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?”
(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.
I think that's a good thing, though the law obviously needs more time to catch up.
> 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.