Justice Thomas too forecasted that “technology may evolve to the point where it becomes impossible to enforce actual child pornography laws because the Government cannot prove that certain pornographic images are of real children.” In his view, “if technological advances thwart prosecution of ‘unlawful speech,’ the Government may well have a compelling interest in barring or otherwise regulating some narrow category of ‘lawful speech’ in order to enforce effectively laws against pornography made through the abuse of real children.”
This is interesting and I’m torn on where I stand. It should probably be illegal, but just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean it should be illegal. Any curtailing of speech cuts the impact of the first amendment. It’s something that shouldn’t be done lightly.
I don’t like the trajectory it puts us on when the government tries to tell people what is and isn’t allowed to be said or done. Free speech and expression should not be curtailed unless absolutely necessary; this goes for joining the Klan to making porn to having died hair. The limits in place for yelling fire in a theater, making credible threats, and producing real csam are there to prevent immediate harm. And yes, I know there are more and exceptions; I’m generalizing. I’m also aware of the paradox of tollerance.
With AI generated csam, assuming the training model didn’t use real csam to begin with, no person is harmed in its creation. Consumption of it could lead to harm, if it normalizes the behavior, making it seem alright for someone to harm a real child. On the otherhand, maybe having it could help keep someone’s desires under control by giving them an outlet.
Has expert research been done on this? Though it might be hard to research. Given the subject matter, I’d imagine it’d be difficult to find a sample group large enough to test. Maybe based on arrest records. Peer reviewed research would help guide the direction.
If AI generated csam causes people to - who wouldn’t have otherwise - harm children, then it should be added to the list of banned speech. If not, then even though many of us will find it disgusting, it shouldn’t be made illegal. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
Again, I’m torn on this one. What thoughts do you folks have?
Edit: missed sentence.
It’s like how people instinctually want to give child rapists the death penalty: it’s counterproductive.
What it leads to is that the child now gets murdered as well, because the guy will try to minimize his chances of getting caught.
I agree, it is a fine line. Another relevant inconvenient truth is that there are pedophiles who have never acted on their urges, never harmed a child, and have even sought appropriate therapy to manage their mental state. Yet at the end of the day, they are still literally pedophiles.
Japan seems to be the canary in the coal mine for this issue. They have long made it legal to draw manga “pornography” featuring apparently underage characters, as long as it doesn’t depict an actual child in any way. This is a vice mini-doc on the subject from a few years ago.
People in that culture try to make the argument that it gives pedophiles a way to manage their feelings without harming any children. But in reality, it’s seeming more like giving suicidal patients access to guns. The challenge seems to be that: philosophically we want universal free speech, but biologically the human brain isn’t evolved to control itself in that environment. You’re not staving off a pedophiles’ urges, you end up nurturing them. You create a subculture that embraces this mental state as acceptable and normalized. It would be like…building Westworld robots for serial killers to abuse. Surely nothing good will come from creating a safe space in society for people with these urges.
I personally do not agree with any laws against speech, and also I don’t think anyone should ever create “artificial” CSAM in any capacity. But I don’t know how to square that circle. Because if you try to just make a blanket law against it, on the one hand people will find ways to skirt the line, slowly developing arguably even more depraved genres; and on the other hand you’ll have rulings against perfectly above-board, consensual pornography/speech, just because a politician doesn’t like it (as have been attempted many times throughout history, and remains a concerted goal of the right to this day).
I have to assume this is what it feels like to be an old-fashioned puritan, seeing a clear line between pornographic content and the erosion of society. But in this case, I think that’s where I am. I just don’t think it’s ok for the future of society to normalize artificial CSAM.
Why assume when there is data? The rates of child sexual abuse are about the same in Japan.
For your assumption to hold, the rate would need to be higher. The data says it doesn’t matter.
Caveat, only numbers I can find are child abuse survivor rates. But if reducing abuse rate outcomes is the goal these numbers feel adequate.
The rate might be higher in Japan specificaly because it’s normalised. If the victims themselves don’t see any wrong with what happened to them and bystanders too, then it’s way less likely to be repported.
