Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney argues banning Twitter over its ability to AI-generate pornographic images of minors is just 'gatekeepers' attempting to 'censor all of their political opponents'
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-games-ceo-tim-sweeney-argues-banning-twitter-over-its-ability-to-ai-generate-pornographic-images-of-minors-is-just-gatekeepers-attempting-to-censor-all-of-their-political-opponents/Open linkView original on eviltoast.org642
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TIL Tim Sweeny is into child porn. Not surprising tbh.
The fall of rome... The fall of the perverse...
If you can be effectively censored by the banning of a site flooded with CSAM, that's very much your problem and nobody else's.
Yet another CEO who's super into child porn huh?
Maybe we are the only people that don't f kids. Maybe this is "H' "E" Double Hockey Sticks.
I'll keep in mind Tim think child porn is just politics.
It is when one side of the political palette is "against" it but keeps supporting people who think CSAM is a-okay, while the other side finds it abhorrent regardless who's pushing it.
I mean the capitalist are the ones calling the shots since the imperial core is no democracy. This is their battle we are their dildos.
Literally this meme again
It helps that Tim Sweeney seems to always be wrong about everything.
If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by
I believe it's called Let Them.
It's called being so effective at marketing and spending so much money on it that people believe you don't do nothing.
Somebody is in a certain set of files
His opinion is as trash as his gaming storefront that insists its a platform.
Someone beat this man for attempting to defent AI csam
I wonder which AI companies he’s invested in
Did Covid-19 make everyone lose their minds? This isn't about corporate folks being cruel or egotistical. This is just a stupid thing to say. Has the world lost the concept of PR??? Genuinely defending 𝕏 in the year 2026... for Deepfake porn including of minors!!???? From the Fortnite company guy???
Unironically this behaviour is just "pivoting to a run for office as a Republican" vibes nowadays.
Its no longer even 'weird behaviour' for a US CEO.
For some reason Epic studios just let Tim Sweeney say the most insane things. If I was a shareholder I'd want someone to take his phone off him.
They could learn a lesson from Tesla.
Trump has shown these oligarchs that they don't have to pretend to not be arrogant oligarchs anymore. They can speak their minds without suffering any kind of repercussion or censure for their insane narcissistic greed.
Every day further convinces me we all died of COVID, and this is The Bad Place.
inb4 "In a stunning 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that AI-generated CSAM is constitutionally protected speech"
Imagine where Epic would be if they had just censored Tim Sweeney’s Twitter account.
It’s like he’s hell bent on driving people away from Epic. I’m not sure I could be more abrasive if I tried, without losing the plausible deniability of not trying to troll.
Not just asshole. Nonce asshole.
Absolutely insane take. The reason Grok can generate CP is because it was trained on it. Musk should be arrested just for owning that shit.
We all live in a two tier justice system.
The one tier is for the capital class. Generally, as long as they don't commit crimes against the government or others in the capital class. These offenders get the slap on the wrist justice system. The Government had enough evidence between witnesses and documentary evidence from the Epstein files to atleast open investigations and charge some of the people. The only people to be arrested and charged were Epstein and Maxwell. It took a long time before either of them faced any serious consequences for their actions.
Everyone else gets the go fuck yourself justice system.
That doesn't stop everyone from directly calling elon musk a pedophile for creating a CP generating machine.
And nor should it.
You know those signs at roller coasters that say "you must be this tall to ride"? The US is that, except the sign says "you must be this rich to play".
IMO commenters here discussing the definition of CSAM are missing the point. Definitions are working tools; it's fine to change them as you need. The real thing to talk about is the presence or absence of a victim.
Non-consensual porn victimises the person being depicted, because it violates the person's rights over their own body — including its image. Plus it's ripe material for harassment.
This is still true if the porn in question is machine-generated, and the sexual acts being depicted did not happen. Like the sort of thing Grok is able to generate. This is what Timothy Sweeney (as usual, completely detached from reality) is missing.
And it applies to children and adults. The only difference is that adults can still consent to have their image shared as porn; children cannot. As such, porn depicting children will be always non-consensual, thus always victimising the children in question.
Now, someone else mentioned Bart's dick appears in the Simpsons movie. The key difference is that Bart is not a child, it is not even a person to begin with, it is a fictional character. There's no victim.
