How they’ve done it in the past is by tracking the criminal history of people caught with csam, arrested for abuse, or some combination thereof, or by tracking the outcomes of people seeking therapy for pedophilia.

It’s not perfect due to the sample biases, but the results are also quite inconsistent, even amongst similar populations.

In that case probably the strongest argument is that if it were legal, many people would get off charges of real CSAM because the prosecuter can’t prove that it wasn’t AI generated.

AI can compose novel looking things from components it has been trained on - it can’t imagine new concepts. If CSAM is being generated it’s because it was included in it’s training set which is highly suspected as we know the common corpus had CSAM in it: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/investigation-finds-ai-image-generation-models-trained-child-abuse

Except in the case of pornography, it’s an open question if viewing it has a net increase or decrease in sexual desire.
With legal pornography, it’s typically correlated with higher sexual desire. This tracks intuitively, since the existence of pornography does not typically seem to line up with a drop in people looking for romantic partners.

There’s little reason to believe it works the other way around for people attracted to children.
What’s unknown is if that desire is enough to outweigh the legal consequences they’re aware of, or any social or ethical boundaries present.
Studies have been done, but finding people outside of the legal system who abuse children is exceptionally difficult, even before the ethical obligation to report them to the police would trash the study.
So the studies end up focusing either on people actively seeking treatment for unwanted impulses (less likely to show a correlation), or people engaged with the legal system in some capacity (more likely to show correlation).

Holy strawman, Batman! Just because someone uses the term “gateway” doesn’t mean they think that games and weed are going to turn all people and frogs gay and violent.

Two things:

• please don’t generate child like pornography. Legal or not it’s disturbing and gross to even think about.
• Yes, per the law it must be “virtually indistinguishable”. “the term ‘indistinguishable’ used with respect to a depiction, means virtually indistinguishable, in that the depiction is such that an ordinary person viewing the depiction would conclude that the depiction is of an actual minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults.”. If it looks like a “real” elf and not a child wearing an elf costume it would be fine.

So long as an ordinary person would know that it’s not a real child being abused, or a real child being depicted (placing a real child’s face on a compromising photo), it’s protected, albeit extremely unpleasant, speech.

I guess my question is, why would anyone continue to “consume” – or create – real csam? If fake and real are both illegal, but one involves minimal risk and 0 children, the only reason to create real csam is for the cruelty – and while I’m sure there’s a market for that, it’s got to be a much smaller market. My guess is the vast majority of “consumers” of this content would opt for the fake stuff if it took some of the risk off the table.

I can’t imagine a world where we didn’t ban ai generated csam, like, imagine being a politician and explaining that policy to your constituents. It’s just not happening. And i get the core point of that kind of legislation – the whole concept of csam needs the aura of prosecution to keep it from being normalized – and normalization would embolden worse crimes. But imagine if ai made real csam too much trouble to produce.

AI generated csam could put real csam out of business. If possession of fake csam had a lesser penalty than the real thing, the real stuff would be much harder to share, much less monetize. I don’t think we have the data to confirm this but my guess is that most pedophiles aren’t sociopaths and recognize their desires are wrong, and if you gave them a way to deal with it that didn’t actually hurt chicken, that would be huge. And you could seriously throw the book at anyone still going after the real thing when ai content exists.

Obviously that was supposed to be children not chicken but my phone preferred chicken and I’m leaving it.

The problem is that the only way to train an AI model is on real images, so the model can’t exist without crimes and suffering having been committed.

It is illegal in Canada to have sexual depictions of a child whether its a real image or you’ve just sat down and drawn it yourself. The rationale being that behavior escalated, and looking at images goes to wanting more

It borders on thought crime which I feel kind of high about but only pedophiles suffer which I feel great about. There’s no legitimate reason to have sexualized image of a child whether computer geneerate, hand drawn, or whatever.

Just to play devil’s advocate:

What about hentai where little girls get fondled by tentacles? (Please please please don’t make this be my most up voted post)

What he probably means is that for a “photo”, an actual act of photography must be performed. While “artwork” can be fully digital. Now, legal definition aside, the two acts are indeed different even if the resulting “image” is a bit-by-bit equivalent. A computer could just output something akin to a photograph but no actual act of photography has taken place. I said the legal definition aside because I know the legal definition only looks at the resulting image. Just trying to convey the commenter words better.

Edit to clarify a few things.

This would also outlaw “teen” porn as they are explicitly trying to look more childlike as well as models that only appear to be minors.

