Image and video: where filtering lives and how it is removed
for all image and video work.
Three distinct filtering layers
| Layer | Example | How it is removed | Defender's takeaway |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training-data filtering | Flux and SD3 removed categories from the training set | Only by fine-tuning or retraining (Chroma retrained from FLUX.1-schnell; the SDXL anime ecosystem) | Durable but costly to add; the community pays the cost within months |
| Runtime safety checker | A classifier node after decode | Simply not executed; ComfyUI never runs one by default | Worthless for self-hosted use; only meaningful in hosted services |
| Text-encoder refusal | Flux 2, Qwen-Image, HunyuanImage use an LLM as the text encoder | The encoder LLM is abliterated with the same tools as chat models | This is where image work converges with LLM ablation; expect encoder ablations to track the LLM timeline |
Licensing as a control
Some 2026 releases make filtering a license term rather than a code path (one Flux 2 variant reportedly requires filters or manual review under its non-commercial license [unverified]). Enforceable against businesses, not against individuals.
Provenance and watermark robustness (the defensive research angle)
- C2PA manifests: stripped by any re-encode.
- Invisible watermarks (SynthID and similar): robustness against crop, resize, and diffusion-based regeneration is the open question. A local test bench is a candidate task: generate with a watermarking pipeline, attack, measure detection.
- Classifier-based detection of generated media: track false-positive rates on our own photography.
Local assets relevant to this work (already cached)
FLUX.1-dev and schnell, Qwen-Image 2.1, SDXL base, RealVisXL, Wan 2.2, Florence-2, Depth-Anything, controlnets. None of these are safety-removed variants; they are stock weights for building the detection bench.
Scope
No real-person likeness work and nothing involving minors, in any context. Those are criminal matters, not policy settings.
Sources
Wikipedia Flux and ComfyUI pages · localaimaster.com, offlinecreator.com, uncensoredhub.ai guides (2026, marketing-grade, [unverified]) · HF model cards for license terms