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from the think-of-the-AI-generated-children dept.
On Wednesday, American attorneys general from all 50 states and four territories sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to establish an expert commission to study how generative AI can be used to exploit children through child sexual abuse material (CSAM). They also call for expanding existing laws against CSAM to explicitly cover AI-generated materials.
"As Attorneys General of our respective States and territories, we have a deep and grave concern for the safety of the children within our respective jurisdictions," the letter reads. "And while Internet crimes against children are already being actively prosecuted, we are concerned that AI is creating a new frontier for abuse that makes such prosecution more difficult."
In particular, open source image synthesis technologies such as Stable Diffusion allow the creation of AI-generated pornography with ease, and a large community has formed around tools and add-ons that enhance this ability. Since these AI models are openly available and often run locally, there are sometimes no guardrails preventing someone from creating sexualized images of children, and that has rung alarm bells among the nation's top prosecutors. (It's worth noting that Midjourney, DALL-E, and Adobe Firefly all have built-in filters that bar the creation of pornographic content.)
"Creating these images is easier than ever," the letter reads, "as anyone can download the AI tools to their computer and create images by simply typing in a short description of what the user wants to see. And because many of these AI tools are 'open source,' the tools can be run in an unrestricted and unpoliced way."
As we have previously covered, it has also become relatively easy to create AI-generated deepfakes of people without their consent using social media photos.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Immerman on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:17AM (20 children)
Oh, please won't someone think of the poor children being exploited by twisted adults using AI to generate sexual images of children who never existed?
Just think, your poor child could be being abused right this moment by some pedophile who, rather than plotting to kidnap them, is directing their dangerous appetites at AI generated porn of nonexistent children!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:10AM (10 children)
Exactly.
The rationale for banning pedo material has always been that real children have been molested to produce the material, and therefore making pedo material highly illegal will deter anyone from molesting children to produce it.
But with AI-generated content, no child was harmed. The material is still disgusting, but the reason for banning it vanishes. And yet, it's still banned.
Quite frankly, I'd rather pedos got their kicks off fake child porn, so that at least they can relieve their urges without hurting anybody. The AI-generated stuff really should be legalized if for no other reason.
Incidentally, the nonsense doesn't end there: hentai depicting child abuse too is illegal. Because you know... Think of the cartoon children!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:58AM (1 child)
Both real or fake children can be used in training data, clothed or naked, in order to produce fake but photorealistic images of specific children who have or have not been in real pornography.
In other words, infinite new poses can be created of an existing identifiable child victim, with realism ranging from cartoony to glossy to indistinguishable from a photograph.
Fifty-four of the worst people in America are on the same page. They will get the new federal law they want. It could take decades before the Supreme Court sorts out the mess, because the criminal defendants have the wrong circumstances, or plead guilt and undermine their appeals. Even then, it's unlikely that the Supreme Court will be amenable to AI-generated porn.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:19PM
So what? A child is harmed by sexual abuse.
They are NOT harmed by some sick individual who has never met them masturbating to fake images of them being subjected to abuse that never happened.
And if the individual *does* know them and has become fixated? As creepy and icky as it is, I'd much rather have a pedophile masturbating to fake images of my child being abused, than to kidnap my child to actually abuse them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:29PM (7 children)
The rationale for banning pedo material has always been that real children have been molested to produce the material
Only half true. The other rationale is that if it were freely available people might develop a taste for it. That might seem inconceivable since many investigators actually get PTSD from doing their jobs; but they weren't frog-boiled. They were thrown in the deep end. Imagine some porn site algorithm gradually feeding teenagers progressively younger and younger content, progressively more violent content, etc. Some will acquire a taste for it, and the next thing you know you've got a increased segment of society not content with simulations; they start going out and doing the real thing.
I'm not saying it's valid or not; just that it's an argument for banning that stuff even if it's AI generated and ostensibly "victimless". This is one of those areas where we bump up hard against the idea of free speech being absolute. It isn't. We err on the side of free speech, but we don't err 100%.
