Justice Thomas too forecasted that “technology may evolve to the point where it becomes impossible to enforce actual child pornography laws because the Government cannot prove that certain pornographic images are of real children.” In his view, “if technological advances thwart prosecution of ‘unlawful speech,’ the Government may well have a compelling interest in barring or otherwise regulating some narrow category of ‘lawful speech’ in order to enforce effectively laws against pornography made through the abuse of real children.”
If that’s free speech then so is AI generated porn of the Judge.
technology may evolve to the point where it becomes impossible to enforce actual child pornography laws because the Government cannot prove that certain pornographic images are of real children.
That right there seems like a great reason to ban ai-geneated CSAM, because that shit is never okay no matter what.
It should probably be illegal, but the rational here isn’t great. Something shouldn’t be made illegal just because it makes a detective’s job more difficult.
One way around it is we might see legislation require AI watermark generated images. If you have CSAM that isnt watermarked you used software thats against law, or its real CSAM unless you can somehow prove otherwise. If you prove its AI, hit them with the illegal software charge assuming they didnt do any of the other illegal things that can be done with the content (e.g uploading it somewhere)
A watermark law seems like its going to happen.
Edit: and some are starting to watermark of their own choice. Claude is altering text output to make it identifiable, they claim without altering the meaning or intention of its output.
I think AI images should be watermarked, but this would just lead people to watermarking their CSAM and detectives putting no effort into determining if the watermark was added by a person or a program. All the sudden a hard drive full of CSAM looks legal because they slapped a filter on it. AI generated CSAM should be illegal, like all CSAM.
Writing one of these is a weekend project for any seasoned developer.
Any idea that you can make software illegal ignores the reality that the code itself is free speech.
Wouldn’t this be more like, writing a computer virus is legal, but using the virus isn’t?
Yeah that’s almost exactly what the judge ruled. Possession is legal but production and distribution are illegal. You could have the code to a virus, but no you can’t write one.
I don’t 100% follow the judge’s logic, but it’s a simple parallel.
I think distribution is actually a stronger claim. There is a lot of precedence on distribution of things that are otherwise covered under free speech.
I’m not sure who could claim standing.
It would be a criminal case, no one would have to have standing to sue.
That honestly makes absolutely zero sense…
Transmitting it is illegal.
If creating it is illegal (e.g hand drawn), it is impossible to possess it, and not have transmitted it. Either you created it, or transmitted it, and while maybe they can’t prove one or the other, you broke a law?
Yes, but they have to prove it in court. I don’t think it really makes sense as is, and the laws should be changed.
This will stand until the first wave of child rapes and sexual assaults happen wherein the cops find huge amounts of the ai-created child porn in the perpetrators computers.
The prurient interest angle of the images an will then be unavoidable as an enticement and incitement to the assaults and it will be banned.
Unfortunately, the law has to see actionable harm FIRST from something before it can be banned.
Just give it time, as you notice the language the judge used - the “compelling interest” the government has - they know that it should ne illegal, but have to wait until the balance of content is ai-generated and the predators come out to play.
It absolutely sucks to have to unfold this way.
The interesting part of this is you can’t have good discussions on the different aspects because any leniency towards the broader parts of prejudging something that doesn’t exist yet means people will jump on you as supporting the current topic. And the danger later if and when such things develop into actual incidents is some level of Patriot Act where everyone says “we told you so” and approve blanket laws that supposedly take care of that problem, but also affect totally not connected things.
It’s been something talked about in the tech world for a long time, how slow government is to react to changes in technology, and the gap widens as things speed along. Meanwhile we still aren’t talking about things like AI safety and how to regress some of the damage done by how LLMs were developed ILLEGALLY. Rather than trying to be ahead of the curve (if that’s even possible at this point) the laws will be late and draconian to appease the loud crowds.
I fear it’s more likely that the silent majority of this culture has turned out to be pedophiles and this is the subtle ground work for their inevitable legalization of child rape.
That will likely not happen. The greater risk to the billioinaires is to high.
All it takes is for one father to catch a member of the Epstein Class touching his kid and the rich pervert gets beat to death and the father gets away with it (as they usually do in these cases) then people will start to realize they should just pre-emptively go after the lot.
The magats are so well brainwashed that some have even said it would be an honor for trump to touch their daughters. They may be a minority, but the slow creap that we’ve all watched without stopping could eventually push us to that end. Sure we wouldn’t tolerate it now, but 10 years ago we wouldn’t tolerate a convicted felon as president and 20 years ago we’d have collectivly linched the guy that Nazi salutes at an official government function.
The magats are so well brainwashed that some have even said it would be an honor for trump to touch their daughters.