EDIT: I'm going to abridge what I said above, in a way that even my dog would understand:
What Grok is doing is harmful, there are victims of that, regardless of some "ackshyually this is not CSAM lol lmao". And yet you guys keep babbling about definitions?
Everything else I said here was contextualising and detailing the above.
Is this clear now? Or will I get yet another lying piece of shit (like @[email protected]) going out of their way to misinterpret what I said?
(I don't even have a dog.)
What exactly have I lied about?
I've never once tried to even insinuate that what grok is doing ok. Nor that it should be. What I've said. Is that it doesn't even matter if there are an actual real person being victimized or not. It's still illegal. No matter how you look at it. It's illegal. Fictional or not.
Your example of Bart in the Simpsons movie is so far out of place I hardly know where to begin.
It's NOT because he's fictional. Because fictional depictions of naked children in sexually compromised situations IS illegal.
Though I am glad you don't have a dog. It would be real awkward for the dog to always be the smartest being in the house.
Supporting CSAM should be treated like making CSAM.
Down into the forgetting hole with them!
Nobody here is supporting CSAM. Learn to read, dammit.
He implicitly is.
EDIT: Wait, what is this about? Did I missphrase something?
They mistook your comment as disagreeing with their take on how there are real victims of Grok's porn and CSAM and saying that they themselves were supporting CSAM, rather than saying that you agree and were saying Sweeney is supporting CSAM.
Gasp "Lvxferre! You damn Diddy demon! How could youuuu!"
At this rate I'm calling dibs on your nickname 🤣
Fuck! I misread you. Yes, you're right, Tim Sweeney is supporting CSAM.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, undeserved crankiness, and defensiveness; I thought you were claiming I was the one doing it. That was my bad. (In my own defence, someone already did it.)
Now, giving you a proper answer: yeah, Epic is better sent down the forgetting hole. And I hope Sweeney gets haunted by his own words for years and years to come.
Maybe if it was for comedy purposes, but grown men should not have any CP whatsoever. Or you know, non-grown men either.
That is a lot of text for someone that couldn't even be bothered to read the first paragraph of the article.
There ARE victims, lots of them.
That is a lot of text for someone that couldn’t even be bothered to read a comment properly.
Which they then talk about and point out that victims are absolutely present in this case...
If this is still too hard to understand i will simplify the sentence. They are saying:
"The important thing to talk about is, whether there is a victim or not."
It doesn't matter if there's a victim or not. It's the depiction of CSA that is illegal.
So no, talking about whatever or not there's a victim is not the most important part.
It doesn't matter if you draw it by hand with crayons. If it's depicting CSA it's illegal.
Nobody was talking about the "legality". We are talking about morals. And morally there is major difference.
I wish I was as composed as you. You're still calmly explaining things to that dumb fuck, while they move the goalposts back and forth:
All of that while they're still pretending to argue the same point. It reminds me a video from the Alt-Right Playbook, called "never play defence": make dumb claim, waste someone else's time expecting them to rebuke that dumb claim, make another dumb claim, waste their time again, so goes on.
Talking about morals and morality is how you end up getting things like abortion banned. Because some people felt morally superior and wanted to enforce their superior morality on everyone else.
There's no point in bringing it up. If you need to bring up morals to argue your point. You've already failed.
But please do enlighten me. Because personally. I don't think there's a moral difference between depicting "victimless" CSAM and CSAM containing a real person.
I think they're both, morally, equally awful.
But you said there's a major moral difference? For you maybe.
You're only rewording what I said in the third paragraph, while implying I said the opposite. And bullshitting/assuming/lying I didn't read the text. (I did.)
Learn to read dammit. I'm saying this shit Grok is doing is harmful, and that people ITT arguing "is this CSAM?" are missing the bloody point.
Is this clear now?
Yes, it certainly comes across as you arguing for the opposite since you above, reiterated
Which has never been an issue. It has never mattered in CSAM if it's fictional or not. It's the depiction that is illegal.
No, it does not. Stop being a liar.
Or, even better: do yourself a favour and go offline. Permanently. There's already enough muppets like you: assumptive pieces of shit lacking basic reading comprehension, but still eager to screech at others — not because of what the others actually said, but because of what they assumed over it. You're dead weight in any serious discussion, probably in some unserious ones too, and odds are you know it.
