arXiv subjects

Rui-Jie Yew

Publications and source records attributed to Rui-Jie Yew.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Video Deepfake Abuse: How Company Choices Predictably Shape Misuse Patterns

In 2022, AI image generators crossed a threshold, enabling much more efficient and dynamic production of photorealistic deepfake images than before. This enabled opportunities for creative and positive uses of these models. However, it also enabled unprecedented opportunities for the low-effort creation of AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (AIG-NCII), including AI-generated child sexual abuse material (AIG-CSAM). Empirically, these harms were principally enabled by a small number of models that were trained on web data with pornographic content, released with open weights, and insufficiently safeguarded. In this paper, we observe ways in which the same patterns are emerging with video generation models in 2025. Specifically, we analyze how a small number of open-weight AI video generation models have become the dominant tools for photorealistic AIG-NCII video generation. We then analyze the literature on model safeguards and conclude that (1) developers who openly release the weights of capable video generation models without appropriate data curation and/or post-training safeguards foreseeably contribute to mitigatable downstream harm, and (2) model distribution platforms that do not proactively moderate individual misuse or models designed for AIG-NCII foreseeably amplify this harm. While there are no perfect defenses against AIG-NCII and AIG-CSAM from open-weight AI models, we argue that risk management by model developers and distributors, informed by emerging safeguard techniques, will substantially affect the future ease of creating AIG-NCII and AIG-CSAM with generative AI video tools.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

The Commodification of AI Sovereignty: Lessons from the Fight for Sovereign Oil

"Sovereignty" is increasingly a part of national AI policies and strategies. At the same time that "sovereignty" is invoked as a priority for global AI policy, it is also being commodified along the AI stack. Companies now sell "sovereign" AI factories, clouds, and language models to governments, enterprises, and communities -- turning a contested value into a commercial commodity. This shift risks allowing private technology providers to define sovereignty on their own terms. By analyzing the history of sovereignty and parallels in global oil production, this paper aims to open avenues to interrogate the implications of this value's commercialization. The contributions of this paper lie in a disentangling of the facets of sovereignty being appealed to through the AI stack and a case for how analogizing oil and AI can be generative in thinking through what is achieved and what can be achieved through the commodification of AI sovereignty.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Anti-Regulatory AI: How "AI Safety" is Leveraged Against Regulatory Oversight

AI companies increasingly develop and deploy privacy-enhancing technologies, bias-constraining measures, evaluation frameworks, and alignment techniques -- framing them as addressing concerns related to data privacy, algorithmic fairness, and AI safety. This paper examines the ulterior function of these technologies as mechanisms of legal influence. First, we examine how encryption, federated learning, and synthetic data -- presented as enhancing privacy and reducing bias -- can operate as mechanisms of avoidance with existing regulations in attempts to place data operations outside the scope of traditional regulatory frameworks. Second, we investigate how emerging AI safety practices including open-source model releases, evaluations, and alignment techniques can be used as mechanisms of change that direct regulatory focus towards industry-controlled voluntary standards and self-governance. We term this phenomenon "anti-regulatory AI" -- the deployment of ostensibly protective technologies that simultaneously shapes the terms of regulatory oversight. Our analysis additionally reveals how technologies' anti-regulatory functions are enabled through framing that legitimizes their deployment while obscuring their use as regulatory workarounds. This paper closes with a discussion of policy implications that centers on the consideration of business incentives that drive AI development and the role of technical expertise in assessing whether these technologies fulfill their purported protections.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Red Teaming AI Policy: A Taxonomy of Avoision and the EU AI Act

The shape of AI regulation is beginning to emerge, most prominently through the EU AI Act (the "AIA"). By 2027, the AIA will be in full effect, and firms are starting to adjust their behavior in light of this new law. In this paper, we present a framework and taxonomy for reasoning about "avoision" -- conduct that walks the line between legal avoidance and evasion -- that firms might engage in so as to minimize the regulatory burden the AIA poses. We organize these avoision strategies around three "tiers" of increasing AIA exposure that regulated entities face depending on: whether their activities are (1) within scope of the AIA, (2) exempted from provisions of the AIA, or are (3) placed in a category with higher regulatory scrutiny. In each of these tiers and for each strategy, we specify the organizational and technological forms through which avoision may manifest. Our goal is to provide an adversarial framework for "red teaming" the AIA and AI regulation on the horizon.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Navigating Dialectal Bias and Ethical Complexities in Levantine Arabic Hate Speech Detection

Social media platforms have become central to global communication, yet they also facilitate the spread of hate speech. For underrepresented dialects like Levantine Arabic, detecting hate speech presents unique cultural, ethical, and linguistic challenges. This paper explores the complex sociopolitical and linguistic landscape of Levantine Arabic and critically examines the limitations of current datasets used in hate speech detection. We highlight the scarcity of publicly available, diverse datasets and analyze the consequences of dialectal bias within existing resources. By emphasizing the need for culturally and contextually informed natural language processing (NLP) tools, we advocate for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to hate speech detection in the Arab world.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

You Still See Me: How Data Protection Supports the Architecture of AI Surveillance