Those are men that are already fucking their own. That shit is real and the conservatives are more into it than people realize.
Honestly I’m genuinely looking for a proper therapist at this point because I can’t stop seeing the pattern. Guestimating off the current statistics and being conservative with the numbers, 1 in 13 Americans were molested as a kid or are currently being molested. Its in our music, our movies, our art, our comedy. It’s been consistently ignored for generations.
As a victim myself, I came to terms with it on the understanding that I was a rare case and the fact that so many of my friends were also victims was coincidental or proof that I give off a comforting aura or something. Instead it’s looking more and more like the minority are the people who make it through life unscathed…
This is the number one compelling argument for me. Largely, I feel passionately about having uncensored models for a variety of reasons not salient to the thread, but I draw a line when it protects abusers. That boundary trumps other considerations for me.
Check that judge’s computer!
That is absolutely fucking insane.
If CSAM is not CSAM because it’s fake and generated by AI, then that dude in Florida should be acquitted because they weren’t real flock cameras.
It’s that simple.
~And while I want that dude to go free, I also want all CSAM and their producers to be punished and burn in Hell/deactivated. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s a real child or not, the damage it does is real in the real world.~
Fucking assholes.
it doesn’t matter if it’s a real child or not
Real children who were abused to make CSAM say that they are re-traumatized when they come across the material or learn that it is being shared. I think most victims would say it does matter.
What I think you’re trying to argue is that a generated facsimile of CSAM is also harmful.
Yes, thank you. I am not always good at words, but you captured my point precisely.
This is interesting and I’m torn on where I stand. It should probably be illegal, but just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it should be illegal. Any curtailing of speech cuts the impact of the first amendment. It’s something that shouldn’t be done lightly.
I don’t like the trajectory it puts us on when the government tries to tell people what is and isn’t allowed to be said or done. Free speech and expression should not be curtailed unless absolutely necessary; this goes for joining the Klan to making porn to having died hair. The limits in place for yelling fire in a theater, making credible threats, and producing real csam are there to prevent immediate harm. And yes, I know there are more and exceptions; I’m generalizing. I’m also aware of the paradox of tollerance.
With AI generated csam, assuming the training model didn’t use real csam to begin with, no person is harmed in its creation. Consumption of it could lead to harm, if it normalizes the behavior, making it seem alright for someone to harm a real child. On the otherhand, maybe having it could help keep someone’s desires under control by giving them an outlet.
Has expert research been done on this? Though it might be hard to research. Given the subject matter, I’d imagine it’d be difficult to find a sample group large enough to test. Maybe based on arrest records. Peer reviewed research would help guide the direction.
If AI generated csam causes people to - who wouldn’t have otherwise - harm children, then it should be added to the list of banned speech. If not, then even though many of us will find it disgusting, it shouldn’t be made illegal. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
Again, I’m torn on this one. What thoughts do you folks have?
Edit: missed sentence.
It’s like how people instinctually want to give child rapists the death penalty: it’s counterproductive.
What it leads to is that the child now gets murdered as well, because the guy will try to minimize his chances of getting caught.
There is currently no good evidence that consuming child porn leads to abusive behaviour - there is some contradictory evidence of the kind you mentioned.
As such I think it should be legal unless it is established that it actually does lead to harmful behaviour.
I don’t think the model’s training data matters that much here, because that’s the same regardless of what the model is used for.
It’s because CSAM can be used to groom kids and has to be produced. It’s existance also leads to harm to the victims, who couldn’t consent to the act.
Producing csam involves sexual abuse, which is illegal already. Distributing it I can see should also be illegal as perpetuating the harm.
But we’re talking about child porn which may not have been made by abusing anyone due to being computer generated (or drawn, for example).
I don’t get the “can be used to groom kids” angle - so can candy. Grooming kids is illegal already.
CSAM, computer generated or drawn, can and has used references of other CSAM materials in order to be drawn. It’s existence can rely on the existence of previous materials, and it often does.
It makes it harder for kids to understand what’s wrong with the behaviour, and even grow up themselves to be offenders later on. Candy can’t do that.
“can, and often does” is not good enough for banning it. You’re trying to convince me it “can, and often does” rely on abuse material because that’s something basically everyone agrees is wrong… but that means that should be banned. And it is!
I generally assume that people who insist on calling drawn child porn etc “CSAM” even though it is not material containing child sexual abuse are too dogmatic about this to have a useful conversation with.
I have never heard of any evidence that seeing child porn can turn a child into a paedophile (if that’s what you meant by “offender”) and again, this can only happen if they see it… I think showing a child pornography is already illegal, as it should be.
