Mhm I have mixed feelings about this. I know that this entire thing is fucked up but isn’t it better to have generated stuff than having actual stuff that involved actual children?
A problem that I see getting brought up is that generated AI images makes it harder to notice photos of actual victims, making it harder to locate and save them
It does learn from real images, but it doesn’t need real images of what it’s generating to produce related content.
As in, a network trained with no exposure to children is unlikely to be able to easily produce quality depictions of children. Without training on nudity, it’s unlikely to produce good results there as well.
However, if it knows both concepts it can combine them readily enough, similar to how you know the concept of “bicycle” and that of “Neptune” and can readily enough imagine “Neptune riding an old fashioned bicycle around the sun while flaunting it’s tophat”.
Under the hood, this type of AI is effectively a very sophisticated “error correction” system. It changes pixels in the image to try to “fix it” to matching the prompt, usually starting from a smear of random colors (static noise).
That’s how it’s able to combine different concepts from a wide range of images to create things it’s never seen.
Basically if I want to create … (I’ll use a different example for obvious reasons, but I’m sure you could apply it to the topic)
… “an image of a miniature denium airjet with Taylor Swift’s face on the side of it”, the AI generators can despite no such thing existing in the training data. It may take multiple attempts and effort with the text prompt to get exactly what you’re looking for, but you could eventually get a convincing image.
AI takes loads of preexisting data on airplanes, T.Swift, and denium to combine it all into something new.
Well that, and the idea of cathartic relief is increasingly being dispelled. Behaviour once thought to act as a pressure relief for harmful impulsive behaviour is more than likely just a pattern of escalation.
The arrest is only a positive. Allowing pedophiles to create AI CP is not a victimless crime. As others point out it muddies the water for CP of real children, but it also potentially would allow pedophiles easier ways to network in the open (if the images are legal they can easily be platformed and advertised), and networking between abusers absolutely emboldens them and results in more abuse.
As a society we should never allow the normalization of sexualizing children.
Interesting. What do you think about drawn images? Is there a limit to how will the artist can be at drawing/painting? Stick figures vs life like paintings. Interesting line to consider.
If it was photoreal and difficult to distinguish from real photos? Yes, it’s exactly the same.
And even if it’s not photo real, communities that form around drawn child porn are toxic and dangerous as well. Sexualizing children is something I am 100% against.
networking between abusers absolutely emboldens them and results in more abuse.
Is this proven or a common sense claim you’re making?
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a mixture of the two. It’s kind of like if you surround yourself with criminals regularly, you’re more likely to become one yourself. Not to say it’s a 100% given, just more probable.
The far right in France normalized its discourses and they are now at the top of the votes.
Also in France, people talked about pedophilia at the TV in the 70s, 80s and at the beginning of the 90s. It was not just once in a while. It was frequent and open without any trouble. Writers would casually speak about sexual relationships with minors.
The normalization will blur the limits between AI and reality for the worse. It will also make it more popular.
The other point is also that people will always ends with the original. Again, politic is a good example. Conservatives try to mimic the far right to gain votes but at the end people vote for the far right…
And, someone has a daughter. A pedophile takes a picture of her without asking and ask an AI to produce CP based on her. I don’t want to see things like this.
Actually, that’s not quite as clear.
The conventional wisdom used to be, (normal) porn makes people more likely to commit sexual abuse (in general). Then scientists decided to look into that. Slowly, over time, they’ve become more and more convinced that (normal) porn availability in fact reduces sexual assault.
I don’t see an obvious reason why it should be different in case of CP, now that it can be generated.
Did we memory hole the whole ‘known CSAM in training data’ thing that happened a while back? When you’re vacuuming up the internet you’re going to wind up with the nasty stuff, too. Even if it’s not a pixel by pixel match of the photo it was trained on, there’s a non-zero chance that what it’s generating is based off actual CSAM. Which is really just laundering CSAM.
IIRC it was something like a fraction of a fraction of 1% that was CSAM, with the researchers identifying the images through their hashes but they weren’t actually available in the dataset because they had already been removed from the internet.
Still, you could make AI CSAM even if you were 100% sure that none of the training images included it since that’s what these models are made for - being able to combine concepts without needing to have seen them before. If you hold the AI’s hand enough with prompt engineering, textual inversion and img2img you can get it to generate pretty much anything. That’s the power and danger of these things.
What % do you think was used to generate the CSAM, though? Like, if 1% of the images were cups it’s probably drawing on some of that to generate images of cups.
And yes, you could technically do this with no CSAM training material, but we don’t know if that’s what the AI is doing because the image sources used to train it were mass scraped from the internet. They’re using massive amounts of data without filtering it and are unable to say with certainty whether or not there is CSAM in the training material.
Yeah, it’s very similar to the “is loli porn unethical” debate. No victim, it could supposedly help reduce actual CSAM consumption, etc… But it’s icky so many people still think it should be illegal.
There are two big differences between AI and loli though. The first is that AI would supposedly be trained with CSAM to be able to generate it. An artist can create loli porn without actually using CSAM references. The second difference is that AI is much much easier for the layman to create. It doesn’t take years of practice to be able to create passable porn. Anyone with a decent GPU can spin up a local instance, and be generating within a few hours.
In my mind, the former difference is much more impactful than the latter. AI becoming easier to access is likely inevitable, so combatting it now is likely only delaying the inevitable. But if that AI is trained on CSAM, it is inherently unethical to use.
Whether that makes the porn generated by it unethical by extension is still difficult to decide though, because if artists hate AI, then CSAM producers likely do too. Artists are worried AI will put them out of business, but then couldn’t the same be said about CSAM producers? If AI has the potential to run CSAM producers out of business, then it would be a net positive in the long term, even if the images being created in the short term are unethical.
