I wonder if this could help pedophile people since generated porn wouldn't imply abuse of children.
Sexual preferences are a given; some people are attracted to the opposite sex, some people are attracted to the same sex, some people are attracted to children. Nothing they (or anyone) can do about it, lest one decides to indulge in so-called "conversion therapy".
Of course, children can't consent, and abusing children is horrible. And child porn is horrible because it implies children have been abused to produce it.
But AI-generated child porn, however nauseating it might sound, doesn't hurt anybody.
You're looking at it too narrowly. AI-generated CSAM may facilitate a sexual interest in children among certain individuals. Development of such an interest makes it significantly more likely they will abuse children. So it ought be illegal.
The analogy is not apt. You cannot compare image-based abuse of children with a video game. GTA is a legitimate form of entertainment, child abuse material is not. They are not remotely similar. This shows why analogies are almost never helpful and it's best just to focus on the topic under discussion.
You can generate whatever you want on your own PC, but if you try to use it for fraud or to share illegal material then you are a criminal.
Why on Earth any normal person would specifically look for CSAM material be it AI generated or not? I doubt that many people who seen something sickening on internet immediately became attracted to it and huge percent of people who use internet for 10+ years seen all kind of terrible things. Unfortunately anyone who hosted or moderated online communities had to deal with a lot of terrible things.
Also we have whole army of youtube / facebook / twitter moderators who actually see CSAM daily and we dont have stories about everyone of them turning into child-abusers. Though it's proven that this kind of job can make person mentally ill, but for completely different reasons.
PS: Again be it AI generated or not I totally sure that CSAM should stay banned from sharing. But I dont give a damn about what you paint, generate and watch on your own PC.
One could make the opposite argument, too. If you give pedophiles AI-generated CSAM, it reduces the demand for real CSAM, thereby reducing production of real-world CSAM, thereby reducing child abuse. Moreover it provides pedophiles their fix without them having to actually abuse a child.
In the end these are all armchair speculations made from our intuitions about individual psychology and group psychology.
We dont require image editors to have CSAM filters and requiring filter for ML model is madness.
There are two separate questions to be answered here:
1. Is it immoral?
2. Is it sufficiently immoral to warrant imposing my own moral standard upon others, by force if necessary? i.e. is responding to or preventing it with violence itself moral?
Morality is subjective and relative, which is why it's interesting to ask both questions: given the subjectivity and relativity of morality, at what point does your own moral code take precedence over those of others?
This will be a bigger disaster than the war on drugs, because it's almost impossible to provide proof. So what's left is convicting people based on oral testimony alone ...
At the same time I think everyone should be free to wrire / paint / generate whatever material they want on their own computer within comfort of their house. As long as no one gets hurt I dont give a damn.
What? Of course you can curate what you feed and have filters to train your ML model
I am sure it is currently easier to train a model with legal sex content and without any children
Also the law is still the same, having and distributing pedophilia content is illegal
Most publicly available sources of sexual content are adult, legal, don't have children
So if you feed Pornhub to your model, which most porn is actually well tagged, as is many ML data, you really have to go out of your way to get any children
Not saying is not possible, I am saying is easy to avoid. Not as an impossibility to separate both as you suggested above
If your training data have any absolutely innocent children pictures at all and also NSFW content with adults then model will be able to generate NSFW content with children. It's that simple.
Also even if you remove any children completely from training model will still be able to generate CSAM-like content because a lot of legit porn include jailbait models.
Actually there are studies suggesting that letting known child molesters access to child porn cartoons reduces recidivism.
Decent review of some of the evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por...
In reality, if it is the case that this will satisfy some people desires, then it may be the case that fewer children are abused this way, in which case it would be a bad idea to ban it.
There’s no genetic or development-while-in-womb explanation for why some people are specifically sexually into the idea of someone taking on the properties of a giant blueberry.
What is a fetish? It is the scar that guides the knife.
People are deeply uncomfortable with it, especially these days, but of course child-rearing families are the place were nature actually intends there to be sex, where there's almost guaranteed to be sexual activity. Probably the younger the child, the better the odds of sex. And, of course, this is not bad at all: that's how human society has worked for hundreds of thousands of years, how every animal society has worked for a billion or so years.