Data forms the backbone of artificial intelligence (AI). Privacy and data protection laws thus have strong bearing on AI systems. Shielded by the rhetoric of compliance with data protection and privacy regulations, privacy-preserving techniques have enabled the extraction of more and new forms of data. We illustrate how the application of privacy-preserving techniques in the development of AI systems--from private set intersection as part of dataset curation to homomorphic encryption and federated learning as part of model computation--can further support surveillance infrastructure under the guise of regulatory permissibility. Finally, we propose technology and policy strategies to evaluate privacy-preserving techniques in light of the protections they actually confer. We conclude by highlighting the role that technologists could play in devising policies that combat surveillance AI technologies.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Compliance Cards: Automated EU AI Act Compliance Analyses amidst a Complex AI Supply Chain

As the AI supply chain grows more complex, AI systems and models are increasingly likely to incorporate multiple internally- or externally-sourced components such as datasets and (pre-trained) models. In such cases, determining whether or not the aggregate AI system or model complies with the EU AI Act (AIA) requires a multi-step process in which compliance-related information about both the AI system or model and all its component parts is: (1) gathered, potentially from multiple arms-length sources; (2) harmonized, if necessary; (3) inputted into an analysis that looks across all of it to render a compliance prediction. Because this process is so complex and time-consuming, it threatens to overburden the limited compliance resources of the AI providers (i.e., developers) who bear much of the responsibility for complying with the AIA. It also renders rapid or real-time compliance analyses infeasible in many AI development scenarios where they would be beneficial to providers. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a complete system for automating provider-side AIA compliance analyses amidst a complex AI supply chain. This system has two key elements. First is an interlocking set of computational, multi-stakeholder transparency artifacts that capture AIA-specific metadata about both: (1) the provider's overall AI system or model; and (2) the datasets and pre-trained models it incorporates as components. Second is an algorithm that operates across all those artifacts to render a real-time prediction about whether or not the aggregate AI system or model complies with the AIA. All told, this system promises to dramatically facilitate and democratize provider-side AIA compliance analyses (and, perhaps by extension, provider-side AIA compliance).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Measuring the Success of Diffusion Models at Imitating Human Artists

Modern diffusion models have set the state-of-the-art in AI image generation. Their success is due, in part, to training on Internet-scale data which often includes copyrighted work. This prompts questions about the extent to which these models learn from, imitate, or copy the work of human artists. This work suggests that tying copyright liability to the capabilities of the model may be useful given the evolving ecosystem of generative models. Specifically, much of the legal analysis of copyright and generative systems focuses on the use of protected data for training. As a result, the connections between data, training, and the system are often obscured. In our approach, we consider simple image classification techniques to measure a model's ability to imitate specific artists. Specifically, we use Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) encoders to classify images in a zero-shot fashion. Our process first prompts a model to imitate a specific artist. Then, we test whether CLIP can be used to reclassify the artist (or the artist's work) from the imitation. If these tests match the imitation back to the original artist, this suggests the model can imitate that artist's expression. Our approach is simple and quantitative. Furthermore, it uses standard techniques and does not require additional training. We demonstrate our approach with an audit of Stable Diffusion's capacity to imitate 70 professional digital artists with copyrighted work online. When Stable Diffusion is prompted to imitate an artist from this set, we find that the artist can be identified from the imitation with an average accuracy of 81.0%. Finally, we also show that a sample of the artist's work can be matched to these imitation images with a high degree of statistical reliability. Overall, these results suggest that Stable Diffusion is broadly successful at imitating individual human artists.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Regulating Facial Processing Technologies: Tensions Between Legal and Technical Considerations in the Application of Illinois BIPA

Harms resulting from the development and deployment of facial processing technologies (FPT) have been met with increasing controversy. Several states and cities in the U.S. have banned the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and governments, but FPT are still being developed and used in a wide variety of contexts where they primarily are regulated by state biometric information privacy laws. Among these laws, the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has generated a significant amount of litigation. Yet, with most BIPA lawsuits reaching settlements before there have been meaningful clarifications of relevant technical intricacies and legal definitions, there remains a great degree of uncertainty as to how exactly this law applies to FPT. What we have found through applications of BIPA in FPT litigation so far, however, points to potential disconnects between technical and legal communities. This paper analyzes what we know based on BIPA court proceedings and highlights these points of tension: areas where the technical operationalization of BIPA may create unintended and undesirable incentives for FPT development, as well as areas where BIPA litigation can bring to light the limitations of solely technical methods in achieving legal privacy values. These factors are relevant for (i) reasoning about biometric information privacy laws as a governing mechanism for FPT, (ii) assessing the potential harms of FPT, and (iii) providing incentives for the mitigation of these harms. By illuminating these considerations, we hope to empower courts and lawmakers to take a more nuanced approach to regulating FPT and developers to better understand privacy values in the current U.S. legal landscape.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2021

Ethical Dilemmas in Strategic Games

An agent, or a coalition of agents, faces an ethical dilemma between several statements if she is forced to make a conscious choice between which of these statements will be true. This paper proposes to capture ethical dilemmas as a modality in strategic game settings with and without limit on sacrifice and for perfect and imperfect information games. The authors show that the dilemma modality cannot be defined through the earlier proposed blameworthiness modality. The main technical result is a sound and complete axiomatization of the properties of this modality with sacrifice in games with perfect information.

cs.AI↗