Man Arrested for Creating Child Porn Using AI
futurism.com
futurism.com
With that out of the way:
> the generative AI wrinkle in this particular arrest shows how technology is generating new avenues for crime and child abuse.
Is it really child abuse if no children were involved? Does that mean that AI-generated imagery of some protected group being harmed causes actual harm to that protected group? Not saying it doesn't, but it may be worth thinking about.
> The content that we’ve seen, we believe is actually being generated using open source software, which has been downloaded and run locally on people’s computers and then modified, [...] that is a much harder problem to fix.
Sarcastic: people downloading and modifying open source software is a major problem indeed, hopefully a solution can be found.
I think the path starts with asking, "How do things get normalized? What are the tools of normalization?"
People aren’t going to be attracted to kids because they see such things. It’s like arguing gay porn is going to turn people gay.
You're right. It's probably better to focus on things that have a proven record of impacting child predators or child predation.
The reason why child porn is illegal completely - not just restricted in its advertising and distribution - is because it's production necessarily involve abuse of actual children.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
> In response to Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, Congress passed the PROTECT Act of 2003 (also dubbed the Amber Alert Law) which was signed into law on April 30, 2003, by President George W. Bush.[126] The PROTECT Act adjusted its language to meet the parameters of the Miller, Ferber, and Ashcroft decisions. The Act was careful to separate cases of virtual pornography depicting minors into two different categories of law: child pornography law and obscenity law. In regards to child pornography law, the Act modified the previous wording of "appears to be a minor" with "indistinguishable from that of a minor" phrasing. This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults.
Now, there is an argument that if the fictional content is indistinguishable from real abuse, it may be illegal. But that could probably be circumvented by providing the inputs and seed to generate the image, rather than the image itself.
I'm not super motivated to defend AI generated child porn, but the notion of banning it introduces ambiguity. Actual child abuse material can be identified because the people involved were born on a specific date and so whether or not it's illegal has a clear threshold. But AI generated content is not so easy to distinguish. The fictional characters don't have a birth date, so whether or not it's illegal becomes a lot more subjective.
Many sovereign citizens(1) have in fact been prevented from doing things society deems illegal despite their attestations to the law’s applicability to them.
1
Deepfakes of real children is real children being involved.
Outside of that, my response is, “how would you create a compelling CSAM image with nothing resembling the target in the training data?”
I think that's a good thing, though the law obviously needs more time to catch up.
(1) You feed it extra training data to suit the desired output.
(2) The AI combines bits from existing training data. It has non-pornographic content of children. It has adult pornography. Layer one over the other and voila. Crime. Most AI has zero images of cats doing calculus, but is very capable of generating such content.
(3) You manually aid the process. People forget how powerful standalone AI can be when one manually selects good output and feeds it back as a guide for the next iteration. This does not scale to a multi-task environment, but is very useful when accomplishing one specific task.
> Last year, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 4,700 reports of generated AI child porn, with some criminals even using generative AI to make deepfakes of real children to extort them.
So, it’s definitely part of the conversation. Also, being a more general conversation means that it encompasses more specifics. Not being able to bring the general conversation back to specifics makes for a fairly useless discussion.
I think there is an empirical question one step beyond this. Does a pedophile who sees AI child porn get inured to it and then go on to try to act out fantasies with real victims? Or does this give pedophiles a way to satiate their desires indefinitely with only AI-based content, and lead to a lower portion abusing actual kids?
A second order issue is that distributing child porn is claimed to create demand for child porn which leads to more abuse. If there were no criminal penalties for purely AI-generated CSAM and the normal criminal penalties remained for CSAM that in any way derived from images of actual kids, would the cost-benefit difference push most consumers to demand only AI-generated stuff?
I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but I think it's at least plausible that more AI-generated CSAM would reduce actual sexual abuse of children, and from a harm-reduction standpoint, it should be beneficial to have more of it ... and it's also plausible that pedophiles being able to generate more and more extreme material at will would make things worse ... and it's also likely legally and institutionally impossible to do the studies to determine which of these is actually true.
Firstly, it normalizes this material, even to the tiniest degree you'd like to claim. If you bring something that was formerly illegal into the state of being legal, it becomes a part of our society. Weed is a fantastic example. It's on a great track to become a very casual drug of use in our society, and with each step forward along that path, it becomes less remarkable. When I was in high school, I was taught, by teachers and hired professionals, about the "dangers" of weed and other drugs. Now, I drive down the street and pass a couple of dispensaries selling that product and many derivatives of it, completely without drama. It is simply a thing that exists.
[And to not leave it merely implied, that's a GOOD thing.]
So, that being the case, are we as a society prepared to have a society and to live within one where something like AI-generated CASM is an accepted, to whatever degree, thing to have, sell, and create? Are we okay with that if it satiates pedophiles? Are we prepared to reckon with the consequences of that if it doesn't, and more children are harmed?
