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.”
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.