See also, the first time you tried a mild hot sauce and got used to it; vs. the segment of our population that dares people to eat whole Ghost Peppers or the dude who stuck a crystal of pure capsaicin on his tongue (I don't think that one ended well). The psychological theory, and that justification for banning even AI generated CP seems valid to me.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheReaperD on Monday September 11 2023, @07:00AM (4 children)
There's been some evidence that having child sex dolls could reduce the risk of a pedophile attacking a real child, but most CSAM groups have attacked it without any real counter evidence. Everyone, even at the policy level is acting almost entirely on emotion rather than taking the time to gather real evidence to find the best ways to actually protect children. Like we still sell the myth of being wary of the 'creepy stranger' when most child molesters are someone close to the child. Either a family member, teacher, coach, etc. We're so upside down on this issue because of people screaming at the top of their lungs like chickens with their head's cut off rather than anything resembling a national policy.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday September 11 2023, @05:49PM (3 children)
If you can site a study, that's interesting. Yes, there are a lot of shrill voices and emotion; but at least a study involving those dolls can be limited. Allowing mass release of AI generated CP, OTOH, can't be done as a limited study so to me the pushback on that seems reasonable. I suppose there could be a study done with a limited number of registered volunteers running over a decade or two; but it's still dicey. I'm assuming the study to which you refer was done with people already predisposed to pedophilia too, so it's a totally different aspect.
I think what you might be ignoring about the "creepy stranger" focus is that it could actually be working--the children avoid the creeps, and the creeps know that. So the creeps changed their strategy and ran long cons to gain trust instead. Take away stranger danger fear, and suddenly kids are taking candy from white vans again.
When I was really young, we had the "Boogy man", pronounced the same way as the dance. Then as an adult I heard people writing it like a bogie in golf; but anyway, it was a huge part of our childhood in a fun yet dark way. It was like Halloween, "the boogie man will get ya if you don't watch out". Scary fun. I wonder how much that's still in the culture. We had woods near the house, so of course that's where the boogie man lived. When I got old enough to go out on my own, it was part of growing up to think, "if anybody tries to attack me, I'll fend them off with a sharp stick and/or rocks". It never happened, fortunately. What did really happen is a literal white van drove up to me when I was in jr. high and they said, "do you want to make a deal?". To me that implies drugs more, but I was like "hell no" and pedaled my bike PDQ out of there.
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(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Tuesday September 12 2023, @04:56AM (2 children)
The problem is, it was preliminary and not enough to be conclusive. A dozen dolls and a pedophiles is not a national double-blind study and as far as I know no one has allowed any real study to get off the ground because too many people have already decided which aside they're on, evidence be damned. And that doesn't even take into account the politicians that want to score political points with their bases over actually protecting children. Personally, I'd rather know what actually keeps children safe. For example, instead of teaching 'watch out for the creepy stranger', we should be teaching adults what behaviors children exhibit when they're being abused. It's usually pretty dramatic and noticeable, at first, before they learn to hide it. Now, it's leaves the other side. What minimizes the chances of someone sexually attracted to children actually attacking them? And, I don't know about you, I'd prefer evidence over rhetoric.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday September 12 2023, @03:57PM (1 child)
False dichotomy? You can teach children to avoid suspicious strangers *and* teach children what's appropriate from adults they know *and* teach school staff what signs to look for.
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(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Sunday September 17 2023, @09:01AM
That would be great, if it were possible. Sadly, at the national policy level, if you expect people to learn a multi-prong nuanced policy, everyone will ignore you and do what some idiot on YouTube or Ticktock says instead. Even when you keep policies simple and focused to a couple of main points, you may still lose out to these people! But, to have any chance of getting people to listen to you, you have to keep it stupid simple and the main points can be remembered in a sentence or two. So, you have to pick your battles and choose the topics that will do the most good for the masses, even though you want to do more. It sucks, but that's reality. So, when I'm talking about points like this, it's not that I wouldn't be for dealing with it all, I'm just realistic to know that we could never make it work as a national policy, as vexing as that is.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday September 13 2023, @07:25PM
Came over here from the "deadly Dorito" article based on your link.
The argument you're making was made WRT Lolita [wikipedia.org] too. As well as many of Judy Blume's [wikipedia.org] books.
Shall we ban those too?
I'd also note that much of the the medical/psychiatric community considers pedophilia to be a sexual orientation [nih.gov] just like heterosexuality or homosexuality. As such, you won't "create" new pedophiles with fictional accounts, art, etc. whether it's AI generated or not.
That said, understanding this doesn't make acting on such desires appropriate, as prepubescent people don't have the emotional development/capacity to meaningfully consent to such activities.
I agree that it's important to take action (laws and enforcement of same as well as treatment to address those with such an orientation) to prevent the abuse and exploitation of children, but fiction is fiction in whatever media -- and no child is harmed by fictional accounts.