Secondly, I think we have to contend with the fact that now that this technology exists, it will continue to exist regardless of legality. This is one of the reasons I was so incredibly opposed to wide-spread and open-source AI in the first place, and at risk of sounding like "I told you so," one of the concerns I outlined many times is that this technology enables people to create... anything, at a near industrial scale, be that disinformation, be that spam, be that non-consensual pornography, be that CASM. I don't think a black box program that can be run on damn near any consumer PC that can create photorealistic renderings of anything you can describe in text is inherently, by virtue of it's being, a bad thing, but I do think it's something that we as a society are not ready for, and I was not alone in that thinking. But now it's here, and now we have to deal with it.
We could say the same about violence and its presence in media.
By that logic, if I see regular porn I would not be interested in having sex.
I assure you this is not the case, and your premise is flawed.
A causal study in this case is basically impossible.
So at the moment, we have correlation studies compared to your anecdote….
No it's not. The comment I replied to was the one suggesting there is a causal relationship.
My anecdote is a counterargument that shows the erroneous logic underlying the original claim.
We'll have to agree to disagree that it's a solid argument. I think it's weak and specious.
It's often noted, if not utterly established, that "internet access" (aka porn access) strongly correlates with (and thus, perhaps causes) lower rates of sexual assault.
We already have severe limitations on fictional depictions of this type of content so prosecuting AI depictions isn't anything particularly new.
Surely that would be a good thing if it incentivizes prosecutors to track down the purveyors and distributors instead of just stopping with easily targeted consumers. With nothing to establish beyond mere possession, by some metrics their performance is optimized to the contrary, much like the war on drugs.
> Does believing material was AI generated serve as a defense?
Believing that stolen property was legitimately acquired is a defense against a charge of possession of stolen property, as is plausibly claiming to have been set up. The alternative enables anyone with physical access to cause anyone else to be guilty of a crime, surely a net negative for society.
> We already have severe limitations on fictional depictions of this type of content so prosecuting AI depictions isn't anything particularly new.
Are you advocating its expansion to a general principle? Maybe Agatha Christie should have faced charges for the crimes committed by her characters.
It would make it harder to prosecute purveyors and distributors. Arguing to some amorphous 'incentive' under some unnamed "metric" is silly since we have much better ways of creating incentives if you think the investigatory or prosecutorial priorties need to shift.
> The alternative enables anyone with physical access to cause anyone else to be guilty of a crime, surely a net negative for society.
No it doesn't as these defenses are unchanged.
> Are you advocating its expansion to a general principle? Maybe Agatha Christie should have faced charges for the crimes committed by her characters.
Work on your reading comprehension instead of making ridiculous claims. I'm not advocating anything. I am describing the current legal state in our country. If you are unfamiliar with the laws about creating fictional porngraphic material with underage characters, then google is your friend.
You don't choose who or what you like. Unfortunately.
Yes, basically. You can absolutely criminalize fake images.
The "harm" principle which is very popular these days to see if things are bad or good or punishable or not, I think it has a lot of problems. There are a lot of things that don't map onto this principle well. Social cohesion is a huge one. Something may not directly harm someone, but it can harm the fabric of society and many other things.
If the government can throw you in prison for something, it better be for a good reason. If it's simply doing something "that doesn't harm anyone but is perceived as not conducive to social cohesion", that doesn't seem like a good reason. Many conservatives would say gay marriage, polyamory, tattoos, porn, foul language, and blasphemy are not socially cohesive. Insulting people or using slurs is not socially cohesive. Some countries imprison people for many of these things, but I'm glad the US doesn't.
For example, insulting someone, or self harming. Even things that "don't harm anyone" actually do, it's just the scale is too small to be measurable at the individual level. For example, substance abuse. If one people does it, it's hard to measure the harm to society. But if 300M people do it, it's easy.
One example is alcohol, a lot a lot of countries struggle with controlling it. Technically it's a victimless crime. It's easy for people to see how it affects society though. In some places banning it will be impossible due to local preference, but governments have creative ways to reduce usage. It's not totalitarian to run a campaign to try to reduce people's alcohol consumption, or to add taxes onto it which are shown to reduce consumption and related incidents.
By all means, fast track the death penalty for child rapists. Even make a constitutional amendment allowing cruel and unusual punishments for that single crime. Treat paying for actual abuse images as a worse crime than commissioning a murder. Sky's the limit for actual abusers. But (legally) punishing the creation of fake imagery is absurd, and in practice punishing possession seems to be unhealthy for a free society.
If someone's only crime is being disturbing, the government doesn't need to get involved, but we can still not want to be around them and especially keep kids away from them.
> A Florida man is facing 20 counts of obscenity for allegedly creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography
I'd bet distribution of CSAM the crime what got him prosecuted, not modifying OSS.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/10/fac...