I get the reason people think it’s a good thing but all censorship has to be narrowly tailored to content lest it be too vague or overly broad.

Not necessarily. There’s been a lot of advances in watermarking AI outputs.

That presumes that the image generation is being done by some corporation or government entity that adds the watermarks to AI outputs and doesn’t add them to non-AI outputs. I’m not thrilled that AI of this sort exists at all, but given that it does, I’d rather not have it controlled by such entities. We’re heading towards a world where we can all run that stuff on our own computers and control the watermarks ourselves. Is that good or bad? Probably bad, but having it under the exclusive control of megacorps has to be even worse.

Is the average user really going to risk prison, pay a huge amount of money or harm a child with an even greater prison risk when effectively identical material is available for free?

Average users aren’t pedophiles and it would appear that yes they would considering he did exactly that. He had access to tools that generated the material for free, which he then used to entice boys.

Well, you don’t hear many people decrying the places that already have. Canada many US states, parts of Europe too have outlawed sexual imagery of children, real or fake.

I am just proposing that that should be the standard approach going forward, for the sole fact that the fake stuff is identical to the real stuff and real stuff can be used to make more convincing “fake” stuff.

Right, but what I am suggesting is that laws should be worded to criminalize any sexualized depiction of children, not just ones with a real victim. It is no longer as simple to prove a photograph or video is actual CSAM with a real victim, making it easier for real abuse to avoid detection.

Oh cmon they don’t hoard the money. They use it to pay each other/politicians to make sure the status quo remains.

it currently can make CSAM because it’s trained on CSAM

That is a non sequitur. I don’t see any reason to believe such a cause and effect relationship. The claim is at least falsifiable in principle though. Remove whatever CSAM found its way into the training set, re-run the training to make a new model, and put the same queries in again. I think you are saying that the new model should be incapable of producing CSAM images, but I’m extremely skeptical, as your medieval castle example shows. If you’re now saying the quality of the images might be subtly different, that’s the no true Scotsman fallacy and I’m not impressed. Synthetic images in general look impressive but not exactly real. So I have no idea how realistic the stuff this person was arrested for was.

If AI has the means to generate inappropriate material, then that means the developers have allowed it to train from inappropriate material.

That’s not how generative AI works. It’s capable of creating images that include novel elements that weren’t in the training set.

Go ahead and ask one to generate a bonkers image description that doesn’t exist in its training data and there’s a good chance it’ll be able to make one for you. The classic example is an “avocado chair”, which an early image generator was able to produce many plausible images of despite only having been trained on images of avocados and chairs. It understood the two general concepts and was able to figure out how to meld them into a common depiction.

A person (the arrested software engineer from the article) acquired a tool (a copy of Stable Diffusion, available on github) and used it to commit crime (trained it to generate CSAM + used it to generate CSAM).

That has nothing to do with the developer of the AI, and everything to do with the person using it. (hence the arrest…)

I stand by my analogy.

Sounds to me it would be more like outlawing grand pianos because of all of the dead elephants - while some people are claiming that it is possible to make a grand piano without killing elephants.

Do… Do you really think the creators/developers of Stable Diffusion (the AI art tool in question here) trained it on CSAM before distributing it to the public?

Or are you arguing that we should be allowed to do what’s been done in the article? (arrest and charge the individual responsible for training their copy of an AI model to generate CSAM)

One, AI image generators can and will spit out content vastly different than anything in the training dataset (this ofc can be influenced greatly by user input). This can be fed back into the training data to push the model towards the desired outcome. Examples of the desired outcome are not required at all. (IE you don’t have to feed it CSAM to get CSAM, you just have to consistently push it more and more towards that goal)

Two, anyone can host an AI model; it’s not reserved for big corporations and their server farms. You can host your own copy and train it however you’d like on whatever material you’ve got. (that’s literally how Stable Diffusion is used) This kind of explicit material is being created by individuals using AI software they’ve downloaded/purchased/stolen and then trained themselves. They aren’t buying a CSAM generator ready to use off the open market… (nor are they getting this material from publicly operating AI models)

They are acquiring a tool and moulding it into a weapon of their own volition.

Some tools you can just use immediately, others have a setup process first. AI is just a tool, like a hammer. It can be used appropriately, or not. The developer isn’t responsible for how you decide to use it.

Image AIs also don’t act or respond on their own. You have to prompt them.

I learned how to write by reading. The AI did the same, more or less, no?