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Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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