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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
No, I don’t think it is easy with movies or books, unless you are certain of the source, or have knowledge of the subject matter so extraordinarily detailed that you can spot a fake.
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.
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
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 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.
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?
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
Another worry could be: how do you know if it’s a real victim who needs help, or an AI generated image.
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
Good thing it’s already outlawed by most places
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Okay… So correct me if I’m wrong, but being abused as a child is like… one of the biggest predictors of becoming a pedophile. So like… Should we preemptively go after these people? You know… To protect the kids?
How about single parents that expose their kids to strangers when dating. That’s a massive vector for kids to be exposed to child abuse.
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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
Of all the problems and challenges with this idea, this is probably the easiest to solve technologically. If we assume that AI-generated material is given the ok to be produced, the AI generators would need to (and easily can, and arguably already should) embed a watermark (visible or not) or digital signature. This would prevent actual photos from being presented as AI. It may be possible to remove these markers, but the reasons to do so are very limited in this scenario.
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I was actually specifically avoiding all of those concerns in my reply. They’re valid, and others are discussing them on this thread, just not what my reply was about.
I was exclusively talking about how to identify if an image was generated by AI or was a real photo.
I was exclusively talking about how to identify if an image was generated by AI or was a real photo.
These images are being created with open source / free models. Whatever watermark feature the open source code has will simply be removed by the criminal.
Watermarking is like a lock on a door. Keeps honest people honest… which is useful, but it’s not going to stop any real criminals.
In this specific scenario, you wouldn’t want to remove the watermark.
The watermark would be the only thing that defines the content as “harmless” AI-generated content, which for the sake of discussion is being presented as legal. Remove the watermark, and as far as the law knows, you’re in possession of real CSAM and you’re on the way to prison.
The real concern would be adding the watermark to the real thing, to let it slip through the cracks. However, not only would this be computationally expensive if it was properly implemented, but I would assume the goal in marketing the real thing could only be to sell it to the worst of the worst, people who get off on the fact that children were abused to create it. And in that case, if AI is indistinguishable from the real thing, how do you sell criminal content if everyone thinks it’s fake?
Anyways, I agree with other commenters that this entire can of worms should be left tightly shut. We don’t need to encourage pedophilia in any way. “Regular” porn has experienced selection pressure to the point where taboo is now mainstream. We don’t need to create a new market for bored porn viewers looking for something shocking.
The real concern would be adding the watermark to the real thing, to let it slip through the cracks. However, not only would this be computationally expensive if it was properly implemented,
It wouldn’t be expensive, you could do it on a laptop in a few seconds.
Unless, of course, we decide only large corporations should be allowed to generate images and completely outlaw all of the open source / free image generation software - that’s not going to happen.
Most images are created with a “diffusion” model where you take an image, and run an algorithm that slightly modifies it. Over and over and over until you get what you want. You don’t have to (and commonly don’t - for the best results) start with a blank image. And you can run just a single pass, with the output being almost indistinguishable from the input.
This is a hard problem to solve and I think catching abuse after it happens is increasingly going to be more difficult. Better to focus on stopping the abuse from happening in the first place. E.g. by flagging and investigating questionable behaviour by kids in schools. That approach is proven and works well.
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?
Isnt it better the are AI generated than real? Pedophiles exist and wont go away and no one can control it. So best they watch AI images than real ones or worse
AI needs training data.
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Images, yes, but mixing concepts is a mixed bag. Just because the model can draw, say, human faces and dog faces doesn’t mean it has the understanding necessary to blend those concepts. Without employing specialised models (and yes of course the furries have been busy) the best you’ll get is facepaint. The pope at a beach bar doesn’t even come close to exercising that kind of capability: The pope is still the pope and the beach bar is still the beach bar, and a person is still sitting there slurping a caipirinha.
I just leave this link here as counter point (somewhat NSFW):
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11un888/flamboyant_origami_fgures/
A whole lot of weird stuff can be created by bashing things together with AI. The beauty of AI is after all that you can “edit” with high level concepts, not just raw pixels.
And as for humans and dogs: https://imgur.com/a/TdXO7tz
Mixing with a basic prompt isn’t where the AI’s strengths lie, though. Selecting different parts of the image and giving each part a different description is the best way to get AI art out of the models that you can distribute yourself.