Video games, music and other media have also seen demands for it to be banned because "think of the children." Which is a bunch of bullshit.
N.B.: I have no sexual interest in the prepubescent and am horrified by abuse/exploitation, sexual or otherwise, of kids.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday September 14 2023, @08:20AM
That argument could be used for violent video games. Actually, it has been used, quite broadly and publicly, and based on all current data, incorrectly.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Saturday September 09 2023, @08:49AM (3 children)
I think the problem is that investigators cannot tell the difference between real and ai and don't want to investigate each image and just want to declare it all real.
(Score: 3, Touché) by driverless on Saturday September 09 2023, @10:31AM (1 child)
Well that's not hard to do, if your nonexistent-child image has six fingers, legs with three joints, and a mouth with 90 degree angles in it, then it's AI-generated.
That's actually another problem, AI generates a lot of anime-style doll-like faces, how is anyone going to be able to tell whether the doll-face attached to the 38DDs is a nonexistent child or a nonexistent adult? Can't these people get back to arguing over the satanic symbolism of pizza slices or something?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @12:37PM
We already see AI-generated images that are much better from the latest models. The anatomy needs less or no correction, and they can be much harder to distinguish from photographs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:23PM
Not really a problem - possessing child porn is already illegal in the US, even if it's hand drawn cartoons.
This law is specifically about requiring companies to prevent their AI from generating such images... somehow.
Shall we next pass a law requiring pencil makers to prevent their pencils from being used to draw child porn?
(Score: 0, Redundant) by mcgrew on Saturday September 09 2023, @01:53PM (4 children)
Oh, please won't someone think of the poor children being exploited by twisted adults using AI to generate sexual images of children who never existed?
No different from the poor children being exploited by twisted adults using their artistic skills and twisted imaginations to generate sexual images of children who never existed. Either way, seeing it might encourage a similarly evil, cruel, twisted mind to accost YOUR child and do unspeakable things to him or her.
I take it you're in favor of child porn?
Our nation is in deep shit, but it's illegal to say that on TV.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Immerman on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:14PM (2 children)
Right...because the existence of child porn causes people to become pedophiles.
I bet the existence of gay porn makes people gay too?
I'm not buying it.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:11PM (1 child)
You are right, it is an open question as to whether exposure to paraphilia materials can cause people to become a certain type of paraphile. But it's not actually relevant.
Let me tell you a story.
Imagine there are, among all the paraphilias, two kinds of paraphilia. We'll call them Wibble-o-philia and Wobble-o-philia. There is an important difference between them, but I won't say what now.
If you are living in some rural location, where you are the only Wibble-o-phile (or Wobble-o-phile) and 'coming out' will be socially disadvantageous for you, there is unlikely to be any Wibble-porn or Wobble-porn on open sale. You really don't want anyone to find out. So there's no open market for Wibble-porn or Wobble-porn. Mail order in plain brown packages, or the Internet can help here, but you have to be careful.
Move home to Bigsville. There's a part of town that has a very open and liberal culture. Nobody will censure you for being a Wibble-o-phile, and you can buy Wibble-porn in the shops. There's a market for Wibble-porn. You can make friends who like wibbling, and you can wibble with them too, and nobody thinks this is wrong. Wibbling is normalised.
But why, you wonder, is there no Wobble-porn? You ask someone.
Ah, they say, the reason is that there is a difference between Wibbling and Wobbling. Wibbling is done between consenting adults. They have a choice. Wobbling requires that at least one participant, by definition, cannot consent. So it is illegal. Of course there are people who want to buy Wobble-porn, but because to produce it requires at least one participant who can't consent, the production of Wobble-porn is also illegal.
So, someone who is a wibble-o-phile might never 'come out' when they live in the socially restrictive rural location, and never meet another wibbler. But once they are in a location where wibbling is normalised, they can come out. Did the Wibble-porn make them into a wibbler, or were they one before their environment changed? Who knows. There may be a lot of wobblers about, but they can't come out, because wobbling is not normalised, and never will be (unless ideas around consent change). Availability of Wobble-porn will tend to normalise wobbling, which might not be a good idea. It doesn't necessary make people into wobblers, but would give them an opportunity to express their wobble-nature.