You keep bringing up stuff that is already illegal as if we need to ban child porn to prevent it. That doesn’t make sense. I think you just find it horrible and so want it banned, which is understandable but still not the principle on which I think the law should operate.
I mean that it often does in action. Yes, theoretically, an AI could be successful at generating CSAM, but since in practice, it is nigh impossible to remove all instances of CSAM from scrapped data just by trying to filter it out, you cannot decouple the fact that it does use actual abuse material.
I was talking under the hypothetical that you proposed. That CP would be drawn. CP is a synonym for CSAM, although CSAM is more respectful. This is just semantics.
Groomers often use that as a tactic. It happens on the Internet as well. Porn can be shown, but unlike porn, CSAM is necessarily SA material. I’m saying that if it’s something ONLY used for that, then its harm is undeniable. Just having a legal blanket over the fact that showing a child porn is illegal is not the point. It’s what use case of the materials are actually valid. For example, consumming CSAM is invalid, since the children cannot consent. The second use case is grooming, which is also invalid. Since AI CSAM in practice has shown to be produced by agents that CAN’T filter out all CSAM from their data set (because it is impossible), then, for the respect of the victims, it should be illegal.
I’m not just bringing up things that are already illegal, but that if it’s used by predators to get off of material that is most likely made off of existing CSAM, and that it can harm children by the same means, then there isn’t any good that can come off of allowing its possession either. We’re talking about children who were exploited being reexploited again.
And what would stop a predator from saying that a footage or picture of CSAM was AI generated and get away with it? It purpousfully mudies the water.
Why does it matter than some tiny fraction of AI training data is child porn? Does it taint the whole model, or just when it generates child porn, and why? Does the fact that it has trained on other problematic content, such as photographs of real murders, mean that generated pictures of people being killed is more problematic than other ways of making those pictures? (Not to the point of illegality, since possessing pictures of a murder is not usually illegal). “Respect for the victims” is a vague thing that could be used to justify more or less anything; it’s not a sufficient principle, in my opinion, for curtailing freedoms. Not without something more concrete and objective.
CP is a synonym for CSAM, although CSAM is more respectful. This is just semantics.
“Semantics” means “what stuff means”, and what CSAM means specifically is Child Sexual Abuse Material. It’s not just a synonym.
I’m saying that if it’s something ONLY used for that, then its harm is undeniable.
You’re going through a number of situations which are harmful, and I don’t disagree about that. But that doesn’t prove that every situation is harmful. Just having child porn on your computer doesn’t harm anyone. Hell, jerking off to it does not - as far as I am aware from the present best research - harm anyone.
And what would stop a predator from saying that a footage or picture of CSAM was AI generated and get away with it?
If you can’t prove harm, then it shouldn’t be illegal, I don’t think. If there’s proof of harm, then it doesn’t matter what the predator says.
I agree, it is a fine line. Another relevant inconvenient truth is that there are pedophiles who have never acted on their urges, never harmed a child, and have even sought appropriate therapy to manage their mental state. Yet at the end of the day, they are still literally pedophiles.
Japan seems to be the canary in the coal mine for this issue. They have long made it legal to draw manga “pornography” featuring apparently underage characters, as long as it doesn’t depict an actual child in any way. This is a vice mini-doc on the subject from a few years ago.
People in that culture try to make the argument that it gives pedophiles a way to manage their feelings without harming any children. But in reality, it’s seeming more like giving suicidal patients access to guns. The challenge seems to be that: philosophically we want universal free speech, but biologically the human brain isn’t evolved to control itself in that environment. You’re not staving off a pedophiles’ urges, you end up nurturing them. You create a subculture that embraces this mental state as acceptable and normalized. It would be like…building Westworld robots for serial killers to abuse. Surely nothing good will come from creating a safe space in society for people with these urges.
I personally do not agree with any laws against speech, and also I don’t think anyone should ever create “artificial” CSAM in any capacity. But I don’t know how to square that circle. Because if you try to just make a blanket law against it, on the one hand people will find ways to skirt the line, slowly developing arguably even more depraved genres; and on the other hand you’ll have rulings against perfectly above-board, consensual pornography/speech, just because a politician doesn’t like it (as have been attempted many times throughout history, and remains a concerted goal of the right to this day).
I have to assume this is what it feels like to be an old-fashioned puritan, seeing a clear line between pornographic content and the erosion of society. But in this case, I think that’s where I am. I just don’t think it’s ok for the future of society to normalize artificial CSAM.
People in that culture try to make the argument that it gives pedophiles a way to manage their feelings without harming any children. But in reality, it’s seeming more like giving suicidal patients access to guns.