I hope that there are people out there who know the true answer.
It takes a special kind of person to seek the truth about something that people feel so strongly about. The truth doesn't care about us or how we feel. Finding it is a thankless task full of distractions and dead ends. If a perspective makes sense and rings true to me, that says more about me than it does about whether the perspective describes reality.
How can you prove that zero children were involved at any point?
How does the model generate CSAM without it either being in the training material or fed to the model as an input?
> How does the model generate CSAM without it either being in the training material or fed to the model as an input?
How can a skilled artist (when forced to) draw CSAM without ever having seen CSAM? How can they draw something without having seen the exact thing before? Both humans and LLMs are able to extrapolate information.
There has, in fact, been CSAM found in a version of the training set that was used to make Stable Diffusion 1.5, for example.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1510365
I always assumed the reason we didn't see the same thing in the US's was the 1st amendment. I guess it's too soon to know if this is just an aberration that will be fixed.
https://dfrws.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/2019_USA_pres-a...
https://dfrws.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2019_USA_paper-...
For 3 years of probation, he was banned from drawing at all, even for personal use.
https://cbldf.org/2016/09/mike-diana-case-still-resonates-in...
I can't see this rationale extending to generated imagery (deepfakes aside). No victim exists.
Vaguely gesturing at social harm is not principled enough, in my opinion. One can point to actual crime and actual harm for filmed and photographed child pornography. For generated imagery, one can only point to one's own personal revulsion as "harm".
We are spiraling very quickly towards a "media creation box", standalone software that will generate whatever content a person might want without any external connections. There will be huge societal ramifications. We think media bubbles are bad now, but just wait until everyone can live inside their own bubble filled with locally-generated content to match their increasingly warped world views.
edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
The harm is supposed to be to children.
If you are caught with loli hentai manga in New Zealand, expect the law to treat you like the chomo you are.
The reason why blanket bans are implemented is not just to punish actual harm, but to avoid creating a demand for material that harms children.
In the USA this kind of blanket ban, though desired by a majority of citizens, has historically not been feasible due to "that pesky First Amendment". So we say it's not about banning speech, it's about banning the abuse of children. And then we say that children get re-abused every time someone procures, distributes, or views this material. (Except when the FBI does it.) And then we're into semantic hair splitting of when exactly child abuse has occured: what if it's Bart Simpson? What if it's an AI deepfake? A photorealistic render of a fictional child? A Shadman cartoon drawing of a real minor e-celeb?
Other countries have eliminated this problem by banning the material altogether irrespective of whether it depicts real or fictional persons, whether photographed, drawn, or computer synthesized. Before 1969, this would even have been possible in the United States. The PROTECT Act gets us closer by criminalizing any material that flunks a Miller obscenity test, which the Supreme Court has ruled is NOT protected under the First Amendment.
> The PROTECT Act adjusted its language to meet the parameters of the Miller, Ferber, and Ashcroft decisions. The Act was careful to separate cases of virtual pornography depicting minors into two different categories of law: child pornography law and obscenity law. In regards to child pornography law, the Act modified the previous wording of "appears to be a minor" with "indistinguishable from that of a minor" phrasing. This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults.[127][128][129][130] Furthermore, there exists an affirmative defense to a child pornography charge that applies if the depiction was of a real person and the real person was an adult (18 or over) at the time the visual depiction was created, or if the visual depiction did not involve any actual minors
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
The legal challenges here will be important to follow.
That aside, the “fully synthetic CSAM with no children involved at all” idea relies very, very heavily on taking the word of the guy who you just busted with a hard drive full of CSAM.
His defense would essentially have to be “Your honor I pinky swear that I used the txt2img tab of automatic1111 instead of the img2img tab” or “I did start with real CSAM but the img2img tab acts as an algorithmic magic wand imbued with the power to retroactively erase the previous harm caused by the source material”
There is no coherent defense to this activity that boils down to anything other than the idea that the existence of image generators should — and does — constitute an acceptable means of laundering CSAM and/or providing plausible deniability for anyone caught with it.
The idea that there would be any pushback to arresting or investigating people for distributing this stuff boggles the mind. Inventing a new type of armor to specifically protect child abusers from scrutiny is a choice, not some sort of emergent moral ground truth caused by the popularization of diffusion models.
Although currently it is not entirely clear whether mere possession should continue to constitute a crime by itself, or it should require actual child abuse (because the former used to imply the latter).
It’s not unreasonable to think “we should look into this guy that is publishing CSAM even though he’s posted it under hashtag #totallylegal”
I have a legitimate question for the defenders of this specific activity: If a bad actor were to produce real CSAM by harming children and then used an img2img model that creates very similar but distinct outputs, what do you call those outputs? CSAM? Art?
What (if anything) should happen when law enforcement sees those images?
How can the idea of “synthetic CSAM that harms no one” exist without some mechanism to verify that that is the case?