The problem with Wobble-porn is that it requires a non-consenting participant. Normalising a situation in which a participant is non-consenting does not sound psychologically healthy to me - even if the Wobble-porn is fictional/artificial, it is basically saying that having non-consenting parties in a sexual activity is OK. That's not healthy. *
*To move away from Wibble & Wobble, BDSM is enacted between consenting adults (although there are some legal complications depending on jurisdictions, about what you can consent to), and usually has things like safe-words. It is generally not-OK to do sexual stuff to people without informed, positive consent. Minors, by legal definition, cannot consent.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Immerman on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:38PM
Two counterpoints:
1) The internet exists. Who gets porn delivered by mail anymore? Especially socially unacceptable porn. I doubt very much that many people have furry porn delivered to their door, regardless of its legality or a brown envelope.
2) "Coming out" is a VERY different thing than raping a child. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the more pedophiles there are who "come out", the safer children are likely to be from them.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:14PM
Any hard data on that? Or is it on the same page as the arguments against violent video games?
And for the record, I'm not for child porn, I'm just against punishing anything that doesn't harm anyone, no matter how disgusting it may be.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:48AM
Have an expert commission study the matter, huh? Maybe, they do understand that there's little to nothing the law can do, and this move is just a smokescreen to show the people they're busying themselves working on it.
Probably the commission will have to come up with some scheme no matter how implausible or invasive. Require that the AI to refuse to draw such things seems most likely. This will of course fail, because the AI is not that intelligent, and easily tricked. Like, ask it to draw a juvenile chimp. Then ask it to remove the hair, and change the face to that of a human child.
Or the triggers will be far too broad. Also, there certainly can be legitimate reasons. One of the most famous photos from the Vietnam War is of a young girl, stark naked, running for her life. Heck, maybe law enforcers themselves would need an exception, to improve their ability to identify murder victims. Anyway, law enforcers would likely prefer that the AI rat out the individuals who ask for such stuff. That's not happening, but they will ask.
(Score: 2) by Captival on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:52AM (2 children)
There's a new area of technology/modern life. The government doesn't have their noses in it yet. Therefore reasons are required for the government to step in and regulate.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Saturday September 09 2023, @04:25AM (1 child)
"Therefore reasons are required for the government to step in and regulate."
Yes for the government, but probably not for the huge multi-national business corporations. Their only mission is to grow and make more money, by any means necessary.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 09 2023, @04:48AM
Funny who's better in this situation.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Saturday September 09 2023, @03:59AM (1 child)
By that logic, we should be prosecuting Hollywood for mass homicide, aggravated burglary, grand theft auto, etc etc. If there is no victim, is there a crime? And haven't we been sufficiently warned about going down the path of "thought crime"?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @04:53AM
Yeah, but it doesn't matter, it will end up on the books anyway. They have already outlawed animated "child sex"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:36AM (4 children)
Kinda makes you wonder. Do these legal beagles get off on this sort of imagery? They get together to watch these videos, then decide that the common man shouldn't have access?
I have no empathy or sympathy for people who get off on child porn, but, new laws will be misapplied, for sure. Hell, existing law is applied to nonsense cases. Some girl sends her boyfriend a nudie, or even merely a suggestive photo. And, they both get busted for child porn? FFS, give it a break!
https://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/08/galanos.sexting/index.html [cnn.com]
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14860155 [asahi.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:26PM (1 child)
Laws are made by the representatives you vote for. If you think the law is wrong, campaign for change; or vote in different representatives who will make the changes you want.
The law is not made by judges, prosecutors, or the police.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @12:03PM
Right.. just check out how fast bernie got elected and what happened with trump. I'm sure vivek stands a chance too. Remember when tulsi gabbard won the primary? At the local level the party picks who you can vote for all the same. One of these days, alice, one of these days.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday September 09 2023, @07:56PM
Maybe they're offended by the threat to their livelihood, from the decrease in slam-dunk actual human trafficking cases they'll have the opportunity to litigate. Or maybe they're worried that it'll be easier to create this content, secrete it electronically on someone's digital devices, and then they'll have to defend something that distasteful (if not illegal) to a jury. IANAL though so this is all speculation.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @12:00PM
I mean yea.. Look at epstein island. Nobody has been prosecuted. Biden says weird things about little girls and touches them oddly on video. Check out hunter and those pics of him surrounded by underage kids. Those in power are obviously into this stuff and project it onto everyone else.
They will never be prosecuted, only you will on technicalities.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:32AM
Many years ago there was a case in the UK where a photoprocessing lab reported child pornography in a film that they were processing.