This AI has been fed so much porn that it can combine concepts like “big breasts” as easily as “a tree”. This leads to some hilarious mistakes (like adding multiple rows of breasts when it tries to combine “woman” and “big breasts”) but with basic masking and inpainting you can correct all that.
I’m all for banning AI models trained on child abuse imagery¹, but the assertion that AI generated child porn must be based on a model trained on existing illegal material is simply not true.
¹ unlike many AI enthusiasts, I consider AI models to contain significant parts of the training set, which is why I think models trained on illegal material shouldn’t be redistributed and generated AI artwork should be considered derivative works of the many images that are part of the original dataset. Same goes for ChatGPT.
I mean if you train a model on porn with adult actors and on regular photos with children, it shouldn’t be hard to generate the combination.
You probably wouldn’t even need any fancy training data but if you really wanted you could pick adult actors that look young or in other ways similar to the children to help the process.
Knowing what a nude adult looks like doesn’t mean that the model knows what a nude child looks like. I’m quite sure it’s easy to generate disturbing images like that, but actual paedophiles I think won’t be satisfied with child faces on small adult bodies.
Ordinary deepfakes actually have a very similar problem: Sure you can take a picture of a celebrity and tell the AI to undress them – but it won’t be their actual body. The AI is going to be able to approximate their overall build but it’s going to be a generic adult body, not the celebrity’s body. Or, differently put, AI models aren’t any better at undressing people with their eyes than teenagers.
I see where you’re coming from but that’s a technical issue that will probably be solved in time.
It’s also really not a black and white; sure maybe you can see it isn’t perfect but you’d still prefer it to content where you know no one was actually harmed.
Despite what reputation people like that have (due to the simple fact of how reporting works), most are harmless like me and you and don’t actually want to see innocent people suffer and would never act on their desires. So having a safe and harmless outlet might help.
I see where you’re coming from but that’s a technical issue that will probably be solved in time.
You cannot create information from nothing.
So having a safe and harmless outlet might help.
Psychologists/Psychiatrists are still on the fence on that one, I wouldn’t be surprised if it depends on the person. And yes the external harm produced by AI images is definitely lower than that produced from actual CSAM, doubly so newly produced CSAM, but that doesn’t mean that therapy, even in its current early stages, couldn’t do even better.
Differently put: We may be again falling into the trap of trying to find technological solutions to societal problems (well, this is /c/technology…). Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t care at all about models trained on CSAM, but that’s addressing symptoms, not causes. Ultimately addressing root causes is more important: The vast majority of paedophiles are not exclusive paedophiles, often they’re not even really attracted to kids at all beyond having developed a fetish, they’re rapists focussing on the most vulnerable, often due to having been victims of sexual abuse themselves.
I dunno, you seen the stats on popularity of shemale porn? Pretty sure the human brain isn’t that picky. It goes: “boobs check. Cock insertion check.”
That’s a bisexual/bicurious double-whammy, not really comparable.
Yeah exactly, I don’t want to see it but the same goes for a lot of weird fetishes.
As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.
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It doesn’t seem right to me to prosecute someone for computer generated images.
A “weird fetish” is, quite literally a paraphilia, just like pedophilia. We only care about the latter because it has the potential to hurt people if acted upon. There’s no difference, medically speaking.
A lot of the comments in here seem a little bit too sympathetic.
When you want to solve an issue you need to understand the people having it and have some compassion, which tends to include stuff like defending people who didn’t actually do anything harmful from being grouped with the kind who do act on their urges.
Humans also tend to possess an abusive tendency, where, once they can justify labeling somebody as “bad” they can justify being cruel to them. I see people doing it all the time.
A lot of the comments in here seem a little bit too sympathetic
It is a mental illness. If fake images result in less real-world abuse then that’s a good thing.
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Do you think people that are gay are mentally ill? Do you think those people choose specifically to be attracted to people from the same sex? A lot of the same things can de said about people that are attracted to kids.
I’m not trying to say we should in any shape or form tolerate child abuse. But it’s important that we recognize that there are people like this and they didn’t choose to be that way. People have no problem to talk about punishment, but don’t like to also accept that they are also victims in a way.
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This took me 2 seconds to google.
Perhaps the most serious accusation against pornography is that it incites sexual aggression. But not only do rape statistics suggest otherwise, some experts believe the consumption of pornography may actually reduce the desire to rape by offering a safe, private outlet for deviant sexual desires.