This probably "gives an advantage" to that particular sexual preference. You learn sexual behaviours, and the first ones you'll learn are heterosexual ones. There's nothing wrong with that ... or at least I don't think there is.
I suppose it must have been trained on something? Are you 100% sure it's cool to use the sum of all the images of all the children to generate child porn? Also there might be accidental resemblances to particular living children in the produced images, is that ok?
"Unless you have real-world means to make your opinions reality ... I don't care about your opinions"
Which goes both in the positive and the negative. Both "show it working or you can't do it" and the negative "prevent me from making it working or shut up". You have zero means to prevent such use of the technology ...
Add to that trillions of dollars in reasons not to outlaw the technology itself.
Attempts to enforce this will be worse, much worse, than the war on drugs. Plus, frankly, drugs do a lot more harm than just allowing this fully would do, so hopefully that will mean less attention going into this.
If it is a crime then it means any model which can generate CP under any circumstances will be illegal.
Don't count on the legal system to go "haha you got me touché" on this.
This has already been the case for quite some time. AI doesn't really add anything new to that part of the equation.
Apple has AI software the searches for photos given a text query (Siri feature I guess).
Searching for “baby” produces breast-centric photos of my naked wife posing in a sexy manner.
I mean I get the “breast/baby” connection - not rocket science. But I’d appeciate it if SFW queries didn’t product NSFW results.
No you don't, it just generated it and display it to the screen, it doesn't save it anywhere, you at no point posses it. Only solution is that everyone who posses a model capable of generating CP is seen as having CP.
"It's not my pot, officer! I was just holding it for someone!"
If you accidentally generate something inappropriate once with a poorly chosen prompt or an algorithm glitch, and it lives for a few seconds in your RAM before you close it, sure.
If a jury sees your generation history with a bunch of clearly "gimme that CSAM" queries, I wouldn't anticipate an acquittal.
In some jurisdiction even "virtual" child porn is still treated as criminal:
> A sufficient reason, on basis on which Canadian Parliament was warranted to prohibit not only production and distribution (which were not direct question in that case) but also purely private possession of child pornography - even, if it has nothing to do with use of actual children in its production - was, in the Canadian Supreme Court opinion "reasoned apprehension of harm" which may flow from exposing some people to such a materials.
Would GTA helps criminals in their rehabilitation?
I am not an expert on what help they need, but it would not be content that fuels their obsession
For most criminals we give them prison. For people with disorders we give the mental treatment
But possibly they can be treated with psychotherapy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fluidity
There's a few reasons that consuming CSAM can be immoral:
- encouraging further production by adding view count, ad revenue, social encouragement to creators.
- compounding victimization by improving circulation.
- apparent gateway effect, either in the individual consuming it or by allowing a culture of tolerance.
It's the same logic for snuff films.
AI created CSAM basically removes the first two issues and leaves the third. But I'd add that the third is somewhat up for debate unless there's some specific evidence from psychology (although my default assumption is that you're right on this). And I'd add that there's some argument that it reduces the demand for real CSAM.
Please provide some evidence for this.
I would expect those to be similarly illegal in the same jurisdiction.
> What would have been the rationale?
If I see a photo of ice cream, I tend to crave real ice cream.
Would you say this works for other things? Esp. violence? Should all depictions of violence be banned? Or any undesirable behavior? The list may be long.
But more importantly, what you're describing is advertising. An image of an ice cream isn't an ice cream.
Porn works differently. It doesn't advertise for real sex. Porn conflates the representation and the thing itself into one; it delivers gratification directly, something an image of an ice cream doesn't do.
If I find myself sexually aroused by violence.
> But more importantly, what you're describing is advertising.
Sure. We restrict or prohibit advertisements of certain things. Including child sexual abuse on that list is probably OK.
> Porn works differently. It doesn't advertise for real sex.
I'm not sure I agree. There are, for example, indications consumers of porn are more likely to request / engage in certain sex acts common in porn, like facials, anal sex, choking, etc. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32081698/
The full paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract at least doesn't appear to make any conclusion w.r.t. causality. It's just as likely (if not more so) that people who are more likely to request / engage in certain sex acts will tend to prefer porn featuring them.