Why assume when there is data? The rates of child sexual abuse are about the same in Japan.
For your assumption to hold, the rate would need to be higher. The data says it doesn’t matter.
Caveat, only numbers I can find are child abuse survivor rates. But if reducing abuse rate outcomes is the goal these numbers feel adequate.
The rate might be higher in Japan specificaly because it’s normalised. If the victims themselves don’t see any wrong with what happened to them and bystanders too, then it’s way less likely to be repported.
SA cases have been seen to be heavily underepported in Japan. Upskirts were normalized too, for reference, and they had to force the cameras to make shutter sounds when taking pictures to try to solve the issue. Still, people mod their phones to circumvent it, and the demand for such content is still high, hence encouraging the practice more.
assuming the training model didn’t use real csam to begin with
This is a big contingency in your argument, and it’s not an assumption we can make.
The stochastic copy and paste machine needs similar input to what it is expected to output. That’s why there is an immense effort to collect as much data as possible from everything right now. If the relevant data isn’t in the training set then it can’t produce a related output.
You can train models on the output of other models, but at some point the original csam was produced and then processed for patterns by the machine. If you just copy those tagged patterns your still basing your output on very real csam.
Historically the US has banned all forms of csam including hand drawn or generated. This is a shift in that paradigm which now opens the flood gates for investigators as it dilutes real cases with facsimiles generated from real cases.
I’m not a free speech absolutist. There are categories of speech that should be protected and categories of speech that should not; and there are actions and products that absolutely should not belong in the “speech” category to begin with. Spending money is not speech, taking and owning pictures is not speech, and generating pictures of children being abused is not speech. There’s no reason any of that should be bundled up in our overly broad web of “speech” just cause we want to err on the side of personal liberty over common good and protection of this vulnerable in society.
The stochastic copy and paste machine needs similar input to what it is expected to output.
Sort of, but not necessarily to the degree this comment suggests.
A good image generation model can create a photorealistic image of a child riding a three-headed dragon flying over the surface of Mars. It has definitely never seen a real image of that, or one of the major components of it. The copying is at a lower level than the whole scene, and the presence of an element in the output does not imply exactly that element was in the training data.
There have been cases of models being withdrawn after discovery that they were trained on actual CSAM, and allegations that Grok was trained on CSAM in a recent lawsuit. It seems reasonable to me to treat a model trained on CSAM as CSAM itself in most cases.
The model has seen images of dragons (likely even multiheaded ones), children, riding, and Mars. Those existing images are what allows it to pick the appropriate patterns and draw an output.
There are significant physiological differences between a child’s body and an adult’s. If you don’t have a collection of naked children to pick from it will be difficult to produce naked children to the extent indistinguishable from actual pictures of abuse. You might can get partway there building off a chain of descriptors based on an adult model, but I don’t think you’re getting all the way to photorealistic child abuse material without the context trained on child abuse material.
I’m absolutely not willing to test my hypothesis, however, for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons.
There are adult porn models who have popularity based on how youthful their appearance is. Small, even almost flat chests, for example. Which is to say that AI knows how to draw those bodies proportionately. Take those models, add in pictures of children in swimsuits, and AI has all the information to infer what a nude child looks like.
And that’s before opening up the extremely gray area of perfectly legal photos which nonetheless depict nude children.
The reality is if you try to scrape all available images from the internet you will unavoidably ingest CSAM, but even if you could perfectly filter that out, AI would be able to easily create such depictions.
This hints at another issue: most nudity is not pornographic. A model could, for example be trained on medical and scientific imagery, or just innocent family photos; it’s my impression photos containing nude young children were more acceptable in the pre-digital era. It’s certainly distasteful that AI companies are training on such material without explicit permission from the subjects, but that’s true of almost all AI training material.
I share your unwillingness to test how good image generation models are at making a realistic facsimile of CSAM. Legal or not, that’s yucky and I don’t want to look at it.
To play devil’s advocate: those training pictures already exist, and AI generating fake images means another child wasn’t harmed.
I didn’t make any argument and thought I was clear that I wasn’t going to make an argument, one way or another. I also stated that it should probably be illigal though I’m torn on it.
I’m also not a free speech absolutist. There are things that need curtailed. I’m just hesitant to add more to that list as it can easily go too far, depending on who is in power. We see that world wide right now with Free Palestine.
Free speech isn’t just about something spoken, it’s about expression as well. Taking and owning pictures is part of free speech. Limiting porn to 18+ is a great limitation and should not be changed.
It should probably be illegal… Any curtailing of speech cuts the impact of the first amendment. It’s something that shouldn’t be done lightly.
