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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: 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?
A Black, Hispanic, or Muslim voting for Trump is like a Jew voting for Hitler
(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.