vastly expands the pool of potential victims
I’m not brave enough at the moment to say it isn’t some kind of crime, but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn’t seem to be a crime that involves any victims.
My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts (sexualization of children). That’s also why I dislike loli/shota media, despite it being fictional.
That said, I still think it’s a much better alternative to CSAM and especially to actually harming a child for those who have those desires due to trauma or mental illness. Though I’m not sure if easy, open access is entirely safe, either.
My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts
The same concern has been behind attempts to restrict/ban violent video games, and films before that, and books before that. Despite generations of trying, I don’t think a causal link has ever been established.
On the flip side, studies haven’t come to a single consensus of viewing cp leading to reduced violence by individuals either.
While a full-ban infringes upon individual rights of expression and speech, and may impede in previous victims viewing it as an alternative, I’m not sure if a laissez faire approach is the best option, either.
Especially for material that A) depicts abuse and B) is harder to distinguish between fiction and reality (AI generated content), the risk of psychological harm to individuals without existing trauma or fetishes is very real. I stand by this fact for violent/unethical media as well.
I don’t think it’s the same concern. It’s not that people will become pedophiles or act on it more because of the normalization and exposure. It’s people will see less of a problem with the sexualization of children. The parallel being the amount of violence we are OK being depicted. The difference being we can only emulate in a personal level the sexual side.
Maybe there’s the argument that violence is escapist, sexual desire is ever present and porn is addictive.
In that regard, with books, games, movies, and drawings it’s easy to discern fantasy from reality. With an AI generated photograph that becomes increasingly difficult to do.
with books, games, movies, and drawings it’s easy to discern fantasy from reality
I don’t think it is easy with movies or books, unless you are certain of the source.
Either way, we don’t have a causal link.
A teenager who plays a violent video game is not engaging in an act of violence as recognised by his brain. He is not going into a fight or flight response and getting trauma from the experience as he would in a real fight. His brain doesn’t think he’s in a fight.
When you masturbate, your body goes through the same chemical and neurological processes as if you were really having sex.
That’s not entirely true. Some studies have shown that stuff we watch influences our decisions and behaviour.
This article gives an overview over some of the more accepted research done in the area:
Pornography Use and Psychological Science: A Call for Consideration
For “normalisation of sexualisation of children” go ask the people organizing child beauty pageants.
So you agree? It shouldn’t be produced because it can be used to normalise the sexualisation of children or even groom them.
I didn’t say that I agree, I just pointed out that there are way more prominent ways this sexualisation is done.
I also don’t agree with the headline of the article that this kind of pictures will somehow “flood” the internet. It might flood their hidden nieches for being cheap and plentiful, but I don’t think they will pop up increasingly in any normal users everyday browsing activities.
I’m brave enough to say what I am sure some people are thinking.
If a pedophile can have access to a machine that generates endless child porn for them, completely cutting off the market for the “real thing”, then maybe that’s a step in a positive direction. Very far from perfect but better than the status quo.
The ideal ultimate solution is to develop a treatment that pedophiles can use to just stop being pedophiles entirely. I bet most pedophiles would jump on such a thing. But until that magical day maybe let’s explore options that reduce the harm done to actually real children in the immediate term.
Some psychologists agree with you. Others say it would only make the problem worse, making them want to escalate. Definitely one that I’m letting the professionals debate on and I’ll go with their opinion
The consensus is that access to porn lowers rape. Does this extend to pedophilia? Probably, but not proven, in large part because of obvious reasons… testing this theory is super duper internationally illegal
Some can’t be cured by their own admission, its seems for some it is a deep seated sexual deviation that was probably established in very eaely life.
“By their own admission” doesn’t necessarily hold any weight, though. They’re not experts, and even if they were experts they can still be wrong. We’ve got treatments for a variety of psychological disorders these days, with varying efficacy, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that someday we’ll make progress on this sort of thing too.
