you know what that makes sense so I looked into it, one method of detecting csam is hashing the image and comparing it to a database of hashes of known csam images. so I guess that method might not work for “original” csam images.

article about it

apple csam detection [download]

google talking about it

interestingly, Google says they use AI also but didn’t really get into the details.

it’s my understanding that the csam datasets (once already labeled by people) are hashed to the point of being unrecognizable before being passed around.