images

Disgruntled artists have exploited a flaw in artificial intelligence image generators to "poison" their learning. They are looking for revenge on AI operators who use artwork without permission to train their tools. Like most generative AI, image ... tools learn by analyzing millions of pictures and accompanying captions. In turn, the AI creates its own checklist for what particular words or phrases mean. They also learn styles of image and art. While some AI tools are "trained" with permission on libraries of licenses of images, others simply trawl the Internet and use any images they can find. ... (view more)

Google is adding new tools to make it easier to check if an image is credible and as it appears. But the move has highlighted the irony of Google's own involvement in "generative" artificial intelligence. The tools include several additions to ... Google's own search results, along with a dedicated tool for checking any image found online. The search tools have been in testing and are now rolling out to all users, starting with English language searches in the US. They are wrapped up in a featured called "About this image". This will accompany images with information including if and when they ... (view more)

Facebook's oversight board says it should rethink its rules on topless images. Tech experts believe the current rules can't be effectively enforced with automated moderation anyway. The ruling comes from the independent body that looks into cases ... where people believe Facebook has wrongly moderated content. The idea is to concentrate on cases where Facebook's rules may need clarifying. In this situation, the board looked at two connected cases. Both involved posts on Instagram, which is owned by the same company as Facebook. The two services share content rules set by parent company Meta. The ... (view more)

The makers of an artificial intelligence tool for "creating" art are being sued by a photo licensing company. The case could set a precedent for how copyright law works with modern technology. The case involves Stability AI, the company behind a ... "deep learning, text-to-image model." It's designed mainly to create images based on a text description provided by the user. As well as being a neat trick in itself, the idea of the model is to develop computer learning. That means that rather than humans providing a set of rules to follow, the computer model figures out rules itself. Imagery is a ... (view more)

Three cyber security experts say proposals to scan user devices for illegal material will do more harm than good. They've condemned European proposals to deal with illegal collection of child abuse images. The argument is about "client-side ... scanning" which means looking for images or other material on a user's device, rather than waiting until the images are uploaded to the Internet. It's a controversial practice that Apple has previously explored. It appears to have dropped plans to scan iPhones to look for specific images that matched a database in which children were abused. Although Apple ... (view more)

Apple has admitted it scans iPhone images for pictures of children being abused. It says it will refuse any government request to use the facility for other purposes. The scans cover any photos uploaded to the iCloud Photos backup service rather ... than scanning the entire phone. This feature is switched off by default. Once it's switched on, any photo added to the device is automatically uploaded to iCloud and will therefore be covered by the new scans. When Apple scans the image, it doesn't try to figure out the content. Instead it compares it to a database of known child abuse images. If it ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Franco I. writes: " Dear Dennis, Someone is threatening to post a video of me on Facebook . A few weeks ago I was on Omegle (a chat website) and suddenly, a girl sent me a private message. After 30 minutes or so into the ... conversation, things started getting hot and heavy. That's when she requested we move over to Google Hangouts to continue. Once there, we went into video chat and she was already fully unclothed. She then asked me to participate. Not long after that, the video chat ended abruptly and that's when she made threats to ruin my life, my career, and my reputation ... (view more)

Canadian privacy regulators say a company that used online photos to train artificial intelligence tools breached privacy rules. They said Clearview had used "the mass collection of biometric information from billions of people, without express ... consent." US company Clearview offers services to law enforcement agencies and private businesses trying to identify people from a photo. It maintains a database of more than three billion images which it uses to try to find a match using artificial intelligence. Clearview gathered most of these pictures by "scraping" online sites such as Flickr. That ... (view more)

A US court says a man must provide the password to unlock two hard drives that prosecutors say contain unlawful images. The court rejected his appeal that to do so would breach his fifth amendment rights, which roughly translate to: "No person shall ... be held to answer for a ... [crime], unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury." The case is an unusual twist on the more common disputes about how the fourth amendment -- which deals with searches and seizures -- applies to technology. In this case the man claims that handing over the password could incriminate him. The ... (view more)

A major news organization says Facebook doesn't do enough to remove images that exploit children. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) says the site removed just 18 out of 100 images that it reported as part of an investigation. The test was ... part of a follow-up to a report last year about people using members-only groups on the site to share inappropriate images of children. At the time, Facebook said it was improving its moderation system. To see if that was the case, the BBC used Facebook's formal reporting button to report 100 images that appeared to breach the site's ... (view more)