Hear me out on this one:
If we take it as given that pedophilia is a disorder and ultimatly a sickness, wouldn’t it be better that these people get their fix from AI created media than from the real thing?
IMO there was no harm done to any kid in the creation of this and it would be better to give these people the fix they need or at least desperately desire in this way before they advance to more desperate and harmful measures.
Some of the comments here are so stupid: “either they unpedophile themselves or we just kill them for their thoughts”
Ok so let me think this through. Sexual preferences in any way or pretty normal and they don’t go away. Actually if you tend to ignore them they become stronger. Also being a pedophile is not a crime currently. It’s the acting on it. So what happens right now is that people bottle it up, then it gets too much and they act on it in gruesome ways, because “if I go to prison I might as well make sure it was worth it”. Kids get hurt.
“But we could make thinking about it illegal!” No we can’t. Say that’s a law, what now? If you don’t like someone, they’re a “pedophile”. Yay more false imprisonment. Also what happens to real pedophiles? Well they start commit more acts because theres punishment even for restraint. And the truth is a lot of ppl have pedophilic tendencies. You will not catch all of them. Things will just get worse.
So why AI? Well as the commenter above me already said, if there’s no victim, there’s no problems. While that doesn’t make extortion legal (I mean obv. it’s a different law), this could make ppl with those urges have more restraint. We could even still limit it to specific sites and make it non-shareable. We’d have more control over it.
I know ppl still want the easy solution which evidently doesn’t work, but imo this is a perfect solution.
I largely agree with what you’re saying and there definitely is no easy solution. I’ve never understood why drawings or sex dolls depicting underage people are illegal in some places, as they are victimless crimes.
The issue with aigen that differentiates it a bit from the above is the fidelity. You can tell a doll or an anime isn’t real, but in a few years from now it’ll b difficult to spot aigen images. This isn’t unique to this scenario though, it’s going to wreck havok on politics, scams, etc, but there is the potential that real CP comes out from hiding and is somewhat shielded by the aigen.
Of course this is just speculation, I hope it would go the other way around and everyone just jacks off at their computers and CP disappears completely. We need to stop focusing our attention on people with pedophila, get them mental support, and focus on sex offenders who are actually hurting people.
I’m all for letting people have their dolls, drawings, and AI generated stuff, but yeah… it would become easy for offenders to say “Naw, I snatched that shit off of DALL-E.” and walk in court, so some kind of forensic tool that can tell AI Generated Images from Real Ones would have to be made…
Actually there’s a lot of reasons we’d want a tool like that that have nothing to do with hypothetical solutions to kiddie diddling.
Can you imagine how easy extortion would become if you could show an AI pictures of your neighbor next door killing some rando missing person in the area? But every new technology enables crime, until we find out what the proper safeguards are so I’m not too worried about it in the long-term.
I pretty much agree, while we should never treat Pedophilia as “Just another perfectly valid sexuality, let’s throw a parade, it’s nothing to be ashamed of” (Having the urge to prey on children is ABSOLUTELY something to be ashamed of even if you can’t control it.), we need to face facts… It isn’t someone waking up one day and saying “Wouldn’t it be funny if I took little Billy out back and filled him full of cock?”
It’s something going on in their head, something chemical, some misfiring of the neurons, just the way their endocrine system is built.
As much as I’d love to wave a magic wand over these people I reluctantly call people and cure them of their desires, we don’t have the power to do that. No amount of therapy in the world can change someone’s sexual tastes.
So in lieu of an ideal solution, finding ways to prevent pedophiles from seeking victims in the first place is the next best thing.
It’s not dissimilar to how when we set up centers for drug addicted people to get small doses of what they’re addicted to so that they can fight withdrawal symptoms, crimes and death rates go down. When you enact things like universal basic income and SNAP, people have less of a reason to rob banks and gas stations so we see less of them.
It’s not enough to punish people who do something wrong, we need to find out why they’re doing it and eliminate the underlying cause.
There’s also a difference (not sure if clinically) between people who sexualize really young kids and someone who likes kids that are under the age that whatever society has decided splits children and adults. In the USA porn depicting the latter is fine as long as everyone is over the age of adulthood, even if they dress up to look younger.
I think in general people who refer to pedophilia are usually referring to the former and not the 30 year old dating a 17 year old or whatever. But the latter makes it a little weird. Images of fictional people don’t have ages. Can you charge anyone who has aigen porn with csam if the people depicted sorta look underage?
Ai generated content is gonna bring a lot of questions like these that we’re gonna have to grapple with as a society.
The first part of your comment is rather confusing to me, but the latter part I fully agree with. Decoding age on appearance is a thing that will haunt us even more with AI until we face new solutions. But that is gonna be one of a list of big questions to be asked in conjunction with new AI laws.