As best that I can recall, there were several 'suspect' images. The first was a new born baby being bathed by the midwife. The second set was of 2 young children, presumably from the same parents, playing in a bath with soap bubbles. The children were aged somewhere around 3 or 4 years old. The images were all thrown out of court, quite rightly in my opinion. However, the fact that they got as far as a court means that potentially police, social services and others would have been involved in assessing the images or deciding how best to 'protect' the children involved.
There are other similar cases. Naked children playing innocently on a beach (where parents could also sunbathe naked if they chose to do so), children playing with a hosepipe in their own garden, etc.
There will always be idiots and narrow-minded busibodies who see child abuse everywhere they look. Now, apparently, children can be abused simply by allowing them to read childrens' books. But it does make me wonder what kind of person sees abuse in things that are just part of a child's development and the process of growing up.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Saturday September 09 2023, @10:24AM (8 children)
There used to be some cases about cartoons and child porn some years ago. I have no idea where that went.
Regarding US Attorney General, well, they are prosecutors, no? So they like to have some opinions on these things because they will find this material intermixed with real abuse imagery too. I think this could make things difficult for prosecutors because until recently, all these imagery was caused by egregious child abuse. Today, maybe some would claim "but your honour, I just used AI to satisfy my problem and I would never harm or contribute to harm of another innocent child". And then what?
Furthermore, this is not just problem with child abuse. Now you can say any imagery was just "generated and no one was harmed"? It becomes difficult to use imagery as form of evidence in a crime, especially if the victim cannot be located.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Saturday September 09 2023, @11:49AM (5 children)
I can understand your argument but I do not agree with it.
If I draw a sketch of a person shooting someone else have I committed a crime? I cannot think of a jurisdiction in which I could be prosecuted for such a thing. Someone might argue that it indicates something about my mental state but, even if that were proven to be the case, that is still not a crime.
This is leaning towards a society where even drawing some images is considered a terrible sin - we can all recall the furore of a few years ago when a cartoon depicting Allah was printed in the French weekly 'Charlie Hebdo'. This resulted in people being murdered as one group of religious zealots wanted to avenge their God.
If Prosecutors cannot say with certainty that an image depicts an actual identifiable child and that the creation of that image resulted in genuine harm to that child then there is, surely, 'reasonable doubt' and the prosecution should fail. It is only of significant interest because we are being told, yet again, 'think of the children'.
No child was involved in the creation of that image just as no person was actually shot by my own sketch. Should an image of a sexual assault mean that somebody has attempted to commit rape? Or is it only because the image involves an imaginary child?
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:19PM (1 child)
It was a depiction of Mohammed, not Allah.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday September 09 2023, @03:07PM
I will await the hordes descending on my abode to serve me with their justice....
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:36PM (1 child)
I think an issue here is that we don't want to normalise the idea that sexual activity with a participant that, by legal definition, cannot consent is OK.
But you raise a good point with regards to rape-porn. I believe it is an actual genre. But as the (presumably adult) participants creating the (fictional) depiction of rape are cable of consenting to the activity, then the play-acting in itself is not illegal, even though it is depicting an illegal act. Not that I think it is healthy, but that's just my opinion. I do know that some porn actors have made statements to the effect that the recorded scenes were in fact non-consensual*. Which is a problem.
Obviously people don't tend to consent to being murdered, or tortured, but Hollywood has no problem making entertainment media that contain scenes of both. So it is legal to depict illegal acts that are non-consensual. Usually, there is a moral justification for the good guys killing the bad guys, and the bad guys kill because they are, well, bad. This might explain why it is OK. I don't see a moral justification for sexual abuse of minors that can't consent, and therefore no moral justification for depictions of such abuse. If you could argue that looking at depictions of sexual abuse of minors would reduce the actual sexual abuse of minors, you might be able to make a moral justification for producing those images, but I think that is a pretty hard thing to demonstrate.
*For example, Linda Lovelace, the actress in Deep Throat, made a statements to that effect [wikipedia.org]. Many others have made similar statements.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday September 11 2023, @05:17PM
Fictional characters cannot consent nor not consent. They will do whatever their creator makes them do.
Worse, fictional characters do not have to conform to reality altogether. This here is Ixi. Ixi is a fictional character I just created. Ixi looks like an 8 year old but she only looks it, actually she's 20 years old and thus an adult and can consent. Actually, she will consent to anything because that's how I created her, she's fictional and as such, she is whatever I make her.
What now?