SA cases have been seen to be heavily underepported in Japan. Upskirts were normalized too, for reference, and they had to force the cameras to make shutter sounds when taking pictures to try to solve the issue. Still, people mod their phones to circumvent it, and the demand for such content is still high, hence encouraging the practice more.
This is a big contingency in your argument, and it’s not an assumption we can make.
The stochastic copy and paste machine needs similar input to what it is expected to output. That’s why there is an immense effort to collect as much data as possible from everything right now. If the relevant data isn’t in the training set then it can’t produce a related output.
You can train models on the output of other models, but at some point the original csam was produced and then processed for patterns by the machine. If you just copy those tagged patterns your still basing your output on very real csam.
Historically the US has banned all forms of csam including hand drawn or generated. This is a shift in that paradigm which now opens the flood gates for investigators as it dilutes real cases with facsimiles generated from real cases.
I’m not a free speech absolutist. There are categories of speech that should be protected and categories of speech that should not; and there are actions and products that absolutely should not belong in the “speech” category to begin with. Spending money is not speech, taking and owning pictures is not speech, and generating pictures of children being abused is not speech. There’s no reason any of that should be bundled up in our overly broad web of “speech” just cause we want to err on the side of personal liberty over common good and protection of this vulnerable in society.
Sort of, but not necessarily to the degree this comment suggests.
A good image generation model can create a photorealistic image of a child riding a three-headed dragon flying over the surface of Mars. It has definitely never seen a real image of that, or one of the major components of it. The copying is at a lower level than the whole scene, and the presence of an element in the output does not imply exactly that element was in the training data.
There have been cases of models being withdrawn after discovery that they were trained on actual CSAM, and allegations that Grok was trained on CSAM in a recent lawsuit. It seems reasonable to me to treat a model trained on CSAM as CSAM itself in most cases.
The model has seen images of dragons (likely even multiheaded ones), children, riding, and Mars. Those existing images are what allows it to pick the appropriate patterns and draw an output.
There are significant physiological differences between a child’s body and an adult’s. If you don’t have a collection of naked children to pick from it will be difficult to produce naked children to the extent indistinguishable from actual pictures of abuse. You might can get partway there building off a chain of descriptors based on an adult model, but I don’t think you’re getting all the way to photorealistic child abuse material without the context trained on child abuse material.
I’m absolutely not willing to test my hypothesis, however, for what I hope are fairly obvious reasons.
There are adult porn models who have popularity based on how youthful their appearance is. Small, even almost flat chests, for example. Which is to say that AI knows how to draw those bodies proportionately. Take those models, add in pictures of children in swimsuits, and AI has all the information to infer what a nude child looks like.
And that’s before opening up the extremely gray area of perfectly legal photos which nonetheless depict nude children.
The reality is if you try to scrape all available images from the internet you will unavoidably ingest CSAM, but even if you could perfectly filter that out, AI would be able to easily create such depictions.
This hints at another issue: most nudity is not pornographic. A model could, for example be trained on medical and scientific imagery, or just innocent family photos; it’s my impression photos containing nude young children were more acceptable in the pre-digital era. It’s certainly distasteful that AI companies are training on such material without explicit permission from the subjects, but that’s true of almost all AI training material.
I share your unwillingness to test how good image generation models are at making a realistic facsimile of CSAM. Legal or not, that’s yucky and I don’t want to look at it.
To play devil’s advocate: those training pictures already exist, and AI generating fake images means another child wasn’t harmed.
I didn’t make any argument and thought I was clear that I wasn’t going to make an argument, one way or another. I also stated that it should probably be illigal though I’m torn on it.
I’m also not a free speech absolutist. There are things that need curtailed. I’m just hesitant to add more to that list as it can easily go too far, depending on who is in power. We see that world wide right now with Free Palestine.
Free speech isn’t just about something spoken, it’s about expression as well. Taking and owning pictures is part of free speech. Limiting porn to 18+ is a great limitation and should not be changed.
These are all arguments. Non committing doesn’t mean you aren’t making arguments. I was focusing specially on your 3rd argument as it was the most unfounded in my opinion.