“Rates of rapes and sexual assault in the U.S. are at their lowest levels since the 1960s,” says Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The same goes for other countries: as access to pornography grew in once restrictive Japan, China and Denmark in the past 40 years, rape statistics plummeted. Within the U.S., the states with the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and therefore the least access to Internet pornography—experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the states with the most access experienced a 27 percent drop in the number of reported rapes, according to a paper published in 2006 by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University.
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Not saying it is impossible, but the simple fact that internet exists or not is absolutely not indicative of porn having a positive or negative effect. It is a pretty weak article to use as evidence against what I am saying when it states clearly that these are only associations and correlations and essentially guesswork.
It’s more than you’ve provided.
The model being able to generate something convincingly means it has seen equivalent examples, at least of parts of it in large enough quantity. That in itself means the model can’t exist in an ethical way.
Eh… I’m skeptical.
I’m not sure that has to be true. Like you can ask an AI to give you a picture of a sailboat on the moon, while it has not ever seen a sailboat on the moon.
It could be trained on photos that are not pornografic containing kids and images that are pornografic containing adults.
As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.
It’d be hard to actually meet that premise, though. People are getting hurt.
Child abuse imagery is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims. Extending that financial/economic analogy, seeding that economy with liquidity, in a financial sense, might or might not incentivize the creation of new authentic child abuse imagery (that requires a child victim to create). That’s not as clear, but what is clear is that it would reduce the transaction costs of distributing existing child abuse imagery, which is a form of re-victimizing those who have already been abused.
Child abuse imagery is also used as a grooming technique. Normalization of child sexual activity is how a lot of abusers persuade children to engage in sexual acts. Providing victimless “seed” material might still result in actual abuse happening down the line.
If the creation of AI-generated child abuse imagery begins to give actual abusers and users of real child abuse imagery cover, to where it becomes more difficult to investigate the crime or secure convictions against child rapists, then the proliferation of this technology would make it easier to victimize additional children without consequences.
I’m not sure what the latest research is on the extent to which viewing and consuming child porn would lead to harmful behavior down the line (on the one hand, maybe it’s a less harmless outlet for unhealthy urges, but on the other hand, it may feed an addictive cycle that results in net additional harm to society).
I’m sure there are a lot of other considerations and social forces at play, too.
I mean you could also go with a more sane model that still represses the idea while allowing some controlled environment for people whom it can really help.
You could start by not prosecuting posession, only distribution. So it would still be effectively “blocked” everywhere like it’s (attempted to be) now, but distributing models for generation would be fine.
Or you could create “known safe” (AI generated) ‘datasets’ to distribute to people, while knowing it was ethically created.
is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims
A huge part of the idea is that if you create a surplus of supply it cannot work as a currency and actual abuse material will be drowned out and not wort it to create for the vast majority of people - too risky and irrelevant if you have a good enough alternative.
You’re definitely right though that there would have to be more considerations.
You seem to think it’s some kind of human right and people are entitled to have fapping material provided for them. No one is hurt if people don’t have fapping material.
There is an argument to be made that allowing people with unhealthy desires a safe and harmless outlet, they will be less compelled to go with the harmful option.
And, actually, I kinda want to disagree with the premise too. Even if it was provably true that noone gets hurt if there wasn’t porn, you can flip the question; why should it be banned if it doesn’t hurt anyone? Do you want to live in a world where anything that’s perceived as bad is just outright banned without much thought?
You are already making assumptions about whether or not producing artificial CP is harmful. But in truth nobody knows. And studies have shown that media indeed does influence us. It’s quite naive to assume that somehow just porn doesn’t.
Artificial or not, this isn’t really a new idea. A similar argument can be made for existing CSAM and providing it under controlled conditions.
And yeah, “nobody knows”, in huge part because doing such a study would be highly illegal under current CSAM laws in most parts of the world. So, paradoxically, you can’t even legally study how to help those people, even if they actively want to be helped and want to help you do research on it.
Edit: Also, I’m not really making any assumptions; I literally said “there is an argument to be made”. I’m not making that argument because I don’t actually know enough. Just saying that it’s an option that should be explored.
We absolutely can make pedos go away.
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
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).
@[email protected] 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?
Medical textbooks.
Probably fine for child abuse porn in a drawn style, like loli, but probably not sufficient for the photorealistic porn that it is supposedly intended to replace.