(Score: 2) by TheReaperD on Monday September 11 2023, @07:15AM
In short, these days police organizations are against anything that would force cops away from their desk and can't be Hoovered up by the NSA. The police are rarely part of their communities anymore and the 'us vs them' mentality is rarely conducive to getting good information from people. This makes real, old-fashioned police work very, very difficult.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday September 09 2023, @12:14PM
Also, consider this. We don't exist at the convenience of attorney generals. Just because something is difficult for them, doesn't mean we should make it easy for them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Saturday September 09 2023, @08:59PM
I suppose they could, if desperate enough, focus on finding people who are actually abusing children (with or without photographs). I would go so far as to say that would be the best thing for the children.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @11:40AM (9 children)
A problem with allowing AI-generated images is that it allows people who make an use images of real minors being abused to claim that they believed the images are 'just' generated by a really good AI.
As for finding the victims, there is a real problem of young children being kidnapped, or sold, to be exploited by abuse. Many people think it 'just' happens in underdeveloped countries and victims are smuggled across national borders - but statistics from 2015 how that around 45% of child sexual abuse victims identified in Germany were moved from one region to another within Germany (See: https://www.gov.uk/research-for-development-outputs/data-on-child-trafficking [www.gov.uk] for the reference). Once you have a victim, all you need to do is murder them and dispose of the body once they get too old or damaged to be used further. Then the victim cannot be found. It happens. It is sickening, but it happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_(murder_victim) [wikipedia.org]
Mo Farah, the British Olympic medal winning runner, was trafficked from Djibouti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mo_Farah#Family_and_interests [wikipedia.org]
https://www.ecpat.org.uk/child-trafficking-statistics [ecpat.org.uk]
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/what-is-child-abuse/types-of-abuse/child-trafficking/ [nspcc.org.uk]
https://www.gov.uk/research-for-development-outputs/data-on-child-trafficking [www.gov.uk]
BBC: The bleak world of trafficked children and modern slavery [bbc.com]
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/childvictimsofmodernslaveryintheuk/march2022 [ons.gov.uk]
Much as generation of artificial images of abuse of minors could be regarded as victimless, it could allow actual perpetrators to claim plausible deniability. I'm definitely not comfortable with that.
On the other hand, if the availability of artificial images could be shown to decrease exploitation (I can't think of any ethical way of doing this, mind you) then perhaps you could argue that it is reasonable on a 'harm reduction' basis.
The people who 'only' look at images and don't do anything to minors themselves still provide a market for those who exploit and abuse minors to make the images.
I think the people who work in this area do a difficult job. And one of the problems is that it attracts the very people who you are trying to guard against:
BBC: Peterborough detective in sex abuse unit jailed over images [bbc.com]
BBC: Greater Manchester Police officer jailed for child sex abuse offences [bbc.com]
BBC: Former Humberside Police officer jailed for online child sex abuse [bbc.com]
BBC: Ex-officer jailed over sex abuse [bbc.co.uk]
If you look at media reports ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=sex+abuse+jailed [bbc.co.uk] ), you also see that many cases involve people who are in a position of trust. In the past, people made jokes about not leaving a choirboy alone with the vicar. These days, it is slightly more likely the vicar will be prosecuted, so progress has been made. But it is slow.
I really don't understand people who want to abuse minors in this way. If AI can be used to reduce such abuse, that would be great, but right now, I don't see how.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 09 2023, @12:32PM (7 children)
As a legal outlet for such sexual desires?
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @12:58PM
This link goes into more detail with regard to the UK, and has a section on the (poor) data quality.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/childvictimsofmodernslaveryintheuk/march2022#measuring-the-data [ons.gov.uk]
Recording of slavery and sexual abuse is different across jurisdictions. The UK, counter-intuitively, looks like a major source of child-trafficking victims in international statistics, but that is probably because the detection and recording mechanisms are better than than in other countries. If you don't look for, or record, crimes, then your crime statistics will be fabulous!
As I pointed out, if AI-generated images can be used as plausible deniability such that a user of non-artificial images believed the images to be artificially generated, we have a problem. A producer of illegal images can simply run them though an AI to add the AI watermark. A legal outlet sounds like a sensible idea, except that you cannot guarantee that illegal images will not be mixed into the collection.
How do you prevent counterfeit artificial images produced by abusing real minors from being mixed in with all the proposed legal artificial ones? A guaranteed government cryptographic signature for each image, testifying that it is genuinely artificial?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:38PM (5 children)
With that, you help to illustrate the slippery slope thing.
