Quebec man who created AI-generated child pornography sentenced to prison | Hacker News Reader

Quebec man who created AI-generated child pornography sentenced to prison

cbc.ca

22 pointsCharlesW24 comments

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If you read the article, the headline is a confused mess.

He was putting other kid's faces on existing child porn using common face swap software, and distributed the modified stuff as if it was real, including details of the kids who the faces come from.

So, hes a pedophile who engaged in harming children within the definition of the law, not some guy who produced whole-cloth fictional victimless works using some sort of GPT model (ie, things we actually call AI; we do not call face swapping software AI).

Effectively "revenge porn"/deep fakes of actual children. That's gross and humiliating because there's a real victim to point to. There are monsters in the world, no doubt.

Although, I'm apprehensive at the thought for the potential of this sort of underground taboo material to include generative AI creating fully synthetic biographies, videos, social media trails, chat bots, video conferences and such that appear real enough to pass Turing tests. In realpolitik terms, it may be a relief in disguise if it meant less targeting of real human beings.

I'm also wondering if the 4chan types, terrorists, and violent sociopaths will use generative technologies to simulate scenes and events they wish to transpire. If so, then where does one draw the line between that and say shoot 'em up games? Do their so-called fictional plans and expressions become crimes?

(Sigh. It's confusing, uneasy, and brain-breaking.)

> He also pleaded guilty to possessing hundreds of thousands of computer files of child pornography, for which he was sentenced an additional four and a half years.

Seems like hundreds of thousands of child porn images should be more than 4.5 years in prison. Is child porn not a serious offense in Canada?

Also, he used deepfake so the videos were childporn before he replaced the faces. So I think these are AI-augmented rather than AI-generated. If he has made whole cloth videos that never involved children I wonder what his sentence would be.

4.5 years is a really long time. Ridiculous US sentencing habits might be affecting your calibration for how seriously this offense is being taken.

4.5 years for child abuse feels like a very short period of time. Multiply that by the volume and it feels laughable. Child pornography is not a victimless crime. These children were abused and the people who possess this material are party to it. How is 4.5 years "serious," considering the extent of the crime?

Again, 4.5 years is a long time. Nothing else to it. I tried doing research on average sentence lengths in Canada to see how serious this sentence is relatively speaking and couldn't find much easily so I gave up. You could try yourself and see what you find.

Do inmates in Canada regularly serve their full sentence? If 4.5 turns into 3, are we still going to say that is long time?

I don't have to research sentencing to feel that 4.5 years is out of line with the amount of victimization being discussed. What would you think was justified for someone who abused children for profit? Someone who forced kids to do lewd things, so they could sell photos of it? Is possessing the material different? Or do think causing lifelong harm to children, in general, is only worth a handful of years to the abuser? Is 1/25 of a life really the just outcome for an entire life in therapy? A lifetime of trust issues? What if one of those kids committed suicide because they couldn't cope? So 4.5 years, huh?

The US has plenty of examples of light sentencing. Rapists who get "time served" is common. Victim blaming is part of what we do. Serious crimes deserve serious punishment or the ROI on crime becomes worth it.

"Is possessing the material different?"

I mean...yes? of course it is?

It's like pretending to watch a football match on tv to be materially the same as being in the field.

There is of course the question of whether he shared it or not, or if it was just for personal use, but still, as horrible that subject might be, I'm more than a bit mystified at the idea of the act vs. watching the video of the act considered as being even remotely in the same ballpark.

That is a false equivalence, unless you're saying that professional athletes are there under duress and that they are not choosing any long term side effects.

We're talking about paying for violence and abuse. By consuming the material, you are supporting the activity in a material way, thus creating an incentive for it to continue.

I don't know, do you feel like a party to child exploitation when you buy an iPhone and clothes? What about people living and working in horrific conditions to support your lifestyle? Do you feel culpable for that? Without people like you, that human suffering wouldn't exist, or at least there would be less of it, right? What would be an appropriate prison sentence for your participation in those things, a couple of months?

Clearly benefiting from horrific crimes is not the same as perpetrating them.

I don’t think the suffering in the creation of an iPhone is in any way comparable to the suffering of sexually abusing children and filming it. And doing that thousands of times.

True enough.

Now, in this specific case is there evidence that this person abused children first hand and|or filmed themselves doing so?

Apparently the court saw no such evidence if they merely charged and found on filesharing.

They're comparable in the same way that 1 year and 50 years are comparable.

Bit of a copout, tbh. I'm gonna assume you don't have a good response for how you somehow aren't culpable for your part in these crimes.

