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Comment by Hard_Space | Hacker News Reader

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'

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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.

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