IWF and Black Forest Labs join forces to combat harmful AI-generated content

Partnership grants the frontier AI lab access to safety tech tools 

Black Forest Labs, a frontier AI research lab, has joined the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) as a Member.

The startup has deep roots in the generative AI research community and is behind FLUX, a suite of advanced text-to-image models that generate images from text descriptions.

As an IWF Member, Black Forest Labs gains access to the child protection charity’s specialised tools designed to prevent the spread of harmful content online. By partnering with the IWF, Black Forest Labs is furthering its commitment to disrupting the misuse of AI tech and joins more than 200 organisations in a global effort to eradicate child sexual abuse on the internet.

Use of the IWF’s Hash List, for example, will allow Black Forest Labs to combat known images and videos showing child sexual abuse. The IWF Hash List is a special catalogue with more than 2.7million unique hashes – a type of digital fingerprint that identifies if an image is known to contain child sexual abuse.

Black Forest Labs CEO Robin Rombach said: “Black Forest Labs is on a mission to create the best generative media models and infrastructure to enable novel creative applications. As a fundamental part of this mission, we are committed to preventing the misuse of generative AI technology.

“We look forward to working with IWF to continue implementing industry-leading solutions to help to combat online child sexual abuse material while we shape the future of generative AI.”

Derek Ray-Hill, Interim CEO of the IWF, said: “AI imagery, much like real child sexual abuse images and videos, can normalise and ingrain the sexual abuse of children.

“Not only that, it can have real-world harm because we know that real victims’ imagery is being exploited in AI child sexual abuse content. This repeatedly victimises survivors, adding to their trauma.

“AI companies can act to prevent the creation of child sexual abuse imagery which is why we are gratified to have Black Forest Labs on board as a Member and look forward to working with them to tackle online child sexual abuse material.”

Find out more about becoming a Member and the services the IWF can provide here: https://www.iwf.org.uk/our-services.

The public is given this advice when making a report to iwf.org.uk/report

• Do report images and videos of child sexual abuse to the IWF to be removed. Reports to the IWF are anonymous.
• Do provide the exact URL where child sexual abuse images are located.
• Don’t report other harmful content – you can find details of other agencies to report to on the IWF’s website.
• Do report to the police if you are concerned about a child’s welfare
• Do report only once for each web address – or URL. Repeat reporting of the same URL isn’t needed and wastes analysts’ time.