My position is that the crime of economic exploitation and whatnot involved with creating iPhones is nothing like that of child porn.

So it’s like comparing a minute to a year. They’re both units of time.

Also, I’ve bought maybe 10 iPhones in my life. This person has tens of thousands of photos.

It’s not about you and me being culpable for our part in using technology made in China, we obviously are. It’s about that not being relevant to someone with mounds of child porn.

You're making some pretty fun suppositions about my lifestyle choices. I do feel somewhat culpable for any acts of consumerism that I participate in, that harm others. I actively try and do the least harm. It's inescapable without living in a cave but I do what I can. I'm doing so, I spend my money in ways that encourage ethical sourcing and treatment of workers. I pay more for this because I think people deserve to be treated like people. So yes, there is some blame that we can all share in but without people like me, people who are willing to spend more to support ethical practices, there'd be more of it. I can only assume that you're basing your arguments on your own lifestyle and maybe you should feel some blame but that's up to you.

Now let's be honest, these things are not the same. By buying your apple devices and whatever clothing brands you opt into, are you doing it for the explicit purpose of harm? If so, you're a monster and you should probably be incarcerated. That's what child pornography is: explicitly supporting abuse of children. There's no ethical way to source child pornography. It's all criminal and consuming criminal material supports criminal activity. This is similar to how you and the dealer would be charged for things like dealing drugs (I'm not passing judgement, just statement of fact) or illegal weapons or trafficking in people. There's innocence to be had by any party and they're maybe equally guilty.

Honestly, it sounds like the same bogus logic that some copyright holder companies uses to charge people with an absurd fee / prison sentence, by just multiplying big numbers unrelated to the actual harm done.

4.5 years is not a light sentence in any way.

The crime associated with the 4.5 year sentence is not child abuse.

The crime is sharing prohibited files.

4.5 years in a prison - a half decade - is an incredibly harsh penalty for filesharing.

And then there is the post incarceration collateral conditions (fail all background checks, hard banned from working in a large number of industries with vulnerable peoples, housing restrictions with likely being on a sex offenders registry, social media vigilantes to name just a few).

This individual is unlikely to lead anything approaching a normal life ever again.

They will suffer a massive economic penalty due to 5 years lost wages and loss of 80%+ employment opportunities.

They will suffer material psychological harm from being in a prison for 4.5 years, especially as an identified target for other inmates.

They, by virtue of their actions and their sentence duration, will lose virtually all of their social connections.

This sentence, especially when combined with the other they will be receiving, is effectively a punishment for life.

The result is this individual is unlikely to ever be a productive member of society ever again and is much more likely to reoffend.

Even if they don't they will almost assuredly be a ward of the state due to the impact of the above.

Mandatory minimums, long prison terms in sentencing guidelines and post incarceration collateral conditions make the underlying problem a lot worse not better.

There are 10k's-100k's of aging black and brown men in US prison for de facto life for having a joint or being accused of some random crime without having a proper defense. The US has the highest incarceration rate on the planet per capita except for the Seychelles, and this includes all of the unofficial carceral populations of regimes like China, Russia, and DPRK. Some countries consider ~21 years to be "life" because a person may recalibrate, transform, and be rehabilitated in that time frame. America is a punitive, brutal, soulless regime. It has mass shootings because its socio-economic order, fulfillment, and values are third-world, at best.

Ok, so even with the slightly click-baity title, looks like the important part is this

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

Media in question copy-pasted real kids faces into sex videos, which seems to be illegal as read.

This ruling probably doesn't cover 100% fully artificially generated stuff. Still wondering when that will hit the courts.

Also the guy had plenty of the real stuff apparently.

This ruling probably doesn't cover 100% fully artificially generated stuff.

Not this ruling but others do. In 2008 an Australian man was convicted of possessing child pornography for having sexually explicit depictions of characters from The Simpsons; Canada and the UK have seen a few convictions involving erotica based on (entirely fictional) anime characters.

As other have said, this is more like AI augmented, not generated. So that is one factor against the guy.

Also, the way current models work is that they need to be trained on real data. It is really questionable if someone can make this kind of stuff with, say Stable Diffusion, entirely without any offensive material as training.

If they can actually do it and make these things without using any abusive material, then I think it is fair game. Nobody was harmed, nobody should care. What a person does in their private is none of anyone business if it doesn't affect anyone else.

Even if it was fully AI generated if the model was trained on proscribed materials the distribution of the model itself and what it generates can be also soldiered illegal.

SD is known to easily be able to generate this type of thing in the 1.5 model without being trained on explicit images of children. I imagine we will see a court case in the next few years.

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