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They're basically calling BS: "As soon as we did, we had the developers check all the parameters for the platform and were comfortable with the settings, but a

They're basically calling BS: "As soon as we did, we had the developers check all the parameters for the platform and were comfortable with the settings, but after further internal discussions today, we chose to take down the site out of an abundance of caution, as we don’t want something like this purported event to happen again." It's weasel worded, which makes it sound like they're not 100% certain. It should be easy enough to check the logs, but I imagine there's somebody out there right now going "Why the hell didn't I log every picture we generate?"

justinclift 3y ago
Alternatively, they're just trying to sow doubt in order to later claim it never happened.
mingus88 3y ago
Logging every image generated, using personally identifying photos, adds a big risk with almost zero upside. The reason not to store the images is right here in front of us. “Oops we may have generated topless photos of women who submitted their photos, but I can unequivocally state that nobody aside from that person saw the image, if it even existed”
- malfist 3y ago
  Another point to not storing it: Storing all the images your users generate could require a non-trivial amount of disk space. And considering this is government, they're probably using a server farm and bare metal, and not an infinitely scalable file storage
  - flemhans 3y ago
    Bare metal is cheaper so would help them to be able to store this amount of files. 10,000,000 photos are trivial to store on a 4-drive zfs array
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    If you stored a 50kB avif (which would be way higher quality then you need for this), you could do 20 million images / TB. Bare metal can fit almost 2 PB of raw storage in 1U now. "Infinitely scalable" is not really a thing anyone needs to worry about.
skywhopper 3y ago
Do you believe that “the parameters” will be followed by AI image generation? If they think the parameters are somehow bulletproof then they don’t understand what tool they are using.
mjhay 3y ago
There's almost certainly porn and nipples in the training set. It's pretty hard to eliminate 100% of NSFW images. That means there is always the possibility of something like this happening.

justinclift 3y ago

Alternatively, they're just trying to sow doubt in order to later claim it never happened.

mingus88 3y ago

Logging every image generated, using personally identifying photos, adds a big risk with almost zero upside. The reason not to store the images is right here in front of us. “Oops we may have generated topless photos of women who submitted their photos, but I can unequivocally state that nobody aside from that person saw the image, if it even existed”

malfist 3y ago
Another point to not storing it: Storing all the images your users generate could require a non-trivial amount of disk space. And considering this is government, they're probably using a server farm and bare metal, and not an infinitely scalable file storage
- flemhans 3y ago
  Bare metal is cheaper so would help them to be able to store this amount of files. 10,000,000 photos are trivial to store on a 4-drive zfs array
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  If you stored a 50kB avif (which would be way higher quality then you need for this), you could do 20 million images / TB. Bare metal can fit almost 2 PB of raw storage in 1U now. "Infinitely scalable" is not really a thing anyone needs to worry about.

skywhopper 3y ago

Do you believe that “the parameters” will be followed by AI image generation? If they think the parameters are somehow bulletproof then they don’t understand what tool they are using.

mjhay 3y ago

There's almost certainly porn and nipples in the training set. It's pretty hard to eliminate 100% of NSFW images. That means there is always the possibility of something like this happening.