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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

CSAM is probably the least available category of material on the Internet. Almost all but the most "free speech" diehard services consider it a bannable offence. It's very illegal in almost every jurisdiction and hugely unpopular with the public. The demand for it lurks nonetheless.

CSAM is extremely illegal because making it is a crime against a child. Textual material describing fictional child abuse isn't quite in the same category. Deepfake material that purports to be of a specific real child may or may not be illegal depending on jurisdiction but really ought to be.

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Why should it “really ought to be” if it is fictional? Isn’t it like the text material?

CSAM is unique in that society, almost uniformly, classifies it as wrong, even when there is no relationship to any material harm. I think parent's argumentative basis is simply that the information itself is evil at face value, an the vast majority of people (in the U.S. at least) would agree.

They would agree, or they would be afraid to disagree?

Because making it legal creates a situation where someone makes real CSAM and then argues that it is an AI fake in court. And it's really not a pretty thing to require the affected children to testify as to what happened to them.

It's also a gateway, stoking interest in the real thing.

Neither of these two arguments hold any water. I see them all the time, but they really just feel like justification after the fact, as both can be applied to such a large swath of information as to be useless.

The first would require we outlaw generating depictions of any illegal activity. The second would require we ban undesirable men from legal adult content.

I think it's ok if society, and our legislature, classifies the information as illegal, in isolation, with no useless A->B gymnastics. Thats pretty much what the law already does.

The first would only require banning fictional depictions of heinous crimes against children (When the children look like real ones), as it is intended to protect children from having to testify to what happened to them. One could argue that adults shouldn't have to testify to being the victim of various terrible crimes either, but that is a different argument than what was being made.

Adults are not children. We often afford special protections to children that we wouldn't afford to adults, because they aren't fully developed humans. Nowhere did I talk about adults or say adults shouldn't be required to testify to provide evidence. But I think children need to be allowed to be children. You can look at the law in some US states around crimes against children, and a lot of them do permit either CCTV or recorded testimony with the assistance of a child psychologist or similar. The law already treats children as different. It sound like you're arguing that they should be treated like adults in this specific instance?

Slippery Slope is a fallacy if the person you're arguing with has no intention of going further than exactly what they've said.

> as it is intended to protect children from having to testify to what happened to them.

What do you mean? You don't have to show the child in fake CSAM the CSAM to figure out if it happened or not. If there is no crime commited against the child in reality, there is nothing for it to testify.

> The first would only require banning fictional depictions of heinous crimes against children

If, and only if, you limit the scope of the logic to CSAM, which is my point.

The logic, by itself, could apply to any video evidence of crime. For instance, if we want CCTV videos to remain admissable in court, then according to parents logic, we need to outlaw any video generation of CCTV format, otherwise every defendant can simply claim the videos are fake.

Defendants claiming that video is fake will be a challenge that future courts (and probably very near future, if not already) will have to deal with. In the short term, it will likely require the folks involved in the CCTV system to keep better records to show a proper chain of evidence, and be available to testify in court as to this chain of evidence. Courts have always had to deal with the veracity of evidence brought before them.

But it is a lot easier to have folks who are in charge of systems testify as to their authenticity than to have a child who has been abused testify to the authenticity of the abuse, thus the logic is defensibly limited to child abuse.

> But it is a lot easier to have folks who are in charge of systems testify as to their authenticity than to have a child who has been abused testify to the authenticity of the abuse, thus the logic is defensibly limited to child abuse.

Exactly my point? We don't need to come up with a generic legal basis or reason, we can just say "CSAM is special" in a legal sense.

No, this is a common misunderstanding about introducing evidence.

When you introduce a picture or video in a trial (or hearing) then someone with knowledge of the video must appear to "lay a foundation" and say what is presented is true and accurate and genuine. Often there are stipulations to avoid this (e.g. in a murder trial it generally pisses the court staff off if the defendant demands that the crime scene photographer turns up to say they took the photos of the body), but it is still not uncommon for a lab technician to be brough to court to explain how they processed some drug sample.

The poster a bit above you was right about the problem with AI. If we say AI CSAM should be legal then we might end up with the scenario that all CSAM is considered fake unless we can uncover the victim or perpetrator and have them brought to court to say they took the photo or video. It's a very tough legal problem.

Im confused by the "No". Everything you said is in agreement with my comment.

There is some part of me that can rationalize that an AI is not a child and therefore there is no child abuse happening in the interaction, but that tiny part of my brain is shouted down immediately by the rest of my brain screaming, "PEOPLE ARE HORRIBLE. YOU CANNOT GIVE THEM THE OPPORTUNITY TO FANTASIZE ABOUT CSA IN A COMMUNITY AS PEOPLE WILL INEXORABLY ESCALATE INTO REAL LIFE CSA!"

Even if there are people who can indulge in imaginary CSAM without ever bringing it into real life, those are not the people you can set the bar against.

You have to set it against the average person and deduce from there what percentage of them when given free access to this material would be tempted into committing crimes. If that number goes up, your rule is too loose.

Giving everyone unlimited access to this without judgement will almost certainly increase child sex crimes. Therefore it must be restricted.

>but that tiny part of my brain is shouted down immediately by the rest of my brain screaming

Your gut feeling is simply wrong.

General pornography availability and sexual assault are negatively correlated; you'll notice the former increased dramatically and the latter decreased dramatically over the past 20 years in Western societies where that is true.

Despite what you might be led to believe crime rates were not increasing (well, before 2020 anyway).

Wow. Honestly, no part of my brain is screaming about possible escalation, it's something I'm not worried about in the slightest. Why would someone risk their freedom and harm another person IRL by committing a serious crime, when they could get the same stimulation from a computer program?

But let's say we do live in a world where fictional crimes often escalate to real ones. Suppose that playing DOOM increases the chance that an unstable person will buy a gun and shoot real people. Even in that universe, I would not be OK with laws that restrict me from playing DOOM, because that violates my freedom. I do not want the law to treat everyone as a potential criminal.

I'm far from an expert but last I checked the consensus was that attraction to minors is a disordered behavior, and if you feed it with (even fictional) visual depictions it increases the paraphilia. It might seem like a harmless outlet, but it doesn't actually function that way, and so it's better for everyone if it's just made illegal.

Textual CSAM can be very illegal too:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-40-years-...

Because the whole point of laws 'n shiet existing at all is to legislate morality.

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