Cops bogged down by flood of fake AI child sex images, report says

As with all interventions, it is a claim that can only be tested by comparing abuse rates in two otherwise very similar jurisdictions, where the only difference is the availability of such material. To think otherwise is to presume that all members of the target group are identical, which is implausible.

Even attempting to run such a pure observational study of such a situation would be denounced, even if the researchers had no power to alter the laws.

If you did somehow manage to run such a study, I expect you'd find three things: (1) plenty of examples of people who were inspired to act due to the images they saw, (2) plenty of examples of people who used the images as a way out, (3) that there are way more abusers and victims than most people realise.

What you're saying is the market-share of the AI version that does not involve additional exploitation of minors in its creation is going up over time. The evidence is increasing that the theory is right.

If the AI version gets good enough, the supply of a substitute will real CP will go up, the price of real CP will go down, meaning there is less incentive to exploit real children.

In the 80s & 90s, many people feared that violence in video games, movies & music would desensitise young people to violence and lead to an increase in crime.

But the exact opposite happened. The generation who murdered and robbed their way through the streets of San Andreas committed much less IRL crime than their parents generation.

Who are you seeing as being desensitized in this scenario? People searching the net for CP are already desensitized.

> It might be why pedophilia seems to be more and more common post internet.

I suspect (admittedly without evidence) that it's not more common—it's just more socially unacceptable, and also easier to get caught.

The age of consent in the UK was 12 between 1275 and 1875, so I suspect "seems" doesn't map to "is".

And I vaguely remember an 80s or 90s survey which said something like 1 in 6 American women were victimised as minors.

I think most killers aren't serial killers though.

> It’s very obviously not going to be a meaningful legal distinction in terms of possession nor should it be when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

I've thought about it for 5 seconds, and it's not obvious to me.

The whole possession of images is a crime is already a stretch, justified by the very real observation that the market for these images necessarily fuels abuse of real children.

But AI images cut that link.

I'm in complete agreement that the content is odious. But there's plenty of stuff that's odious and legal.

Under current US law, it is a very meaningful distinction. Possesing pictures of real child abuse. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) makes this distinction very clear.

> The argument that eliminating the market for pornography produced using real children necessitates a prohibition on virtual images as well is somewhat implausible because few pornographers would risk prosecution for abusing real children if fictional, computerized images would suffice. Moreover, even if the market deterrence theory were persuasive, the argument cannot justify the CPPA because, here, there is no underlying crime at all. Finally, the First Amendment is turned upside down by the argument that, because it is difficult to distinguish between images made using real children and those produced by computer imaging, both kinds of images must be prohibited.

With the current composition of the court, I'm not convinced this precedent will hold up if a case reaches them. But until that happens, the law seems quite clear.

Not to mention all the people who already looked at the images that hopefully were filtered from the data set before training.

And none of these people likely received mental health care as compensation for that work.

Is it? I know in the early AI image days there were issues with number of fingers or other weird things, but today there are plenty of images that I struggle to tell apart

Thanks for this! If wikipedia is correct, it seems that this is clearly answered.

> The PROTECT Act also enacted 18 U.S.C. § 1466A into U.S. obscenity law:[122]

> Section 1466A of Title 18, United States Code, makes it illegal for any person to knowingly produce, distribute, receive, or possess with intent to transfer or distribute visual representations, such as drawings, cartoons, or paintings that appear to depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and are deemed obscene.

> Thus, virtual and drawn pornographic depictions of minors may still be found illegal under U.S. federal obscenity law. The obscenity law further states in section C "It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist."

The difficult part of this is the phrase, "...that appear to depict minors..."

Hm, I'm thinking, if there's a way to convert a real image of a person into a manga version (there's ton of them on the internet) the reverse should be true. So you would just have to train it with manga (which is legal in Japan, for example), and then convert it to real. No real people dataset needed.

Please, don't think I'm trying to justify. This thing is just plain nasty.

But these images do bring us some new (terrible) questions to ponder. Especially if the police can't differentiate between what's real and what's not.

They are already using child protection as an argument to implement totalitarian measures.

The most recent example that come to mind is the European Union Chat Control, which were meant to break all e2e encryption, enforcing on-device data scanning and fingerprinting to function.

I have luckily never encountered any of this stuff, real or fake, so I may be hopelessly naive about what's depicted, but... I can ask for a picture of naked Donald Trump wallowing in mud and such a picture will be constructed even though there are no photos of Donald Trump wallowing in mud (naked or otherwise). So I don't think the training set necessarily contains illegal images.

Not necessarily.

If the training data contained sexual images of consenting adults and legal images of children, many intelligent models could interpolate between the two.

Not necessarily: the algorithms are perfectly capable to extrapolate, which makes the argument that the synthetic images "harm children" (as the article repeatedly tells) hard to defend.

To be clear, I find child sexual abuse appalling, but maybe synthetic images would keep some people "satisfied" and leave the real children alone?

Pictures of naked kids aren’t necessarily illegal, or we’d be sending nearly every parent to prison (to take one example).

Besides, if it worked like that, training on anything under copyright would have a similar effect. These models have a bigger problem if they get “tainted” by a tainted training source. (Fingers crossed they do! But I doubt it)

For truly realistic CSAM, there would probably need to be some quasi-illegal images in the training set.

But "CSAM" also includes "character looks under 18" even if they look fully developed, which an AI model could do without training on actual CSAM.

Whether that makes the model illegal is a separate question. Is a LLM illegal if a clever prompt can get it to output a copyrighted poem? Is a human illegal if they can draw "CSAM"?

The images would desensitise them, and it would normalize them. But there is a huge step between having a fantasy and taking it to reality. There are people who fantasize about being raped, but would hate for it to become reality.

Ironically in trying to transcend a conflict you never needed to transcend because you're not even a part of, you just sound like you picked a side.

"Modern progressive discourse" is an US culture export. Also is using "racism" as a substitute for "bad".

And what would be a pedo by US standards might be legal and fine in other countries (looking at Japan lolicon situation).

Why would you think Mayans are any more violent than other contemporary or later civilizations?

She is an adult. Yes adults get trafficked. Especially good looking ones falling into health and economic challenge. She has a daughter. Children are hurt when adults are trafficked- no one gets this. The trafficked party then used to extort me by someone actually pretending to be “cops” with cross platform analytics and data broker access.

Craziest thing you ever could have imagined and only an extremely rich tech narcissist can come up with what they did to a woman already being trafficked. They did so to secondarily traumatize me.

I mean sure... but that's because there's an actual person photographed there. What happens when you get into "does (s)he look 17 or 18 in this photo?" and no way to prove anything, since the person does not exist?

I mean sure... but that's because there's an actual person photographed there. What happens when you get into "does (s)he look 17 or 18 in this photo?" and no way to prove anything, since the person does not exist?