Not necessarily. There’s been a lot of advances in watermarking AI outputs.
As well, there’s the opposite argument.
Right now, pedophile rings have very high price points to access CSAM or require users to upload original CSAM content, adding a significant motivator to actually harm children.
The same way rule 34 artists were very upset with AI being able to create what they were getting commissions to create, AI generated CSAM would be a significant dilution of the market.
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?
Pretty much overnight the CSAM dark markets would lose the vast majority of their market value and the only remaining offerings would be ones that could demonstrate they weren’t artificial to justify the higher price point, which would undermine the notion of plausible deniability.
Legalization of AI generated CSAM would decimate the existing CSAM markets.
That said, the real question that needs to be answered from a social responsibility perspective is what the net effect of CSAM access by pedophiles has on their proclivity to offend. If there’s a negative effect then it’s an open and shut case that it should be legalized. If it’s a positive effect than we should probably keep it very much illegal, even if that continues to enable dark markets for the real thing.
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.
How about any photo realistic image without a watermark is illegal? And the watermark kind of has to be traced back to author so you can’t just add it to real CP?
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.