This is ultimately the flaw in your argument that an AI can produce “new” works because it doesn’t need to have seen a toddler riding a lion on the moon to be able to produce that image. If you didn’t give AI photos of lions, it would never be able to create a lion. If you never gave it photos of toddlers, it would never be able to do a picture of a toddler. And if there were no photos of the moon in its training data, it would be incapable of producing the moon. It cannot create things it has not seen. It can only arrange things it has seen in combinations that may or may not have been previously thought of (with billions of images in the training data, you can’t say there isn’t a Photoshopped photo of a toddler on the moon in there.)
Without actual child porn in its training data, it would never be able to produce any, because even when it’s capable of piecing individual elements together into a “new” piece (basically an advanced collage), if there’s no images of children being abused in the training data, it’s not going to be able to piece it together by putting a child’s head on an adult’s naked body, and result in anything that’s more satisfactory for paedophiles than actual photos of children. There is therefore no ethical means of producing AI-generated child porn, and therefore it is not an ethical alternative. Somewhere in the chain, there are still children being abused.
I think you haven’t made much use of image-generating AIs. They’re quite capable of reinterpreting images into different styles. A very common use case for me is to draw a sketch of something and then tell an image AI to turn it photorealistic. The “automated collage” approach you describe is simply not how they work, it’s a common misconception. Image AIs very much can create imagery of things that weren’t explicitly in their training set, they’re not just regurgitating pasted-together snippets.
You’re also assuming that there are no literal photographs of children’s genitals in medical literature. Again, I haven’t exactly gone looking, but I’m sure there are some out there. Doctors can’t afford to be prudish.
And finally, you can get plenty pornographic without even specifically showing off genitals.
Oh, so you mean the photos in the training dataset that violate medical privacy, because parents who consented to photos of their child being included in textbooks and medical journals for educational purposes didn’t consent to photos of their child being used for AI-generated child porn for the sexual gratification of paedophiles? The only way photos of children from medical literature would be ethical to use for child porn is if the parents of the child have consented to that usage. Having had surgery last year, where photos were taken, I can confirm there are extensive consent forms to be filled out for what medical professionals can record (photos, videos, livestreaming, etc), and what they can use the visual records for (research, education/training, sharing cosmetic outcomes on social media, etc). Parents that will have checked the “can use photos of my child for research and education” will not have given informed consent for those photos to be inserted into an AI model for child porn, and are unlikely to give consent if “child porn AI” is a separate box on the consent form.
So… yeah, you’re not convincing me using medical photos of vulnerable children in hospital settings to create fapping material for paedophiles is an ethical use of AI technology.
And an AI without photos of lions is never going to be able to produce a photorealistic lion, even if you gave it a sketch of a lion, because it would have no frame of reference for what a lion is supposed to look like. It would make its best guess, which is fine for when it’s something that doesn’t really exist - but when humans know what a lion is meant to look like, they’ll know when an AI botches it.
Dude how are you going to regulate AI?!!
Like by all means go after people harming others, but man… You realize you have no control right? Black markets THRIVE in this world. Like fuck, they can’t even keep drugs out of prison.
The fact that regulation is imperfect doesn’t mean the solution is to do absolutely nothing and let AI be used by bad actors (including those feeding real child porn into it) with impunity.
The entire conversation in the comments here have been “well if AI child porn stops paedophiles from hurting real children, then it has a use”, but in order to prevent real children being used for the training data, it has to be regulated. In fact, you’ll find that the majority of Beehaw users (since I notice you are from a different instance) are in favour of AI being properly regulated. “Some people will break the law anyway” is no excuse not to have laws.
Sorry, I really don’t support your perspective. If you have reasonable suspicion to believe real child porn is being used in these models prove it to a judge and get a warrant. If someone is a bad actor to the point of criminal intent, prove it to a judge, and bring it to court.
That’s not how the law works.
Wrong.
Right, actually. People who aren’t law enforcement can’t just walk into a court to ask a judge to give them a warrant to take action against a criminal. That is the job of the police. And it’s the job of government to decide what constitutes breaking the law. In due time, governments will, in fact, decide that using real child porn to train AI models is illegal, and enforcing that law will remain the purpose of the police. It will never be the job of private citizens to prove it to a judge, or to do anything else to the criminal except report the crime.
Libertarian, anarchist, and sovereign citizen deulisional fantasies are not reality. The law is literally structured around not having random people enforcing the law or investigating crimes.