Also, I'm not wasting my time further with you, go be functionally illiterate elsewhere.
Ok. You're right. You saying it's ok to depict CSAM if there isn't a victim is not you arguing the opposite. It's me lying.
You're so smart. Good job.
Is it so hard to admit that you misunderstood the comment ffs? It is painfully obvious to everyone.
Tim Sweeney vocally supports child porn and deep fake porn? He certainly looks like the type of creeper, so I guess I'm not that surprised.
I wonder how many times he's been to Trump and Epstein's Pedophile Island 🤔
Oh, they're thinking of 'em all right!
Guy atomically made of shit takes has another shit take, colour me surprised.
I think it's more a:
"Guy who enjoys making child porn on xhitter gets angry when decent people want to ban it."
type situation.
If I see someone arguing for something then that's because they want it. Or want to use it.
Not in the least surprised by this bag of slimy cocks
So he's saying CSAM is free/protected speech? Got it.
Dude had absolutely no reason to out himself as a paedophile, but that seems to be exactly what he's done. And for what? Epic is in legal battles to get onto other companies' platforms (Google's Android and Apple's iOS) without paying the fees outlined in the terms and conditions every other developer had to agree to. I'm not saying he's 100% wrong in that opinion, but outing himself as a paedophile by stating CSAM is protected speech only hurts his argument in the other case, because he's saying he could put CSAM on his own platform (i.e. Fortnite, a game aimed at children and teenagers) and he'd be against you censoring his "free" and "protected" speech.
I just see no good outcomes for what Sweeney is fighting for here.
To address the political opponents angle, no one was calling for a Twitter/X ban before the CSAM problem, even when our political opponents were up there (i.e. before and after Trump was banned and un-banned).
What a surprise, Tim Sweeney is still a shit person
This is SO SURPRISING that in a Country run by JEFFREY EPSTEINS BEST FRIEND who's using YOUR TAX DOLLARS to Protect Pedophiles and Child Sex Traffickers that people would call the CREATION OF CHILD PORN A PROTECTED ACT!
Did he take an oath against common sense? Is he bound by a curse to have bad takes for his entire life? Does he ragebait as a living? What the actual fuck is up with this man?
It sounds like he's simply a Trumptard, brainwashed with their koolaid of doom. And again I'm glad I never signed up for Epic.
He wants to see loads of AI generated porn of himself...
Yeah. I’m as tired of the argument that pretty much anything goes as far as free speech goes as I am of the “everything is a slippery slope when we make laws to keep people from doing harmful shit.”
I mean what’s the required damage before people put a stop to inciteful speech and objectively harmful lies? Or making CSAM of kids using a platform like X? Germany had to kill a few million people before they decided that maybe displaying Nazi symbols and speech wasn’t a good idea. So we have a platform being used to make CSAM. What’s it going to take before someone says that this is a bad idea and shouldn’t be done? How many kids will commit suicide after being taunted and shamed for their images being used? How many is “enough”? There should be immediate action to end the means to use these tools to make porn, there’s plenty of porn available on the internet and making it from user-submitted images on a major public platform is a horrible idea, but too many make up all kinds of reasons why we can’t do that…economic, censorship, whatever.
Tim Sweeney is into child porn
Who else just did a search on the Epstein files for "Tim Sweeney"?
I didn't find anything on jmail, but there's still a lot that haven't been released, and a lot of stuff is still redacted.
Man I just ran into 3 site blockages trying to open this. Somebody REALLY doesn’t want this to be read.
I use a VPN for 99.9% of personal Internet usage and had no issues connecting. So you're probably correct that it's being blocked by some means either intentional or not.
Pedo and facist defendant Tim Sweeney. Burn his business down by disconnecting your, patronage, money, time, etc. Boards can find CEOs who are not supporters of Pedo and Facists
Im not going to comment on whatever he's commenting on.
Im just going to re-affirm that Tim Sweeney is a fucking moron. in any and all cases
sweeney sounds like a pedo
TIL Tim Sweeney doesn't know what gatekeeping is
Tim Epic sucks, and has always sucked. Bring back Unreal Tournament you coward.
More like Tim NotEpic.
Tim EpicFail.
