In this hypothetical, the AI would be trained on fully clothed adults and children. As well as what many of those same adults look like unclothed. It might not get things completely right on its initial attempt, but with some minor prompting it should be able to get pretty close. That said, the AI will know the correct head size proportions from just the clothed datasets. It could probably even infer limb proportions from the clothed datasets as well.
It could definitely get head and limb proportions correct, but there are some pretty basic changes that happen with puberty that the AI would not be able to reverse engineer.
There are legit, non-CSAM types of images that would still make these changes apparent, though. Not every picture of a naked child is CSAM. Family photos from the beach, photos in biology textbooks, even comic-style illustrated children’s books will allow inferences about what real humans look like. So no, I don’t think that an image generation model has to be trained on any CSAM in order to be able to produce convincing CSAM.
This is a fair point - if we allow a model to be trained on non-sexualizing minor nudity it likely could sexualize those models without actually requiring sexualized minors to do so. I’m still not certain if that’s a good thing, but I do agree with you.