Just a point of clarity, an AI model capable of generating csam doesn’t necessarily have to be trained on csam.
I think one of the many problems with AI generated CSAM is that as AI becomes more advanced it will become increasingly difficult for authorities to tell the difference between what was AI generated and what isn’t.
Banning all of it means authorities don’t have to sift through images trying to decipher between the two. If one image is declared to be AI generated and it’s not…well… that doesn’t help the victims or create less victims. It could also make the horrible people who do abuse children far more comfortable putting that stuff out there because it can hide amongst all the AI generated stuff. Meaning authorities will have to go through far more images before finding ones with real victims in it. All of it being illegal prevents those sorts of problems.
And that’s a good point! Luckily it’s still (usually) fairly easy to identify AI generated images. But as they get more advanced, that will likely become harder and harder to do.
Maybe some sort of required digital signatures for AI art would help; Something like a public encryption key in the metadata, that can’t be falsified after the fact. Anything without that known and trusted AI signature would by default be treated as the real deal.
But this would likely require large scale rewrites of existing image formats, if they could even support it at all. It’s the type of thing that would require people way smarter than myself. But even that feels like a bodged solution to a problem that only exists because people suck. And if it required registration with a certificate authority (like an HTTPS certificate does) then it would be a hurdle for local AI instances to jump through. Because they would need to get a trusted certificate before they could sign their images.
so many people still think it should be illegal
It is illegal. https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/possession-of-lolicon
I wasn’t arguing about current laws. I was simply arguing about public perception, and whether the average person believes it should be illegal. There’s a difference between legality and ethicality. Something unethical can be legal, and something illegal can be ethical.
Weed is illegal, but public perception says it shouldn’t be.
Why are you assuming everyone lives in the US? Your article even admits that it is legal elsewhere (Japan).
This is a better one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors
I have trouble with this because it’s like 90% grey area. Is it a pic of a real child but inpainted to be nude? Was it a real pic but the face was altered as well? Was it completely generated but from a model trained on CSAM? Is the perceived age of the subject near to adulthood? What if the styling makes it only near realistic (like very high quality CG)?
I agree with what the FBI did here mainly because there could be real pictures among the fake ones. However, I feel like the first successful prosecution of this kind of stuff will be a purely moral judgement of whether or not the material “feels” wrong, and that’s no way to handle criminal misdeeds.
If not trained on CSAM or in painted but fully generated, I can’t really think of any other real legal arguments against it except for: “this could be real”. Which has real merit, but in my eyes not enough to prosecute as if it were real. Real CSAM has very different victims and abuse so it needs different sentencing.
Yeah would be nice. Unfortunelately it isn’t so and it’s never going to. Chasing after people generating distasteful AI pictures is not making the world a better place.
It reminds me of the story of the young man who realized he had an attraction to underage children and didn’t want to act on it, yet there were no agencies or organizations to help him, and that it was only after crimes were committed that anyone could get help.
I see this fake cp as only a positive for those people. That it might make it difficult to find real offenders is a terrible reason against.
Is everything completely black and white for you?
The system isn’t perfect, especially where we prioritize punishing people over rehabilitation. Would you rather punish everyone equally, emphasizing that if people are going to risk the legal implications (which, based on legal systems the world over, people are going to do) they might as well just go for the real thing anyways?
You don’t have to accept it as morally acceptable, but you don’t have to treat them as completely equivalent either.
There’s gradations of questionable activity. Especially when there’s no real victims involved. Treating everything exactly the same is, frankly speaking, insane. Its like having one punishment for all illegal behavior. Murder someone? Death penalty. Rob them? Straight to the electric chair. Jaywalking? Better believe you’re getting the needle.
Ironically, You ask if everything is completely black and white for someone without accepting that there’s nuance to the very issue you’re calling out. And assuming that “everything”- a very black and white term, is not very nuanced, is it?
No, not EVERYTHING, but some things. And this is one of those things. Both forms should be illegal. Period. No nuance, no argument, NO grey area.
This does not mean that nuance doesn’t exist. It just means that some believe that it SHOULDN’T exist within the paradigm of child porn.
It feeds and evolves a disorder which in turn increases risks of real life abuse.
But if AI generated content is to be considered illegal, so should all fictional content.
Or, more likely, it feeds and satisfies a disorder which in turn decreases risk of real life abuse.
Making it illegal so far helped nothing, just like with drugs
Two things:
- Do we know if fuels the urge to get real children? Or do we just assume that through repetition like the myth of “gateway drugs”?
- Since no child was involved and harmed in the making of these images… On what grounds could it be forbidden to generate them?
Alternative perspective is to think that does watching normal porn make heterosexual men more likely to rape women? If not then why would it be different in this case?
The vast majority of pedophiles never offend. Most people in jail for child abuse are just plain old rapists with no special interest towards minors, they’re just an easy target. Pedophilia just describes what they’re attracted to. It’s not a synonym to child rapist. It usually needs to coinside with psychopathy to create the monster that most people think about when hearing that word.
I would love to see research data pointing either way re #1, although it would be incredibly difficult to do so ethically, verging on impossible. For #2, people have extracted originals or near-originals of inputs to the algorithms. AI generated stuff - plagiarism machine generated stuff, runs the risk of effectively revictimizing people who were already abused to get said inputs.
It’s an ugly situation all around, and unfortunately I don’t know that much can be done about it beyond not demonizing people who have such drives, who have not offended, so that seeking therapy for the condition doesn’t screw them over. Ensuring that people are damned if they do and damned if they don’t seems to pretty reliably produce worse outcomes.
The generated stuff is as illegal as the real stuff. https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/possession-of-lolicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003