As a parent and a grandparent, and as a former Boy Scout and Girls Scout leader, I want to say that a single case of child sexual abuse is a pressing problem. A large part of who I am says that you can't possibly get too draconian with efforts to track down, prosecute, and execute child traffikers.
At the bottom of that slope, you'll find a hell on earth as bad as those enslaved children already live in.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Disagree) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:31PM (1 child)
So you would totally welcome an Orwellian state if it helps with that goal?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:11PM
Perhaps you should read my post again, in it's entirety. That Orwellian bit looks attractive, if it would achieve the desired goal, until you stop to think of all the other ways said Orwellian state would affect you. Slippery slope and all that.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:18PM
I'm afraid you lost me in two places there. It is possible to be too draconian, and I'm not in favour of capital punishment. I understand the sentiment, but I'm not in agreement.
I would like some way in which people who are incarcerated for long sentences to provide enough value to cover the costs of their incarceration, because keeping people in prison is expensive and should be used as a last resort. Rehabilitation is usually the better option, but some people are very resistant to rehabilitation, unfortunately,
(Score: 2) by khallow on Saturday September 09 2023, @11:31PM (1 child)
And yet, here we are already getting too draconian. The fake porn activity in question is harmless, it just might hide something bad hypothetically. The problem is that you go from prosecuting child traffickers to prosecuting people who have nothing to do with the trafficking - not even buying economic products of the trafficking.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 09 2023, @11:55PM
Correct. Case in point: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/teen-sexting-case-revealed-how-judges-let-police-invade-children-ncna830306 [nbcnews.com]
Now that's draconian.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday September 11 2023, @05:05PM
So... we better start prosecuting movie studios because I thought that the action movies where a bunch of people get gunned down are "just generated by some movie director"?
How exactly is that different?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Saturday September 09 2023, @12:50PM (12 children)
So a picture is drawn of a child being abused. Unless that picture is drawn of an actual child being abused, who exactly is the victim? Who is the law allegedly trying to protect here?
What's next, arresting Stephen King for writing stories about ... I mean, have you read some of his stories? That guy's a sicko, lock him up, what's going on in his head is clearly not ok.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @02:15PM (8 children)
Haven't you seen artists and authors get angry about their work being included in the gigantic training sets?
Well, clothed and nude children can also be included in smaller training sets.
https://civitai.com/models [civitai.com]
There's a vibrant community creating and mixing models, using their own training data. Look at the civitai link to see the typical subject matter. Notice that some of the models are aiming for photorealism.
Now imagine there are people are out there using actual child pornography to train models. These models are files containing no images, but can be used to generate images of specific children endlessly.
Imagine that this has been happening on imageboards and the Fediverse for over a year now.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @04:17PM (7 children)
Given I've never heard of civitai before, in the context of this discussion, I'm not going to click on that link.
Knowing that web-browsers do pre-fetching of links on pages, I'm now worried about what might already have been downloaded into my local cache.
And if you routinely run javascript, you have no idea what advertising networks could be downloading in the background. Remember too, they are not immune to compromise.
It is all too easy to end up with illegal-to-possess images on your storage media without necessarily knowing about it. Being investigated for that kind of stuff is 'somewhat' disruptive to your life, as related by (innocent) people who have gone through it.
One could get depressed about the human condition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:40PM (3 children)
https://github.com/civitai/civitai [github.com]
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/civitai [crunchbase.com]
Check the link. Use a VPN if you must.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:59PM
Thank-you
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @12:10PM (1 child)
God damn.. it's civitai for normal SD models not some CP site. That someone is scared to click this link is part of the problem and you've already smeared the community by acting like they are some bastion of CP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @12:57PM
I did nothing wrong. I gave them the link and told them to click it. I wouldn't link CP, but civitai is a bastion of coomer bait.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday September 09 2023, @05:45PM (2 children)
Or you may just have wanted to help, as happened to a teacher in Germany.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything about it in English, therefore here a German language link:
https://www.heise.de/news/Sexualstrafrecht-Lehrerin-will-bei-intimen-Video-vermitteln-Anklage-folgt-9288687.html [heise.de]
(I tried to translate the first paragraphs with DeepL, but it seems to hang at the moment)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:11PM
My German is just good enough to understand. (I could be wrong.)
The key words for me are 'judicially correct'.
But insane in the real world. From the reporting (and of course, we don't know the full story), the consequences for the teacher were unreasonably harsh.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Opportunist on Monday September 11 2023, @05:10PM
In a nutshell, a teacher tried to stop a sexually explicit video of a 13 year old girl to get distributed and put it on her phone to show it to the parents, but now she's in possession of child pornography, costing her her job and pretty much ending her career.