If we have the tech to change people’s brains in such a way, what else will it gets used on? Ethically, there’s differences between pedophilia and other sexual preferences but I don’t know if there’s any biological differences. Given conversion camps are already a problem despite not working, I can’t see how they wouldn’t become a bigger problem if they did actually do what they claimed…
We have the tech right now to shoot people dead. It’s just tech, create laws about what’s acceptable to do with it and what’s not.
Even when conversion camp stuff is illegal, people still try it. Even if just DIY abuse (which is also illegal and still common). Simply not having the tech may be preferable to having the tech/knowledge, making it illegal to use it, and then people use it illegally anyways. If child abuse in general was something that could have just not been invented, not inventing it would be far superior to inventing it and then making it illegal.
oh yeah cause that’s working out oh so perfectly
This thread is about how to regulate AI-generated child porn, that’s going to require creating laws too.
What’s your proposed alternative to using laws to regulate tech?
You have offenders saying if you let me out I will do it again you don’t think they are experts on their own feelings or behaviour), just like pscyhopaths some can’t be fixed. As the word suggests pedophile means loving kids. While some are just nasty ass people, many see it as their sexual orientation (still nasty to harm kids obviously). Like being straighr or being gay. it can be hard wired. i’m sure with early intervention before 7 you might fix deviation or at least teach restraint from acting in it… but they have formed a concrete ldentity. I think larger strides will be made by protecting kids from sexual abuse at an early age than therapy after the fact trying to fix brain wiring
but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn’t seem to be a crime that involves any victims.
Well, there’s all the children whose photos were used for the training data. I’d consider them victims, since AIs can’t produce truly new images, so real human victims were needed in order to make AI images possible. And it’s been established that AIs need to be trained on new human-made content in order to develop, as the images become distorted when trained on AI-generated content, so unless the paedophiles can be convinced to be satisfied with the AIs as they currently are instead of wanting better/more varied child abuse images next year, a whole lot more real children will need to be abused and photographed in order to improve the AI.
There’s a lot of misconceptions about AI image generators in here.
They can indeed generate “truly new images”, ask an image generator for an image of something that definitely doesn’t exist in its training set and it’ll likely be able to come up with something like that for you. Most importantly for purposes of this discussion, you don’t actually need to have any images specifically of child abuse in a model’s training set in order to train it well enough to produce images of child abuse. Train a model with a bunch of regular porn and a bunch of ordinary images of children and I expect it’ll figure out how to make images of children in sexual situations if you ask it to.
This has been known for years. These AIs are capable of “understanding” the things they’re trained on and creating novel interpretations of those things.
There was an article recently that showed if you trained many generations of AIs on just the outputs of previous generations you got degraded performance over time, but that’s a pretty specific scenario that doesn’t match what’s being done in real life. In real life synthetic training data (ie, AI-generated training data) can be very useful for expanding the capabilities of AI as long as it’s well-curated (humans need to select good outputs and ensure they’re described correctly) and ideally has some of the earlier training set’s original data included as well.
So basically, in order to have AIs that make better child porn, there needs to be humans willing to go through vast quantities of AI generated child porn in order to properly curate the content for the AI. Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries, being paid slave wages, I think it would be fair to add them to the list of potential victims of the creation of child porn AIs.
Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries
You don’t quite seem to understand how easy it is to train these AI models, and because of that, you’re missing a critical point - with open-source technologies like Stable Diffusion, which has models that can be refined and run on a consumer-grade graphics card, the people using models to generate images and the people creating and refining those models are the same people. People who want to generate brand new pokemon sprites can train a model on all the pokemon sprites until it looks good. A few absolute galaxy-brain nerds who want to generate MIDI spectrograms from a text description and convert the output into audio… can apparently do that. And of course, people who want to generate lots of hentai or photorealistic porn can create and fine-tune a model, or multiple models, all by themselves (I won’t link any of these, but hundreds are readily available, and thousands exist in total)
In other words, people who already consume CSAM are the people working on models for generating CP, and a subset of those have definitely been trying to make it work with only legal images so that the model itself can be distributed and used without breaking any laws, maybe even hiding in plain sight pretending it’s not for making CP. Someone else out there with a different set of fucked-up desires has probably trained a model on gore and snuff images and then used it to create “photos” of people they hate as mutilated messes. There’s sick people of all kinds all over the place, and the jury’s unfortunately still out on whether this new tool actually causes harm when used in such a manner, or if it’s just the newest way they can express their deviance. We don’t know yet.