Free speech and expression should not be curtailed unless absolutely necessary; this goes for joining the Klan to making porn to having died hair. The limits in place for yelling fire in a theater, making credible threats, and producing real csam are there to prevent immediate harm.
With AI generated csam … no person is harmed in its creation. Consumption of it could lead to harm, if it normalizes the behavior, making it seem alright for someone to harm a real child.
If AI generated csam causes people to - who wouldn’t have otherwise - harm children, then it should be added to the list of banned speech. If not, then even though many of us will find it disgusting, it shouldn’t be made illegal.
These are all arguments. Non committing doesn’t mean you aren’t making arguments. I was focusing specially on your 3rd argument as it was the most unfounded in my opinion.
I think the real question is whether CSAM increases or decreases the likelihood of actual abuse. I have seen no studies dealing with this, but the suspicion from regular pornography is that readily available regular pornography leads to a significant reduction in actual sex being had.
What happens if AI CSAM actually reduces real life abuse?
It won’t because it normalises it. Groomers often use media like this to encourage pedophilia and convince their victims that it’s normal. Litteraly how the pedo side of the fediverse opperates.
Also, the CSAM has to be produced. I know people say AI can just approximate how a child would look doing sexual acts, but that’s half the truth. Oftentimes, predators will use victims’ names to generate it, and pictures/videos similar to the ones in their CSAM would appear. So now, according to this ruling, the produced media would be legal. That, and how sometimes loli/shota artist use CSAM for reference, the AI will most likely use existing CSAM as a reference as well simply because of the tags used in a prompt.
Nothing, because no politician will propose a law to loosen restrictions on it.
And what’s in the Epstein files?
Isn’t the obvious conclusion that if you are unable to differentiate from AI CSAM and real CSAM, the safest thing for the victims is to treat it all as real CSAM?
Not a great argument: why shouldn’t they track down a real victim to confirm actual abuse took place? Seems like an argument for lazy police work & a surrender to authority.
I don’t see this argument come up with fictitious depictions of homicide & other crimes.
Who are the victims of AI generated images? This stuff is absolutely repulsive, but the reasoning for outlawing it (that it’s evidence of, and was produced during, the commission of a crime) falls apart when it’s fake. Now if it can be linked to the commission of future abuse, that starts to make sense in the way that reckless behavior is illegal even if a particular incident doesn’t hurt anybody.
The people that the generated image was aggregated from are the victims.
So, everyone who’s ever had a picture of them on the Internet?
The nude children? Yeah bud
Well my point is that if you can’t differentiate between real or fake, you have no idea if there are victims or not, so you have to assume there are as a worst-case.
That would mean less money to go around to track down the real monsters abusing children because everything spent to track down victims that don’t exist is wasted.
WTF ….
Every law is, fundamentally, a restriction on someone’s freedom. The key justification for why that’s okay is that the law protects one or more people from harm in the process. So in this case the question is “who is being harmed when an AI generates this particular configuration of pixels? How are they being harmed?”
When you dig into that it’s more complicated than the simple knee-jerk “that stuff is just plain bad!” Attitude that has been drummed into the general public.
Also the ruling was just about the possession of it, which when it doesnt depict a real person, isnt against the law.
They get people by having pictures of real people OR transmitting it which is strictly against the law even when its all made up.
Given existing laws, if he transmitted it which he is charged with, he will still be found guilty.
The moment it exits or enters your home from outside its transmitting. Transmitting is as simple as going to a website and downloading it, or uploading it to a cloud drive, or even some cloud service to move it between 2 devices you own.
The court held that creating it is also illegal.
What I don’t understand, is how where the models trained. I don’t think they just took adult parts and made them smaller… so wouldn’t that make the content illegal?
From the article:
For example, researchers have found that “a major dataset used for training image-generating AI contained hundreds of CSAM images.”
However, there is no source for this. I would really like to see one because that’s a huge part of the issue.
But regardless, this court ruling said that only possession is protected by current laws, not production or distribution.
Any model able to generalize will necessarily learn how to combine “nude” and “child” in the same way that it would learn how to combine “rainbow” and “banana”. That’s the whole point of the model is to generalize. It isn’t required that one particular combination of concepts is in the training data for the model to learn how to do it.
So, these judges are definitely pedos.
I’m an opponent of the death penalty. If there’s a convicted murderer on death row I would oppose executing him.
Does that mean I’m definitely a murderer?
3 pedos down voting, how many more can I get?
they should have to show its computer generated. so realease all source and data involved in the generation for every single time it is done.
Seize that judge’s personal computer and phone, and scour their home.
