Words have meaning, and while language does drift over time, it's important to maintain the meanings of certain kinds of words and phrases that draw important distinctions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
> Anderegg moved to dismiss each of the four counts. In an opinion last month, the court largely rejected the motions. However, the court did dismiss the possession charge, holding that Section 1466A is unconstitutional as applied to Anderegg’s private possession of obscene “virtual” CSAM.
> The Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the right to possess obscene material in one’s own home, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), so long as it’s not actual CSAM, Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103 (1990).
Probably they can still charge him with distribution (to the teenage boy), but not possession. Probably production is also not dropped?
That’s a big claim. If the model was trained on CSAM then I would argue that any image generation that comes from it is harmful to the original children. In the same way copies of already existing content continue to harm the victim.
And if the used car I buy was stolen, I have contributed to car theft. That's not an argument against used car sales, especially from salesmen that try to make sure their inventory is legitimate: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/nonprofit-scrubs...
Maybe if it substantially recreates the input images it is equivalent to plain copying and redistribution.
Maybe it creates an economic incentive to abuse more children to create more training data?
These models are wildly intuitive and can assemble impossible ideas, even when datasets are purged of certain tags. I discovered this early on when I couldn't diagnose why most subjects came out as weirdly child-like elderly people.
It turns out "mature" is not synonymous with "nsfw" when negative prompting, and a person absent of maturity, while not explicitly a child, doesn't quite look like a normal adult human, either.
I don't think the model was trained on a large corpus of very old babies, yet it was able to imagine them. As long as a model knows what the pieces are or are not, it can be prompted assemble them.
Let's put it in a very HN-centric way—and please try to suppress your inherent disgust reaction:
There is a certain amount of demand for images of children in sexual positions.
In the past, the only way to satisfy this demand was to put actual children in sexual positions, or to draw such images.
Now, there may be a way to satisfy this demand with highly-realistic images without harming any real children at all.
If we can reduce or eliminate the demand for actual children to be abused, that seems to me like an unequivocal good in the world.
So long as no actual living children are involved, some people getting off to images that look like they're of children, in the privacy of their own homes, all alone, doesn't harm me or anyone else.
Now you've switched to talking about it as a policy issue, explaining it as if the concept wasn't immediately obvious to everyone else. If that's what you wanted to talk about you should have said so in the first place.