But this genie is already out of the bottle. Banning the use of this technology for specific, narrow use cases just isn’t going to be effective without banning AI image generation entirely, and we’re past the point where that’s feasible. Image generation is a powerful tool that’s not going away; it’s on us now to figure out what we really believe about harm, health, and personal freedom, and what we want a society with this tool to look like.
Personally, I’m of a mind that if all the data going into the model is legally obtained, anything generated should be considered artistic expression. A person had a thought, then put their thoughts into a tool, which made a picture of those thoughts. No matter how repulsive those thoughts were, I think throwing people in prison for that kind of expression is thought-crime. There’s public obscenity at play, of course, but only once they take the step of showing it to other people. If it’s just for themselves, and nobody else sees it, who is harmed? Even if it does turn out that it harms the person generating the images (which wouldn’t surprise me), that makes it a health issue, like drugs or other addictions, not something to criminalize.
Except if we’re talking about allowing regulated use of AI-generated child porn as a treatment for paedophilia (which is the core discussion in this thread, whether AI-generated child porn could be helpful), then it cannot be left to paedophiles themselves to create their own models based on the honour system of promising that nobody will use photos of real children in the training data. Just like absolutely no aspect of AI can be left unregulated, trusting on everyone to behave honourably… because so far, nobody has been. Not just in the field of AI-generated child porn. All of AI has been developed with an astounding level of unethical behaviour, and it’s nothing short of complete naivety to believe that anyone is going to behave ethically going forward. If AI is to be considered in any way ethical, then it needs regulation beyond simply asking people to pinky swear that they will only use legally and ethically obtained content for training. Regulation requires oversight and enforcement, otherwise regulation is meaningless. And you can’t regulate child porn AI without having innocent human beings subjected to the inputs and outputs to ensure regulations are being followed.
As I said above, though, you don’t need to make a model that’s specifically “for child porn” in order for it to be able to generate child porn. There are already probably plenty of models that know what children look like and also know what porn looks like, made simply by teaching a model about lots of diverse subjects that happened to include both of those subject areas in them. You can even make new models by merging two existing models together or by adding more training to an existing model, so you wouldn’t even need to have those images be part of the same training run.
I obviously haven’t ever tried generating child porn, but I fired up my local Stable Diffusion with the Cyberrealistic model and generated a toddler on the moon and a toddler riding a lion. I’m reasonably confident that the model wasn’t literally trained with images of toddlers in space suits or toddlers riding large wild predators, it was trained on those concepts separately and was able to figure out for itself how to combine them. Notice how it was able to figure out that a toddler on the moon would be in a space suit and re-proportioned the space suit accordingly, and that a saddle used by a toddler would probably have handlebars (I’m guessing it has a bunch of images of toddlers riding ponies that it got that idea from).
@the_third@feddit.de did a very good post above explaining the problem with the idea of thinking AI-generated child porn would be as simple as asking for non-abusive photos of children to be combined with photos of adult porn. The AI needs to know what each component of the image should look like. AI knows what toddlers look like, and it knows what a lion looks like. Where do you propose the photos of child genitals should come from in order to create these ethical AI-generated child abuse images?
Another worry could be: how do you know if it’s a real victim who needs help, or an AI generated image.
If we had access to the original model, we could give it the same seed and prompt and get the exact image back. Or, we could mandate techniques like statistical fingerprinting. Without the model though, it’s proven to be mathematically impossible the better models get in the coming years - and what do you do if they take a real image, compress it into an embedding, then reassemble it?
Many “AI generated” images are actually very close to individual images from their training data so it’s debatable how much difference there is between looking at a generated image and just looking at an image from its training data in some cases at least.
