Illegal trade in AI child sex abuse images exposed | Hacker News Reader

Illegal trade in AI child sex abuse images exposed

bbc.co.uk

This is an attempted moral panic that while obviously disgusting should be an extremely low priority in a resource constrained law enforcement system. Unfortunately it gets play because it's a boogeyman that people who want to control and monitor online activity generally can make use of. Every cent that goes to "combatting" this is one that doesn't go to solving actual violent crime against kids, and in any event the whole enterprise is as futile as confiscating people's colored pencils.

Set up a honeypot and refer people for investigation, fine. But let's not waste any additional resources or destroy additional freedoms for what is essentially a made up issue.

I definitely don’t support child pornography, but the quote from the article:

> He warned that a paedophile could, "move along that scale of offending from thought, to synthetic, to actually the abuse of a live child".

Sounds a lot like the argument that violent video games are responsible for real life shootings.

is there any evidence for or against this? re: CP, not video games.

I'd search the literature myself, but searching anything about it is too sketchy for me.

> is there any evidence for or against this? re: CP, not video games.

I don't think you're going to find much. From what I hear, admitting things like that to therapists or anybody else with an interest in collecting such data either invokes mandatory reporting obligations or puts you on some sort of list.

I was assuming there'd be a study of convicted pedophiles and recidivism rates or something. Like, the scientists would study the people who are already on some list.

Generally it’s observed that people who possess CP are pedophiles at a greater rate than the gen pop, so presumably, A can lead to B.

That’s the entire argument. Child abuse has been going down globally at around the same time of the rise of CSAM so this argument isn’t only very likely wrong the truth extremely plausibly lies in the opposite direction, since a very obvious explanation for the prior phenomenon is simply B likes A more than most people. Frankly pornography turns people into docile chronic mastrubrators more than it turns them into rapacious monsters, the rise of porn in general has correlated to a decline in how much sex the average person has, and also a decline in sexual abuse generally. There’s a lot of problems with porn but this just isn’t one of them.

This is one of the things where the facts don’t matter though.

Caveat: I’m talking in general terms here, I’m sure porn is a trigger for some abuser out there.

IMO they should have instead focused on how the images were generated in the first place. Ie what illegal content was used to build the base model?

At some point someone will realize that - particularly in UK - the taboo, histeria and irrationally around CP is net negative for actually doing good.

This is what happen when societies treat something as taboo. People who seek help can't have it: https://medium.com/matter/youre-16-youre-a-pedophile-you-don...

You forgot to switch accounts before answering yourself. Yikes especially on that topic.

Is this realistic enough yet that it could deprecate careers held by the likes of Ghislaine Maxwell? Could intelligence agencies now target someone and select a child in their proximity or family circle, click a button and blackmail/destroy that person? What details would AI always get wrong?

Of course it’s good enough. Have you seen the stuff Midjourney can generate?

It's realistic in the sense they look human but could it be realistic in enough detail that if a child was sitting at the desk of an investigator and they were watching the evidence, would they be convinced it is the child sitting at their desk and the perp they just locked up?

I tried reading this a few times but it doesn’t make sense.

You are a detective. There is a purported victim in front of you IRL. Can you verify said victim is the person in the picture? The decision you make may tear apart a family and destroy a persons life.

Are you trying to say an AI could generate a likeness of a real child? I’m sure it’s possible to get close especially since it generates images of celebrities very well.

You could do that with Photoshop already.

Blackmail as an intelligence recruitment technique, especially with something so fake, is really very limited in it's utility.

Oh these are just pictures and not also videos? I guess that is indeed old hat. Maybe this one at least gets birth marks right by learning from Facebook and Instagram swimming photos.

With the resources of a nation state, why not just put real child porn on a device or two and call the local authorities?

I think using the real people involved has a greater effect in destroying them and any group they are associated with. Imagine for example someone made realistic content of a politician and their grand-children and that content is "leaked", regardless of legal outcome they would be immediately and permanently destroyed. Everyone would distance themselves from them and anyone they worked with.

But you could be right. I could be over-thinking this.

How does a civilisation get to this stage. How can we glimpse creation of alien intelligence and go ... you what this would be good for.

I guess I should have allocated more of my dice rolls on cynicism.

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