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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: 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