That’s a symptom of overfitting, which requires the image to be repeated in the training hundreds or even thousands of times. That generally only happened in earlier image generation models, more “modern” ones (“modern” in this case being measured in months because this is such a fast-developing technology) have much better curation of their training sets to avoid exactly that sort of thing. Nobody wants AI image generators that replicate images from their training sets, what would be the point?
So if you want to find an image model that gives you a close duplicate of an existing image of child abuse, you’ll need to find one that was sloppily trained with a training set that included hundreds of duplicates of child abuse imagery. I kind of doubt you’ll be able to find one of those.
I am sort of curious, bc I don’t know: of all the types of sexual abuse that happens to children, ie being molested by family or acquaintances, being kidnapped by the creep in the van, being trafficked for prostitution, abuse in church, etc etc… in comparison to these cases, how many cases deal exclusively with producing imagery?
Next thing I’m curious about: if the internet becomes flooded with AI generated CP images, could that potentially reduce the demand for RL imagery? Wouldn’t the demand-side be met? Is the concern normalization and inducing demand? Do we know there’s any significant correlation between more people looking and more people actually abusing kids?
Which leads to the next part: I play violent video games and listen to violent aggressive music and have for many years now and I enjoy it a lot, and I’ve never done violence to anybody before, nor would I want to. Is persecuting someone for imagining/mentally roleplaying something that’s cruel actually a form of social abuse in itself?
Props to anybody who asks hard questions btw, bc guaranteed there will be a lot of bullying on this topic. I’m not saying “I’m right and they’re wrong”, but there’s a lot of nuance here and people here seem pretty quick to hand govt and police incredible powers for… I dunno… how much gain really? You’ll never get rights back that you throw away. Never. They don’t make 'em anymore these days.
deleted by creator
How often does tracking child abuse imagery lead to preventing actual child abuse? Out of all the children who are abused each year, what percentage of their abusers are tracked via online imagery? Aren’t a lot of these cases IRL/situationally based? That’s what I’m trying to determine here. Is this even a good use of public resources and/or focus?
As for how you personally feel about the imagery, I believe that a lot of things humans do are gross, but I don’t believe we should be arbitrarily creating laws to restrict things that others do that I find appalling… unless there’s a very good reason to. It’s extremely dangerous to go flying too fast down that road, esp with anything related to “terror/security” or “for the children” we need to be especially careful. We don’t need another case of “Well in hindsight, that [war on whatever] was a terrible idea and hurt lots and lots of people”
And let’s be absolutely clear here: I 100% believe that people abusing children is fucked up, and the fact that I even need to add this disclaimer here should be a red flag about the dangers of how this issue is structured.
deleted by creator
It already is outlawed in the US. The US bans all depictions precisely because of this. The courts anticipated that there would come a time when people could create images which are indistinguishable from reality so allowing any content to be produced wasn’t permissible.
I appreciate you posting the link to my question, but that’s an article written from the perspective of law enforcement. They’re an authority, so they’re incentivized to manipulate facts and deceive to gain more authority. Sorry if I don’t trust law enforcement but they’ve proven themselves untrustworthy at this point
I respect your boldness to ask these questions, but I don’t feel like I can adequately answer them. I wrote a 6 paragraph essay but using GPT-4 as a sensitivity reader, I don’t think I can post it without some kind of miscommunication or unintentional hurt. Instead, I’ll answer the questions directly by presenting non-authoritative alternate viewpoints.
- No idea, maybe someone else knows
- That makes sense to me; I would think there would be a strong pressure to present fake content as real to avoid getting caught but they’re already in deep legal trouble anyway and I’m sure they get off to it too. It’s hard to know for sure because it’s so stigmatized that the data are both biased and sparse. Good luck getting anyone to volunteer that information
- I consider pedophilia (ie the attraction) to be amoral but acting on it to be “evil”, ala noncon, gore, necrophilia, etc. That’s just from consistent application of my principles though, as I haven’t humanized them enough to care that pedophilia itself is illegal. I don’t think violent video games are quite comparable because humans normally abhor violence, so there’s a degree of separation, whereas CP is inherently attractive to them. More research is needed, if we as a society care enough to research it.