I hate that the newest Unreal Tournament just kinda... Disappeared. I mean, it's still playable I think, just not online and aside from a week or so after it launched, I ain't ever heard anyone talking about it. It was okay... Balance was not quite there, and it only had 2 maps when I last played it. But it had potential.
It had so much potential, it looked beautiful and just needed polish and some maps made for it. Could have sold it for $10-$20 easy
That's not even what gatekeeping means. Unless he's trying to stand up for the universal right to participate in the child porn fandom.
He wants to use AI in his products but then not be responsible for his products.
Oh that's an even worse (and probably accurate) interpretation.
"How are we supposed to do business if there are consequences for our actions?!"
I'm no fan of banning this or that particular platform (it's like trying to get rid of cheeseburgers by banning McDonalds; the burgers are still available from all the other burger chains and all the people who use the one will just switch to others) but this is a hilariously wrong way to get to the right answer.
The difference here is that the content is explicitly illegal in almost every jurisdiction in the world. And it's not as if Twitter (I'm not calling it x) is a niche platform that regulators may not have yet noticed.
It's a huge company that's doing very illegal things very much out in the open. That might fly in fascist land USA but I don't see why the rest of the world should put up with it.
The 'content' actually may not be illegal in many places. Laws in a number of places do not include non-photographic representations because the harm is in the creation of the imagery by abusing real human children or the incentivisation of abuse by purchasing the material. At any rate, the point is that it's not the platform but the content people object to. Closing twitter down would not stop people who want it from using GenAI to make images. The tech exists now and we will have to figure out how to handle that.
I feel like you didn't read my previous comment. That is not an excuse. The problem is that they are hosting the content quite happily without doing anything about it.
Bro should have stopped after UE3 and fucked off forever
Just look at that guy. If you were to ask 1000 people to describe what they thought a typical CSAM viewer looked like and averaged their responses together you would get something like this photo of Tim Sweeney.
I wonder if his name showed up in the Epstein Files
Tim Sweeny is a jackass.
From making CSAM? Makes you wonder about this Sweeny guy.
Perverts wanna perv
The only “charitable” take I can give this is that he’s been fighting Apple and Google over store fees and the like and that he feels like if he says that Apple/Google can do this then they should be able to restrict EGS as well.
I don’t know why CSAM AI material is the hill you’d make this point with though.
This is almost as sus as the the specific preferred age range terminology for pedophiles that comes up now and again in the most uncomfortable of scenarios
As if we didn't need more reasons to hate on epicgames.
They are all such vile people 💀
Exactly.
The arch demons we need to get rid of, for anything good to happen.
Hold up
What a weird thing to saw by the man whose company is 35% owned by the Chinese government. His argument, the words said and not implied, isn’t directly about csam, it’s about political censorship. Wonder how his Chinese overlords are taking that statement.
Are they removed or just this deep up their own assholes?
If my political opponents are actually sexual predators and their speech is sexual harassment, I'm down with censoring them. That should be the least of their problems.
If there is one gate that definitely needs keeping, it is the kindergarten's gate. Don't let those creeps get away with it...
There's this old adage, "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity".
Tim Sweeney is very ignorant. However, he's also pretty malicious. His fedoraèd waffling should probably be taken exactly for what it is.
I absolutely hate hanlon's razor. It is only ever used to try to protect obviously malicious people.
this guy is out of his mind
For those who aren’t doing this yet, get in losers, we’re going 0.0.0.0.-ing.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2987082604
I hate everything Musk is associated with and I have never and will never spend a dime in the epic game store. That said, I'm willing to stretch pretty far to say this quote might be more about his favoured type of reprehensible speech than csam:
He wouldn't have a leg to stand on if Musk ignored/laughed off the whole thing instead of stupidly threatening the users posting the images but I guess that's the least we can expect these days instead of actual accountability.
sigh I'll get my boycotting tools.
Not that there's an awful lot to boycott.
I'm trying to think what the last majorly popular title they released was that wasn't aimed at kids. Possibly gears of War about a decade ago.
At this point I don't think I'm boycotting them as much as forgetting they exist.
I saw someone suggesting mass downloading and uninstalling and downloading again all of the free games they've claimed over the years
That's a lot of interaction for a boycott, and I'm sure they would just ban your IP at some point. Of course there's always ways around that, but how much effort do you want to put into this boycott?
