Open-weight AI models have skyrocketed in popularity. They allow users to host their own AI systems locally and evade safety guardrails enforced by commercial companies like OpenAI or Anthropic.
Unfortunately, those qualities also make open-weight models popular among people who use AI to generate child sex abuse material (CSAM). As Bloomberg lays out in a shocking new feature, AI models that are partially or fully open-source have led to a major surge in disturbing CSAM material online.
Tracking down perpetrators can be difficult since many of these AI models can be trained on existing CSAM and used to generate many new derivatives without ever connecting to the internet, where they could be identified by experts and reported to law enforcement.
The alarming trend has ballooned into entire communities on the dark web that can attract hundreds of thousands of members, according to Bloomberg.
