AI-generated child sex imagery has every US Attorney General calling for action | Hacker News Reader

AI-generated child sex imagery has every US Attorney General calling for action

arstechnica.com

21 pointsCharlesW27 comments

I'm probably the outlier in this regard, but I'd rather pedophiles and child molesters use AI rather than go out and endanger real kids. (Or endanger by proxy.)

It's like countries like the Australia, Canada or the UK banning Japanese manga artwork to "protect the children." It's got precisely dick to do with protecting kids, it's just about thought policing.*

The reason CSAM/CSEM is illegal is because a child had to be abused/exploited in order to create it, not because it's disgusting or immoral.

*"There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." -Ayn Rand

I actually agree with that. To me it looks like a "crime" without victims.

Yeah it is disgusting, but who is suffering or being molested or abused here?

I agree there's no victims. Just like a drunk driver who drives from point A to point B without killing anyone or causing any damage. There's laws in place to prevent that behavior though. If a cop pulls you over for a broken tail light, you bet he's going to arrest you if you're under the influence -- to prevent bad outcomes. There's an attempt to squash these behaviors through punishment with jail time, reputation, and financial costs. Maybe some rehabilitation with AA. I think the same should be placed on this too. It's a slippery slope as a society if we let this slide.

Now if you were drunk while playing Need for Speed, that wouldn’t be a problem because there is no “real” humans being endangered by your actions.

> Just like a drunk driver who drives from point A to point B without killing anyone or causing any damage

I don't think this is a good analogy. There's strong evidence that drink driving increases the risk of accidents, which is why it's illegal. Child porn is illegal because children are harmed to make it. It's _possible_ that the existence of child porn increases the chance of a pedophile acting on their urges, but if there is I don't know of any studies. An analogous (and more ethical) study might be whether or not people have more sex in places where pornography is easily accessible, but I have my doubts. It's well documented that young people are having less sex in general than previous generations and porn is more accessible than it's ever been, so if anything it appears the correlation might go the other way.

EDIT: I think the other far more compelling argument is that allowing any child sex images to exist at all normalizes it, and could make people consider it less harmful. Could it increase the rates in which people who are otherwise not pedophiles abuse children? I don't know the answer but it seems like a question worth asking.

Obviously if it's using actual CSAM then the image in question should be illegal, but that sounds like something that would already be covered under existing laws anyway.

Fundamentally, I don't see a way to frame the A.I. generated child porn problem in a way that doesn't apply to a lot of other legal things. Maybe you could say it inspires people to go and do X, Y, and Z to children, but then you opened up the "crime is transitive" gates, and you now have to outlaw a wildly long list of things normal people consider innocuous simply because someone sick likes them the wrong way.

> Maybe you could say it inspires people to go and do X, Y, and Z to children, but then you opened up the "crime is transitive" gates

Actually, on that line of thought, incest porn is popular in Japan (not the step-mom/step-sister stuff America does - which, let's face it, isn't incest), yet I don't see any massive increase in people having sex with their mothers or what-have-you.

>I don't see any massive increase in people having sex with their mothers or what-have-you.

I'm afraid to ask how you're measuring this.

Purely speculation for the most part.

The only reason the say step-mom instead of mom is due to policies on the porn site itself

Is this actually true though? Speculation, but I doubt "mom" would have the same appeal as "step-mom" for the same reasons that the former isn't allowed and the latter is.

So from some choice examples I've seen on the fediverse, I think It is less a replacement for abusive material as a stand-in in public venues for the more illegal stuff they trade in private. You will find examples (please don't go looking, mind you) on unmoderated servers of users sharing AI generated CSAM who proudly declare themselves as "pro-c" or pro-contact with minors.

Which is to say, it might be a reasonable argument if it was indeed being used by people coping with a disorder in a less harmful way, but it appears to be more often a way to share their interest in abusing children.

The harm of child porn isn't just the children that are hurt by its production but also that it fuels the urges of the people who consume it. You don't cure people of any sexual compulsion by indulging it.

>The reason CSAM/CSEM is illegal is because a child had to be abused/exploited in order to create it, not because it's disgusting or immoral.

This is a very Liberal line of thought and it's this exact child porn example that makes me unable to consider myself a full Liberal.