The biggest impact you could have on them would be for everyone to go over to Steam OS which I don't believe they support. It would be hilarious if they were forced to add support in order to stay relevant.
I don't think anything else would have much of an affect, because like I said their target demographic are kids, who don't really pay attention to this stuff.
There are tools like heroic launcher that let you install and play most games on Epic pretty easily on Linux.
I bet hes kind of right, here in the UK we just lost a whole bunch of rights and privacies online under the guise of "protect the kids" but its kind of weird to be piping up against it when theres actually protections needed.
It would be weird if it were the only time he's called out the Google and Apple monopolies and their control over apps, but it's been a running theme for him (and his legal battles). Two examples from a quick lookup:
Personally, I see no issue with platforms removing content they deem to be problematic, and I'm sure Sweeney agrees, given that the Epic store prohibits pornography for example. However, as he's said repeatedly, Apple in particular is unique in that it removing an app means there's practically no way for an iPhone user to access it, since there's no sideloading.
If it were an app dedicated to CSAM, I don't think anyone would take issue, but his argument is that removing the app would deplatform all of its 500M users, most of whom are probably not pedos. I'm critical of people being on X, but it's also undeniable that despite the far-right leaning and CEO, there are still leftists and people belonging to minority groups who are on it, for whatever reason. Are they pedophile and Nazi enablers too? I'm inclined to say yes, but I don't know how many people would agree.
Edit: Format and details.
This isn't really a change, though, I'm pretty sure. People have been able to make photo-realistic depictions a lot longer than AI has existed and those have rightfully been held to be illegal in most places because the confusion it causes makes it harder to stop the real thing.
I think the difference here is that Twitter has basically installed a "child porn" button. If their reaction had been to pull the product and install effective safeguards, it wouldn't be as bad. It's a serious fuckup, but people screw up every day.
Instead, they've made it so you can pay them to have access to the child porn generator.
Its not really a change, so much as its suddenly incredibly easy for anyone of any ability to do it as much as they want with near seamless results.
Every year its got easier and easier to do it more and more believably, but suddenly all you have to do is literally ask the computer and it happens. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
Tim Sweeney is a nonce.
Zionazi oligarchist supremacism controlling media/speech promoting hate and genocide is reason to zero out his finances and media control. That bipartisan establishment loves all of this, means this performative whining over image generation tools that can be used to fake offense, is the permitted pathethic discourse establishment masquerades as democracy.
Man that title gives me a stroke trying to decipher it.. it almost reads like Tim Sweeney wants Twitter banned but clearly that’s not the case..
bold words from someone who looks like the stock photo for a pedophile.
that title is very misleading and tim made a reponse to it. Tha argument was never on the fact that grok went crasy and did shit it shouldnt have done. The argument was the gouvernment shouldn't ban one of the biggest social network base on stupid shit a bot did for 1 day that is illegal and that X said they will pursue thoses that made an illegal use of it. The same way lemmy shouldnt be ban cause some user here call for violence.
What a reprehensible, disingenuous representation of what he actually said. I'm not a fan of the guy, but PC Gamer is trash as well. Scary to see how people here are reacting just because it's about X and AI.
Yeah nobody in this thread went past the title, but that's literally not what he said.
He actually said that demanding X remove AI features is gatekeeping since competitors get to keep them, which is still a dumb take but very very far from "Tim Sweeny loves child porn"...
This guy needs to be gimped and fucked by zombie epstein with vance warming up with a recliner waiting on his turn. Can twitter make that happen?
HAHAHAHA Just stop the corn bro... IS everything the lowest common denominator... beatin meat.... I don't eat when I sh!+... Like time and place.... Tim you a straight arse ladder pulling enshittificating boomer reprobate. This pud skims the surface like the scum that he is. One day the master race will get all the gold coins and build a circus that no one can afford. Finger crossed!!! Nukes_2026
How is he wrong?
What images can I make in Grok that can't be done with Gemini or GPT?
He's wrong because he's not Gabe Newell. On a more serious note, the 404 report cited by the PCGamer article basically supports your point, though with the caveats that X and Musk are bad for other reasons and that those generated images make it into people's feeds: