context like contracts and political relationships) also tend to hoard (valuable things, money, information, connections, data, favors) and these tendencies strengthen each other in a stronger way than most people understand

if you're interested in what I'm saying, look up "impunity architecture", especially if you're Marxist because i think a lot of people think this is inherent to capitalism and it isn't at all.

Anything it makes is derived from the whole of its training data.

Yeah. All the results are tainted, even more than they were from the simple fact it was used by loser to creep on women.

You can't ever guarantee that a neural network isn't dreaming of digital sheep - neither for an artificial nor a natural one.
What once has been seen can't be made unseen again. In that, the clankers are like us.

Next is a "funny" issue: scraping the web without checking sources will inevitably lead to AI trained on illegal content.

The only way for them to prevent that is to train their AI to recognize illegal content. And the only way to do that is to feed it that content with label.

AI corps would have to pay people to watch children sexual abuse and label the videos. (Not that I have the slightest doubt they would proceed if that was allowing them to keep going rampage on web scraping)