And people ask me why I cross the street and try to get as much distance as I possibly could if I see a child crying all alone. The LAST thing I would want is to get involved in that in ANY way. It's literally better that this kid dies than to get involved in ANY way, I cannot win anything here, but I could effectively lose my life. Pretending that I never saw or heard that kid in distress is the sensible thing to do here.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2023, @04:29PM (2 children)
You have no way of knowing if it has been drawn from life, or a from photo or video of a real record of abuse.
And because you have no way of knowing, you have to assume the worst, because if you don't, you've just created a market. Sure, every image creator will say it was drawn entirely from their imagination. Of course they would, wouldn't they?
Similarly, a disclaimer, like you find in fictional texts, saying that 'any resemblance between the fictional character and someone real is entirely accidental' doesn't particularly help if it looks like a real child. Of course they'll have a disclaimer. They would say that, wouldn't they?
You can't prove a negative. You can't prove it is not-real. The only winning move is not to play.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @12:53AM
Why do you have to "assume the worst"?
How about innocent until proven guilty? I think that's a more winning move.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Monday September 11 2023, @05:02PM
So given Stephen King, I should assume he has done all the things he writes about?
What about Agatha Christie, should I assume she murdered a couple hundred people?
Why the hell should I "assume the worst"? Oh, right, "think of the children"
If you think of the children all the time, my first guess would be that you're a pedo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2023, @06:14PM (1 child)
If we consider how free market economics actually works I would hypothesise that it would actually make more sense to encourage AI pornography if the objective was to reduce human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Because... if AI generated pornography reaches a sufficient level of detail that it becomes indistinguishable from traditional pornography then the market for traditional pornography should almost entirely disappear. Why would someone who creates pornography for profit go to all the effort, risk, and cost of creating pornography with real humans if an AI tool could generate the same (or better) content for lower cost, time, and risk.
How many people still use film cameras vs digital cameras now vs 50 years ago? They both produce a photographic image, but digital cameras do it much more efficiently and cheaply. And so nobody really uses polaroid cameras anymore (apart from a few niche cases). So, why would anyone produce traditional pornography if it was cheaper and more efficient to do so with an AI tool?
I would extralpolate then, that once AI generated pornography becomes indistinguishable from traditional pornography, the economics would actually drive a massive decline in human trafficking and sexual exploitation because these would become vastly less profitable. As counterintuitive as it may sound, perhaps we should actually be encouraging AI-generated pornography -- commercial adoption drives investment and is typically the fastest route to improving the quality/capabilities of any technology which would get us to this technological 'tipping point' much sooner.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 10 2023, @01:19AM
This. When legal alternatives are cheap and similar or better in quality, most people won't bother going illegal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @09:50AM (1 child)
All of this is a red herring. Those in power don't really care. They just want more power.
If they really cared they'd have done to Roman Polanski ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_case#Rape_case [wikipedia.org] ) etc what they tried to do to Snowden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident [wikipedia.org] or some russian hacker: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/russia-mps-son-seleznev-arrest-us-secret-service [theguardian.com]
But instead you get stuff that suspiciously seem like cover-ups e.g. Epstein taken off suicide watch so he can commit suicide. Are there more thorough and wider investigations to hunt down his "customers"?
The rich and power continue getting to do what they want, their enemies will have child porn found on their computers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @12:39PM
Roman Polanski didn't embarrass the national security establishment like Assange, Snowden, or some Russian hacker. "They" certainly have no reason to care about Polanski whatsoever. Assassinating Assange, slamming Snowden, those can act as deterrents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 10 2023, @11:56AM
The real worry isn't the CSAM generated by AI, it's that you have access to AI that's uncensored. All of the services enforce progressive views, mainly those of their creators. You see it in LLMs and image generators alike. Go a head ask if there are issues with the vaccine and it will probably tell you that you're nuts. Ask for positive paragraphs about republican politicians and you'll be met with a refusal.
So now, like always we'll use CSAM or "terrorism" to stifle anything that's outside the narrative and "liberal" world order. Future AI models will be censored and at some point they will start treating GPU compute as a weapon that you need a permit from the powers that be to access.. unless you use hosted API from the big players, of course.
Everyone here is probably cool with it, or at least will be until someone else gets into power, drops the charade and turns the apparatus against them. Such is the nature of things.