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.”
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?