French Upload Filter Law

[MagicalAzareal]

https://juliareda.eu/2019/12/french_uploadfilter_law/
I saw this near the top of HN.

 

[Wes of StarArmy]

I mentioned this in another thread but apparently some upload filter are already available. Over my Christmas break I was doing a lot of research into AIs and Machine learning and I found this site which has APIs for content recognition AI - https://deepai.org/apis - so in theory this could be set up affordably now. I don't know how much effort it would take to set up your own solution though instead of farming it out to a third party but the third-party options are already a thing now.

 

[MagicalAzareal]

I mentioned this in another thread but apparently some upload filter are already available. Over my Christmas break I was doing a lot of research into AIs and Machine learning and I found this site which has APIs for content recognition AI - https://deepai.org/apis - so in theory this could be set up affordably now. I don't know how much effort it would take to set up your own solution though instead of farming it out to a third party but the third-party options are already a thing now.

I don't much like the privacy implications of third party solutions, but that is just me. It makes me feel uncomfortable to send user data out to third parties, I prefer to keep anything and everything in-house where possible. Users would likely feel the same.

I don't really like filters because they provide a sense of false security (look at all the people flipping videos on YT, using filters or putting an image frame around their favourite TV show openings. this algorithm cost Google $200 million), and for copyright in particular, the number of false positives are frightening and an algorithm has no concept of legal concepts like parody and fair use. All it knows is there is a match and it'll act on it accordingly. It depends on how often it crops up, but it adds a certain degree of friction.

Is it worth the trouble when someone is relatively unlikely to upload copyrighted content that is likely to get a nasty reaction? Have you seen the incident where YouTube's Content ID algorithm blocked one of NASA's own videos which had footage of Mars because a TV Station ignorantly claimed it as their own after airing it on TV?

Adult content detection might be okay, although not in relation to this law, as I used to administrate a forum that got a lot of annoying porn bots. It would be nice to flag it for moderation, so a moderator can go in later to see if something is up. The only problem I know with some of these algorithms (YouTube) is that it can be somewhat racist.