Whoever sold you on the "One Twue Liberal Definition" took your money and ran away laughing:

    Liberalism is more than one thing.

    On any close examination, it seems to fracture into a range of related but sometimes competing visions.

    In this entry we focus on debates within the liberal tradition.

    (1) We contrast three interpretations of liberalism’s core commitment to liberty.

    (2) We contrast ‘old’ and ‘new’ liberalism.

    (3) We ask whether liberalism is a ‘comprehensive’ or a ‘political’ doctrine.

    (4) We close with questions about the ‘reach’ of liberalism

    - does it apply to all humankind?Must all political communities be liberal?

    - Could a liberal coherently answer this question by saying No?

    - Could a liberal coherently answer this question by saying Yes?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/

> You don't cure people of any sexual compulsion by indulging it.

If keeping people away from porn makes them less sexual I've seen no evidence of it either.

I don't think pedophilia is "curable" (other than possibly treatments that just kill libido entirely), all you can do is give people the tools to not act on it. Having a means of release that doesn't harm anyone could be such a tool.

By that same logic the consumption of porn would be expected to lead to increase in real life sex but I think that it has had the opposite effect, at least judging by the quite dramatic decrease of young males having sex nowadays compared to 90's or early 00's.

The idea of someone being prosecuted for AI generated CSAM just seems very absurd to me. The justification of "it can potentially fuel your urges to rape minors" doesn't feel very convincing.

That is like saying video games cause mass shootings or rock music makes people want to commit crimes.

I don't know how you cure a pedophile, you probably can't but providing an escape for them that doesn't harm anyone else seems like a good solution.

> This is a very Liberal line of thought

IANAL, but I believe that is the actual basis of CSAM laws. In that case, it's not political statement, it's a statement of legal record.

You have to remember that the law is required to be self-consistent. So if you allow a line of reasoning to be the basis of a law, you have to also allow it to be the basis of any other law. A law based on "making this thing harms children in the process" is consistent with precedent. A law based on "this will make people want to do bad things" is not.

One might reasonably assume the creators of this stuf are training their models on real CSAM, and thus are guilty of many crimes in addition to the production. Everyone else training models to produce imagery uses real data, so why would AI generated CSAM be any different in this regard?

An AI that puts child faces on young adult bodies would still likely be considered AICSAM, and wouldn't need to be trained on any real CSAM

I have one serious issue that I haven't seen mentioned before.

Wouldn't this open up a giant legal loophole for people to claim that ther CSAM is "just Ai generated"?

Yes, mandatory watermarking could be considered a solution ...but it still introduces a giant layer of doubt.

The feds would probably be able to use metadata and facial recognition comparison against existing CSAM databases to verify many such cases. And investigators would likely use hints such as the image resolution or comparison to other images on the drive to verify if a collection is a photoshoot or a crafted prompt for example.

For all of those confused why fake images would ever be a crime, the legal argument is spelled out in the article:

> They fear that the availability of even unrealistic AI-generated CSAM will "support the growth of the child exploitation market by normalizing child abuse and stoking the appetites of those who seek to sexualize children."

This is something which is plausible. Whether the effect exists or not, and how large it is is not something we're going to learn by arguing about it on the Internet.

I find it hypocritical and disappointing that the argument must go to the extreme end where lawmakers are forced to "think of the children" (specifically the dignity of those captured in media) before they will lift a finger to stop AI.

For the sake of the rhetorical point, they specifically call out deep-fake imagery here.

Does that imply that there is no moral issue with "novel" imagery? Not all the AI porn is deep-faked. We see people right now churning out batches of hundreds of (legal) images of not-quite-photoreal, generic, smooth-faced humans in sexual positions, too. Is that genericized AI pornography OK? What about if it depicted a child? In that scenario the link to the children originally affected is comparable to the link between finished AI art and an artist whose work was used to train the AI.

I feel like there is some kind of link to be drawn between these two things, and feel like focusing on one and not the other is inconsistent.

I of course think that this content is awful and should rightly be banned, I am just disappointed when you see lawmakers excitedly spring to action here when a hell of a lot of people are being negatively impacted by AI right now.

If AI generated images/videos are indistinguishable from real ones how can one make money off the real child porn? Urgent action needed!

So how is this different from photoshop?

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