EU proposes criminalizing AI-generated child sexual abuse and deepfakes | Hacker News Reader

EU proposes criminalizing AI-generated child sexual abuse and deepfakes

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19 pointsfairytalemtg13 comments

Although I think this is fraught and probably will create an entire industry of suit and countersuit I am unsure any jurisdiction has much choice here.

I'm really uncomfortable with both thought crime and implied free speech issues in this and the mechanistic aspects of how an llm and gpt system works makes me wonder who else but the hosting company can be legally at risk here.

I think it would be a mistake to say this is victimless crime, even if I can't point to a victim.

The hentai/domai and related cartoon industry probably has a higher legal risk if this gets up.

I don't think there's an immediate victim with this, but I wonder at whether or not easy access to this sort of content would increase the risk of real world offending.

Or decrease? Does access to “regular” porn increase or decrease real world abuse? I’d say giving a harmless outlet for desires is probably a net positive.

I think that’s a good question. I see it as also possible it would reduce real-world offending.

Today, seeking out images like that puts you on the definite wrong side of a line. A child was harmed to produce that image. You’ll face significant legal and societal consequences if you get caught with it in your possession. Given that you’ve already crossed the line, maybe the next line is not as hard to cross.

Whereas if images like these are decriminalised, folks who look at them don’t have to directly correlate their actions with any specific harm to any specific child, and so that line remains uncrossed.

I think there may be complications around, for example, using inpainting on an image of a specific child, but overall, my approach is more one of harm reduction. Whichever approach leads to fewer real world children being abused is the one to take, and moral outrage should take a back seat to pragmatism if it turns out that decriminalising these images reduces real world offending.

Not sure there’s a good way to test and find out which of us is right though.

Either seems possible to me, and I think it probably depends on the nature of the pornography, and the levels of agency allowed for the consumer (see also, methadone programs).

I worry that left to their own devices, some may slip deeper into the psychosexual sadism side of things.

It's hard enough stopping child pornography when there are real children used to make it...

But when the difference between the difference between the digital representation of a child and that of an adult just becomes a variable in a parameter space?

It'll be impossible to stop.

Child pornography is a byproduct of human trafficking, and that's where the focus needs to be.

> It's hard enough stopping child pornography when there are real children used to make it...

But real children _were_ harmed in order to train the AI.

Not necessarily. You can train with legal adult content combined with innocent pictures of children. The combination of the two is enough to generate virtual CP.

I think the title is misleading clickbait, since it suggests the EU is proposing something similar to the recent UK law, or laws in other jurisdictions regulating AI deepfakes in general; whereas this is entirely about the depiction of CSAM using AI (confusing in itself, since I'm fairly sure that EU regulations already prohibit the non-photographic, i.e., artistic depiction of such content).

A more accurate and less click-baity title might be 'EU proposes criminalizing AI-generated and deepfaked child sexual abuse content'

I think this goes counter to the concept of CSAM - the entire reason to switch away from the earlier term of CP was to explicitly make a point and emphasize that it's not about titillating material involving children but rather that it's material resulting from violent abuse of children, and creating such material involves more abuse, and consuming such material funds and motivates such abuse.

On the other hand, any AI-generated content, no matter what it shows, is substantially different from CSAM, as creating the next image did not require any more abuse. I'd also argue that "artistic" depictions should not be labeled CSAM and instead the older CP term is more appropriate, and the difference is meaningful with respect to whether it should be criminalized; someone paying money for CSAM funds a rape of a kid, but the same person paying same money for an "artistic depiction" just funds someone clicking around on a computer - there's a world of difference in the harmfulness of these activities, and the legal penalties should reflect that.

>but the same person paying same money for an "artistic depiction" just funds someone clicking around on a computer - there's a world of difference in the harmfulness of these activities, and the legal penalties should reflect that.

that distinction becauses dodgier when you consider the checkpoint training methods are suspected of using csam imagery within the training corpus[0], but I agree with your points otherwise.

In principal an AI generated image doesn't exploit someone elses' existence if trained on safe and sane data.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2023/12/20/stab...

I think that even if it would be trained on a large set of actual CSAM data, it makes a very practical difference that the "marginal cost" of new images doesn't imply more abuse.

E.g. I have a local example in mind after a local pedophile was arrested in a bust of an international CSAM ring, the story goes that he was consuming CSAM, and joining that "better" ring of CSAM content required providing "original content" (that's one way they protected against law enforcement infiltration) and allegedly that need for that was the reason he went from watching CSAM to actually molesting several kids to film it. If we can remove this kind of motivation, that's IMHO a good thing for society.

Is it even possible to distinguish between such deepfakes and real footage at this point? Maybe they do that also so that there is no defensive line over claiming CSAM videos found are deepfakes and thus not a crime?

Moreover even AI generated CSAM has to trained somewhere. It is not certain at all that an increase in AI generated CSAM market would necessarily mean less child abuse.

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