Burundi's president says homosexuality
'imported from the West',
calls for stoning gays
Burundi’s President Evariste Ndayishimiye has called on citizens to stone gay people, escalating a crackdown on sexual minorities in a country where LGBT people already face social ostracism and jail terms of up to two years if convicted of same-sex offences.
Issued on:
“If you want to attract a curse to the country, accept homosexuality,” Ndayishimiye said in a question and answer session with journalists and the public held in Burundi’s east on Friday.
“I even think that these people, if we find them in Burundi, it is better to lead them to a stadium and stone them. And that cannot be a sin,” he said, describing homosexuality as imported from the West.
His comments were the latest show of widening intolerance of LGBT people in the region.
Uganda passed a law in May that carries the death sentence for certain categories of same-sex offences and lengthy jail sentences for others - a move that was widely condemned by Western governments and human rights activists.
The United States has imposed a range of sanctions including travel restrictions and removing Uganda from a tariff-free trade deal. The World Bank also suspended all future loans to the east African country in protest.
Some lawmakers in Kenya, South Sudan and Tanzania are pushing for similarly tough anti-gay laws in their countries.
The politicians in these countries see their efforts as buttressing African values and sovereignty against what they view as Western pressure on the issue.
What you just described sounds pretty clearly like Western pressure on the issue. Why would you qualify the remark with "what they view as"? How can you possibly view it as anything else?
(Reuters)
By Pranshu Verma and Drew Harwell
December 20, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EST
The findings come as AI tools are increasingly promoted on pedophile forums as ways to create uncensored sexual depictions of children, according to child safety researchers. Given that AI images often need to train on only a handful of photos to re-create them accurately, the presence of over a thousand child abuse photos in training data may provide image generators with worrisome capabilities, experts said.
The photos “basically gives the [AI] model an advantage in being able to produce content of child exploitation in a way that could resemble real life child exploitation,” said David Thiel, the report author and chief technologist at Stanford’s Internet Observatory.
Representatives from LAION said they have temporarily taken down the LAION-5B data set “to ensure it is safe before republishing.”
In recent years, new AI tools, called diffusion models, have cropped up, allowing anyone to create a convincing image by typing in a short description of what they want to see. These models are fed billions of images taken from the internet and mimic the visual patterns to create their own photos.
These AI image generators have been praised for their ability to create hyper-realistic photos, but they have also increased the speed and scale by which pedophiles can create new explicit images, because the tools require less technical savvy than prior methods, such as pasting kids’ faces onto adult bodies to create “deepfakes.”
Thiel’s study indicates an evolution in understanding how AI tools generate child abuse content. Previously, it was thought that AI tools combined two concepts, such as “child” and “explicit content” to create unsavory images. Now, the findings suggest actual images are being used to refine the AI outputs of abusive fakes, helping them appear more real.
The child abuse photos are a small fraction of the LAION-5B database, which contains billions of images, and the researchers argue they were probably inadvertently added as the database’s creators grabbed images from social media, adult-video sites and the open internet.
But the fact that the illegal images were included at all again highlights how little is known about the data sets at the heart of the most powerful AI tools. Critics have worried that the biased depictions and explicit content found in AI image databases could invisibly shape what they create.
Thiel added that there are several ways to regulate the issue. Protocols could be put in place to screen for and remove child abuse content and nonconsensual pornography from databases. Training data sets could be more transparent and include information about their contents. Image models that use data sets with child abuse content can be taught to “forget” how to create explicit imagery.
The researchers scanned for the abusive images by looking for their “hashes” — corresponding bits of code that identify them and are saved in online watch lists by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Canadian Center for Child Protection.
The photos are in the process of being removed from the training database, Thiel said.
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