- I don’t quite agree, rights are hard-won and easy-lost but we seem to gain them over time. Take trans rights to healthcare for example - first it wasn’t available to anyone, then it was available to everyone (trans or not), now we have reactionary denials of those rights, and soon we’ll get those rights for real, like what happened with gay rights. Also, I don’t see what rights are lost in arguing for the status quo that pedophilia remain criminalized? If MAPs are any indication, I’m not sure we’re ready for that tightrope, and there are at least a dozen marginalized groups I’d rather see get rights first. Unlike gay people for instance, being “in the closet” is a net societal good because there’s no valid way to present that publicly without harming children or eroding their protections.
Points about real stuff hiding in a sea of fake stuff aside, because these ais would likely have been trained on images of real children and potentially real abuse material, each new generated image could be considered a re-exploitation of that child.
Of course, i don’t think that’s true in a legal sense but definitely in an emotional and moral sense. I mean look at the damage deepfakes have done to the mentals for so many celebrities and other victims, then imagine literally a minor trying to move past one of the most traumatic things that could have happened to them
I really don’t think it would actually be trained on that specific data to be able to create it. If it can figure out a blueberry dog “child naked” seems pretty boring.
The issue here is that it enables those who would make the actual CP to hide their work easier in the flood of generated content.
Animesque art is one thing, photorealistic is another. Neither actually harms an underaged person by existing, but photorealistic enables actual abusers to hide themselves easily. So IMO, photorealistic ‘art’ of this sort needs to be criminalized so that it can not be used as a mask for actual CP.
If their work gets flooded then wouldn’t that decrease incentive to produce it?
Now that CSAM content is generated by bigcos with deep pockets, politicians don’t want to scan their servers or take any other action. These are the same demagogues who wanted to kill end-to-end encryption and scan ordinary people’s devices in the name of CSAM. Greedy and hypocritical vermin.
Normally I err on the side of ‘art’ being separated from actual pictures/recordings of abuse. It falls under the “I don’t like what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it” idea.
Photorealistic images of CP? I think that crosses the line, and needs to be treated as if it was actual CP as it essentially enables real CP to proliferate.
I keep seeing people post this same idea, and I see no proof that it would actually happen.
Why would you need “real” CP if there’s like-for-like-quality AI CP out there?
Also, aside from going out of our way to wreck the lives of individuals who look at the stuff, is there any actual concrete stats that say we’re preventing any sort of significant number of RL child abuse by giving up rights to privacy or paying FBI agents to post CP online and entrap people? I Don’t get behind the “if it theoretically helped one single child, I’d genocide a nation…” bs. I want to see what we’ve gained so far by these policies before I agree to giving govt more power by expanding them.
This is a difficult one to get morally ‘right’, but I can see how legal (or at least not-all-out-illegal) AI CP could make the situation worse. Given today’s technological advances, it will be next to impossible for law enforcement to reliably distinguish between illegal real CP and not-illegal artificial CP, meaning images and videos of actual child abuse cannot be used as evidence in court anymore, as the defendant can just claim that it’s AI-generated.
Second, while a lot of consumers of CP might be happy with AI material, I expect that for a substantial number, the real thing will be considered superior or a special treat… much as many consumers of ‘normal’ porn prefer amateur porn over mass-produced studio flicks.
The two combined would mean there’s still a considerable market for real CP, but the prosecution of child abusers would be much, much harder.See the biggest issue is that there isn’t an easy way to test any hypothesis here. For a pretty big obvious issue if you look at it.
You get wrong building a battery you maybe burn a building down, you get it wrong trying to cure pedophilia, you end up with a molested or hurt kid at worst. And a lot more people are gonna have strong emotions about the child than a building even if more lives are lost in the fire.
