I disagree. If it's impossible to tell the difference, people WILL start distributing collections of real and artificial child pornography combined while labeling it as 100% artificial. Most public websites will make both against the terms of service, but it makes it much harder for victims to get support from law enforcement to take down genuine CSAM.
Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
I wonder how people (like yourself) would would feel about "un-watermarked AI-generated CSAM is illegal, but watermarked is not". Or is is your first argument irrelevant and the second one is what actually matters to you?
> Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
I'm not sure. Is the intuition that it will lead to more? because I think there are data-based arguments to the contrary.
I'm not convinced you can stop someone from taking real CSAM, and recreating it with AI to get a copy with a watermark.
Also, assuming your correct and someday we have some watermarked attested "victimless" child pornography. I'd love to hear your best "data-based" argument that shows that predators will be satiated by pictures they have no doubt about being fake. It's laughable.
Should we allow victims of child pornography to endorse the distribution of images of themselves as a child once they are an adult too since at that point, each additional viewer doesn't generate an additional victim?
No. What it means is different. Let's use fire as an example. There is good reason for the fire brigade to come with full force every time a significant amount of smoke emerges from a high rise building. Meaning banning people from simulating a fire with the use of fog grenades and smoke machines without having clear agreement with the fire brigade is totally reasonable. It is in all our interest that the fire brigade comes when smoke is seen.
Every convincingly real CSAM encountered online has to be treated as potentially being the real thing. Even material with clear AI markers needs to be treated as such since that could be an attempt to obfuscate real material. Allowing AI generated CSAM while banning real material seems to be impossible to enforce and would only further a normalization of encountering CSAM and pedophilia.
If you catch a pedophile and they have actual CSAM on their machines, you also do not have to litigate which ones are real and which ones are fake. If fake ones are legal the burden of proof is now shifted as the pedophile can easily argue that pic that contains documented abuse of your daughter is in fact just AI generated.
Society is always about weighing rights against each other. And while "protect the children" has become the hypocritical rallying cry of politicians that want to introduce a surveillance state, in this case I would happily argue for keeping a strong stance e en as someone who has repeatedly argued against surveillance. Pedophilia is shunned in most societies for a reason and in my opinion it should remain so. If people have that unfortunate sexual urge, society does not profit from safely enabling it while producing many potential risks for actual victims and a lot of work for those policing it.
Now it is known that many pedophiles never touch a child. Normalizing pedophilia as a society would likely change that. Allowing CSAM if it is AI generated (from real training material btw.!) may change that. And this is not a thing we need.
Instead society should normalize it for non-acting pedophiles to seek therapeutic treatment.
You're just making more criminals this way. It's the same as saying air rifles that are indistinguishable from fully automatic weapons should be treated as fully automatic weapons.
I hate to extend a bad analogy, but If you rob a convenience store with an airsoft rifle that is visually indistinguishable from a real gun, you will be charged with armed robbery.
People are already using AI to generate porn of real minors, so you don't have to get hypothetical to see how the technology is used to abuse children. If it's easy for any predator to do this, then it's not hard to imagine that they will blackmail minors by threatening to release AI nudes to their friends and family unless they send them real CSAM.
You've combined two crimes into one. Robbing a bank with anything is armed robbery. My analogy is apt.
If I get pulled over with an airsoft identical to an AK47 and charged with trafficking illegal firearms, I think you will agree that I shouldn't be. It's not an AK47, it's an airsoft.
Similarly, calling AI generated imagery CSAM might be a pure category error. If there is no C being SA, it's not CSAM by definition.
Now if that imagery came about because real CSAM material was in the training data, or because someone used AI to generate sexual imagery of a real person, that's a different story. You now have a derivative work based on a real crime with real victims. But we'd also have some very real and important questions to be asking the model trainers.
In a vacuum though? Sorry no, it doesn't make any sense.
Generating sexualized pictures of minors and normalizing pedophillia is soliciting more abuse. You are willfully ignore that at this point to defend your shitty analogy. Your analogy sucks because child porn, and especially it's distribution is inherently bad for society. Trafficking an airsoft gun does nothing. Your semantic arguments about the acronym are extremely cliche especially since you know exactly what everyone means. Before some people started calling it CSAM, it was called child pornography AND IT WAS STILL ILLEGAL
Hold on, is there any evidence of this? This is a very delicate topic and gut reactions are often wrong. Playing violent video games doesn't cause violent behavior, for example.
We should be preventing harm to real children, as well as treating/managing people's psychological disorder of being attracted to children (instead of simply criminalizing it).
The war on drugs comes to mind - it criminalized a substance use disorder, gave power to organized crime, made it harder for people to seek help, allowed the market to be flooded with the most harmful versions of those substances which ultimately killed more people than it saved.
I think you're being overly emotional and haven't addressed any of my points. You just doubled down and said it's child porn again when I've stated to you a couple times that if the porn contains no child, it can't be child porn by definition.
And to be clear I'm not a consumer of such things nor am I attempting to normalize anything. I just want to find out the truth about stuff.
And yes, weapons that are indistinguishable from automatic weapons should be expected to be treated as such. I likely live in a world region with far less people dead from gun violence than you. And I gladly make that choice to keep my fellow humans alive, every single day. Only a brainwashed sociopath would not.
I know this is a different discourse in the US with different positions you all became propagandized to accept as "normal", but the numbers speak for themselves.
