Quebec man sentenced to prison for creating AI-generated child pornography | Hacker News Reader

Quebec man sentenced to prison for creating AI-generated child pornography

montreal.ctvnews.ca

11 pointsgiuliomagnifico14 comments

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He also had large quantities of non-AI generated abuse material, and the AI version was deep fakes, ie using real source material and superimposing faces on it. The point being, this isn't a novel case of someone charged for making something synthetic, the AI angle is a small component.

Were the deepfakes kids' faces on adults or adult faces on kids?

The very first sentence of the article answers that question I would hope.

The article seems to indicate that he was putting (real) childrens’ faces on sexual imagery that didn’t involve them. From context it would seem to indicate that the underlying imagery wasn’t actual CSAM, otherwise it wouldn’t have been called “synthetic” I think. But the article is never very specific on this point.

It’s not clear what would have happened if the faces were the output of a generative AI model, and didn’t actually involve real children. That seems like it's coming soon. Presumably the law is going to treat all of that the same as actual CSAM, but people will need to think hard about the reasoning for it. All of the quotes in this article stress the possibility of harm and risk to (real) minors whose faces were duplicated. Which seems like a very reasonable set of concerns!

OK thank you.

>Presumably the law is going to treat all of that the same as actual CSAM, but people will need to think hard about the reasoning for it.

The US already signed a law in 2021 defining CSAM to include photorealistic AI generated material, even if there is no original child involved (such as deepfakes).

Yes we have that law. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. What I do know is that a lot of the discourse around this area (and specifically new laws on content scanning for CSAM) hinges around the idea that (1) production of CSAM harms children, which is something that is obviously true. But also (2) that proliferation of old or fully-synthetic CSAM causes “addiction” that might lead to further real-world harm to children. The second point is concerning to me because it seems to be more an article of faith than something based in actual science.

It feels to me that there is a (very natural!) tendency to want all of this stuff to disappear, because it’s disgusting. But that this results in a certain degree of motivated reasoning where people feel that they must justify new (invasive) legislation by tightly binding it to the welfare of real children. I worry that these justifications might ultimately do a lot of damage, causing us to aggressively treat symptoms rather than doing much to heal the underlying disease.

> While Larouche's lawyers argued for a lighter sentence, because children were not assaulted when he produced the videos, the judge wrote that the children whose bodies appeared in the videos had their sexual integrity violated again.

> Many images of child pornography have a digital fingerprint, allowing police to identify them, the judge wrote. By creating the synthetic images, Larouche made it more difficult for police to stop the spread of the illicit material.

I'm not sure where others got the idea that the underlying video wasn't child abuse material

Yes, it seems Canada takes a blanket ban approach:

> Canadian law bans any visual representation of someone depicted as being under the age of 18 engaged in explicit sexual activity.

So you could draw an imaginary person in crayon on construction paper as a child and it'd be illegal.

(I was going to write 'of yourself' but it turns out that would actually be permitted: '"What about sexting?" In Canada the law creates a “private use” exception to child pornography. This means that a person can possess sexually explicit depictions of him or herself that may otherwise qualify as child pornography. A person is also permitted to distribute the depictions to any person who is in the depictions as long as the depictions were made with the consent of everyone shown in them and the activity depicted is legal and does not show exploitation.' https://lakinafolabilaw.com/possession-of-child-pornography-... This immediately starts making me think about deepfake and loopholes - could you license deepfake-CP permission from an adult to make it for your own personal use, because that would then have be 'made with the consent of everyone shown in them'? Or, since you can distribute it yourself, does that mean you can sell deepfake-CP of yourself to anyone as long as you use deepfakes to put them into the generated image as well? What a strange twist in the porn industry that would be! I doubt people writing these sexting exceptions gave this any thought...)

Yeah it’s clearly headline BS - “pedo also watched fictional child abuse” is less attention grabbing :-/

So clearly this raises questions of why child porn is banned in the first place. I have always assumed that it is to protect the children directly involved in its production, which would make sense.

However, recently I was listening to some interrogation footage commentary YouTube channel and one of the episodes featured the interrogation of a child abductor/rapist. The officer in the footage mentioned that a common pattern in such cases is that someone starts watching child porn and then wants to “try it out for real”, with the idea being that watching the child porn basically forms connections in their brain which then motivates the behavior.

I had never considered this before, but the notion that people could be born attracted to children doesn’t really make any sense. Is it actually environmental like this? Wonder why it isn’t talked about more. Does anyone know anything about this and whether it is legit?

This is likely true for serial killers as well. Who start watching horror films and reading books about murder. However ordinary people never end up doing the crime.

Same for violent fantasies too. Normal people don't do end up doing it.

We do not prosecute people who have collections of hundreds of horror films or fiction books depicting crime, just in case they might do it for real. That's unacceptable to do in a free society.

It seems that, maybe because of some reason to do with evolutionary psychology, we find sex more "harmful" than death even. When in reality is obviously causes far less harm. Probably some primitive, animal instinct at work there?

In an article it says: " Gagnon wrote that the creation of the new images of sexual abuse encourages the market for child pornography, which craves novelty, and puts children at risk by "fuelling fantasies that incite sexual offences against children." "

Well it looks like they are trying to police peoples' thoughts there. Straight out of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. And civil disobedience should be the correct response, everyone should make sure they have as many abhorrent fantasies as possible.

The good news is that purely AI-driven generation of such images can be done offline, and does not involve real children in any way. The morality police here in the West are going to have a really hard time putting a stop to that. I wonder what hysteria they will try to whip up to justify their continued witch hunting of people looking at images in their own homes.

Yes, the aforementioned morality police, they're like something out of a Muslim country. Doing things that ISIS or the Taliban would do. But it's happening here in the Western world, with supposedly free societies.

At a basic level murder fantasies and sexual fantasies do seem quite different though. Most people never murder at all, it isn’t just about who they murder, so if it is a case of crossed wires it seems like a much bigger lift for murder. Murder is a much more contextualized instinct than sex as well, in nature it only happens in specific scenarios (raiding neighboring tribe, neighboring tribe is raiding us, tribe member is dangerously insane, etc). Finally, it seems that some people could be genetically predisposed to be more susceptible to such wire crossing, and so the induced behavior could be seen as something akin to a medicine side effect which only affects a small percent of the population. At some percent the medicine does not get approved.

No children were involved. Society has forgotten why we were ever opposed to child porn.

Two groups of children were involved, the ones abused in the underlying videos and the ones whose faces were used in the deepfakes.

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