It’s such a big emotionally charged thing to get wrong. How do you agree to take the risk when no one would feel comfortable with the worst outcome?
So instead it’s easy and potentially just proper to push it aside and blanket say “bad”. And I hate black or white issues. But it’s impossible to answer without doing and impossible to do without and answer.
See the biggest issue is that there isn’t an easy way to test any hypothesis here.
If I had to speculate I could see both turning out to be true. There are probably some pedophiles whom AI CP will help handle the urge, and some for whom the readily available content will make actual abuse more morally acceptable. But then again, we’ll probably never know for sure unless we find some criteria like in your nice battery example. Criteria such as “is the building on fire” give you quick and near-immediate feedback on whether or not you’ve been successful.
The discussion reminds me of the never-ending debate on whether drugs should be legal though. If there should be tests with AI CP, could there be a setup similar to that of supplying recovering heroine addicts (and only them) with methadone? This would allow the tests to be conducted in a controlled environment, with a control group and according to reproducible criteria.
Photorealistic images of CP? I think that crosses the line, and needs to be treated as if it was actual CP as it essentially enables real CP to proliferate.
While I absolutely don’t want to sound like I’m defending the practice (because I’m not), I’m really not too sure of this. If this was true, would similar logic apply to other AI-generated depictions of illegal or morally reprehensible situations? Do photorealistic depictions of murder make it more likely that the people going out of their way to generate or find those pictures will murder someone or seek out pictures of real murder? Will depictions of rape lead to actual rape? If the answer to those or other similar questions is “no”, then why is child porn different? If “yes”, then should we declare all the other ones illegal as well?
It’s not that I think AI-generated child porn should be accepted or let alone encouraged by any means, but as was pointed out it might actually even be counterproductive to ruin someone’s life over AI-generated material in which there is factually no victim, as reprehensible as the material may be; just because something is disgusting to most of us doesn’t mean it’s a very good justification for making it illegal if there is no victim.
The reason why I’m not convinced of the argument is that a similar one has been used when eg. arguing for censorship of video games, with the claim that playing “murder simulators” which can look relatively realistic will make people (usually children) more likely to commit violent acts, and according to research that isn’t the case.
I’d even be inclined to argue that being able to generate AI images of sexualized minors might even make it less likely for the person to move over to eg. searching for actual child porn or committing abuse as it’s a relatively easier and safer way for them to satisfy an urge. I wouldn’t be willing to bet on that though
Good thing it’s already outlawed by most places
The legality doesn’t matter, what matters is that the sites will be flooded and could be taken down if they aren’t able to moderate fast enough. The only long-term viable solution is image classification, but that’s a tall ask to make from scratch.
It’s already happening on Pixiv…
I can’t believe how hard it is to avoid drawn or generated cp on there— and you can only ignore one tag without premium, so it’s not viable to manually make a blocklist :(
That only-one-ignore-without-premium thing is really asshole design, though
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
NEW YORK (AP) — The already-alarming proliferation of child sexual abuse images on the internet could become much worse if something is not done to put controls on artificial intelligence tools that generate deepfake photos, a watchdog agency warned on Tuesday.
In a written report, the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation urges governments and technology providers to act quickly before a flood of AI-generated images of child sexual abuse overwhelms law enforcement investigators and vastly expands the pool of potential victims.
In a first-of-its-kind case in South Korea, a man was sentenced in September to 2 1/2 years in prison for using artificial intelligence to create 360 virtual child abuse images, according to the Busan District Court in the country’s southeast.
What IWF analysts found were abusers sharing tips and marveling about how easy it was to turn their home computers into factories for generating sexually explicit images of children of all ages.
While the IWF’s report is meant to flag a growing problem more than offer prescriptions, it urges governments to strengthen laws to make it easier to combat AI-generated abuse.
Users can still access unfiltered older versions of Stable Diffusion, however, which are “overwhelmingly the software of choice … for people creating explicit content involving children,” said David Thiel, chief technologist of the Stanford Internet Observatory, another watchdog group studying the problem.
Saved 78% of original text.
