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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a very interesting question that is being systematically sidestepped in these debates.

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.

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>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.

Does watching gay porn make you gay too?

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.

The idea is that viewing AI-generated CSAM by someone who is already a pedophile will increase the probability that they'll decide to go out and abuse a child. Or, it'll foster a cultural acceptance of child abuse, leading people to be more confident to go out and do it. There's no actual data that demonstrates this, given it's hard to study, but it's not implausible.

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 can speculate all we want. The fact is: its impossible to apply any real restrictionsn ML model. Just like any DRM this one gonna be easy to bypass and will only degrade experience of legit users and gonna slow down technology advancement.

We dont require image editors to have CSAM filters and requiring filter for ML model is madness.

You're talking about filters inside the ML model, but I think the more interesting question is morality and the law.

"The law" is kind of irrelevant unless it's enforced, so it really boils down to morality.

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?

If there is no technical means to enforce the law, there is no law. At least when it comes to the war on drugs ... at least there's some physical thing being traded along. These models would generate such imagery and then immediately destroy it.

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 ...

I am personally on conservative side here so I'm not questioning morality and the law we have now. I'm very much against of spreading of such material regardless of how it was created. If someome decide to publicly share something like that there should be consequences.

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.

> The fact is: its impossible to apply any real restrictions ML model

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

This is not how ML works. You don't need real child abuse material in your training set to make a model capable of creating CSAM. All you need is depictions of any children and any sexual content.

That is in line with what I said

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

Nope. You missed the point. I said the opposite.

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.

> There's no actual data that demonstrates this, given it's hard to study, but it's not implausible.

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...

Is this backed empirically? The argument you made is almost identical to the ones used for "grand theft auto is making kids violent!".

I think that does not apply. That would be if criminals in prison were given GTA would they have better or worse chance of rehabilitation?

There's no reason to make such material lawful unless the converse is proved by empirical evidence. That is, can it be proved that people who view AI-based material are less likely to act on a sexual interest in real children? Unless that's proven, there's no other reason to make such material lawful. You're welcome to provide one.

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.

We live in a society where things are allowed by default and banned if they cause harm, not a society where things are banned by default and allowed if they are proven to not cause harm.

Sadly, these days one can only hope that we do.

I doubt anyone on HN would argue for making AI generated CSAM lawful. At the same time attempts to add unenforceable limitations into ML technology like ClosedAI trying to do is worse than useless.

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.

Legality of fictional child pornography is surprisingly contentious, with positions ranging from "protected as artwork under freedom expression", "illegal if provenance involves child abuse within jurisdiction", to "illegal but non-realistic depictions don't count", to "depiction of children are illegal, regardless of provenance", to "depictions of adults who could be mistaken for children is also illegal"—just among first-world countries. "AI-generated CSAM" ranges from obviously unlawful to an oxymoron depending on the standard applied!

You are making a bunch of assumptions, that, if true, are a strong argument for banning it.

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.

This sounds a lot like the rather-thoroughly-debunked "violent video games make people violent" argument.

I don’t think the idea that all sexual preferences are innate, really holds much water.

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.

One particular sexual preference has children as a result ... and of course we all start as children. The first sexual preference, the first sexual relation anyone is confronted with in their life is heterosexual, simply because that's how childbirth works.

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.

> But AI-generated child porn, however nauseating it might sound, doesn't hurt anybody.

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?

I think most people actually doing something with this technology will be making the maker argument:

"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.

there's a real concern that "erotic plasticity" (esp if you combine this with a recommendation algo) can push people towards weird ass shit. literally the same thing happens on youtube, tiktok etc. with regular videos so why would this be an exception?

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