You know what? Sure. Imagine I find ppl really taste, especially hands. But I never chew on one. I just think about it. Literally the same thing. You should be rewarded for restraint on these urges. If I’d get punished for thinking about munching on a thumb, I’d at least take a hand with me to jail. I’m going there anyway.
That’s basically how I feel. I’d much rather these kinds of people jack it to drawings and AI Generated images if the alternative is that they’re going to go after real chidlren.
At some point the fake images won’t do it for them and then they’d fix their attention to real kids. We don’t want to wait for that to happen.
It’s like using a drug with your threshold increasing each time you use, they’re will be a time that your old limit will have no effect on your satisfaction level.
By your logic, does everyone who’s into bdsm have a sex dungeon in their bedroom?
Your comment reduces everyone to their base fetishes, as if that were the only thing enacting pressure on an individual to act, and I don’t believe that’s the case.
Do you know how much porn there is of the My Little Pony characters? Tons
Do you know how much of an epidemic there is of cartoon watchers going out and fucking ponies? Somewhere between null and zilch… Maybe one or two extreme cases, but that’s around the same amount of people who watch Super Hero movies and try to jump off the roof in order to fly.
This is a slippery slope fallacy if I ever saw it.
Heck, if anything we’ve seen that restrictions on porn actually leads to increased instances of sexual assault, in the same way a crackdown on drugs just leads to more deaths from overdoses.
If letting some sicko have fake images of pretend children saves even one real child from being viciously exploited, I think it’s worth it.
It’s not ideal and yeah, it makes the skin of any sane person crawl… Ideally we should be out curing pedophiles of their sexual urges entirely, but since we don’t have a way to do that why let perfect be the enemy of good? I mean what other ideas do we have? Cause “To Catch A Predator” may have been good television, but even that had ethical concerns ending in lawsuits lost and suicides performed, and castrated everyone convicted isn’t exactly 8th Amendment friendly… and even then that prevents repeat offenses, not initial offenses. (Prevention > Cure)
Now all this aside, we do need to look at this on a case by case basis. If real children are being used to model for the AI or fake images are used as a form of blackmail (Think “Revenge Porn”, but way, way worse), then cuffs need to be slapped on people.
In the US we ignore mental illness, make excuses for it, and then patiently wait until sometime terrible happens.
And when it does, can’t do anything about it “While making sure this never happens again is a noble goal, let’s not politicize this tragedy.”
Or as they say over in Europe “Apparently the Americans say there’s no way to prevent that problem that literally doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world.”
Jfc what’s with these pedo apologists. If someone were a cannibal, would it be totally fine to just give them human flesh removed from surgeries or dead people? Maybe let him pay people to eat them and drink their blood? AI images are trained on actual CP and CP anyway should not be normalized. If someone has ideation of violence then the last thing you do is feed those ideations. Would you think a suicidal person should watch simulated suicide? Why would watching simulated acts of depraved violence because you enjoy them somehow prevent you from committing that act yourself? If you enjoy something that much then you are thinking about doing it yourself.
That is not required. Especially in the larger models like a DALLE-3 it can combine concepts even without being directly trained on it. The one they had in the showcase for DALLE-2 was a chair shaped like an avocado. It knows what a chair is and it knows what an avocado is, so it can combine them. So it can know “this is what a naked human looks like” and “this is what a human child looks like” and could combine them without having ever seen CSAM.
I dont beleive its a sickness. Humans vary in innumerable ways and defining natural variations as sickness is a social decision, not medical. If you look at the DSM you will find that that social problems are sometimes given as a reason for defining something as illness. This is just the medicalisation of everything.
Even if you grant that its a sicknesd, how does it follow that sickness should therefore be treated by AI? I see no argument or logic here.
Do you think harm would be done if the paedophile knows the child? If the child finds out they are the object of rape fantasies? If you find you are married to a person who gets off on raping children? Your children?
Do you allow for disgust and horror at sadistic desires or are we ‘not allowed to kink shame’.
Sex offenders aren’t allowed to watch porn at all in my state.
Because science suggests watching porn, and getting your fix as you put it, through porn, encourages the behavior.
Watching child porn teaches the mind to go to children to fulfill sexual urges. Mindfulness practice has been shown to be effective in curbing urges in all forms of addiction.
So, no. Just no to your whole post.
There’s effective treatment for addictions, rather sexual or otherwise. Rather the addiction feeds on children or heroin. And we don’t need to see if fake child porn helps. Evidence already suggests it doesn’t and we already have effective treatments that don’t put children at risk and that don’t encourage the behavior.
This isn’t about addiction, it’s about sexuality. And you can’t just curb your whole sexuality away. These people have a disorder that makes them sexually attracted to children. At this point there is no harm done yet. They just are doomed to live a very unfulfilling life, because the people with whom they want to engage in sexual practices can’t give their consent, which is morally and legally required, no question about that. And most of them don’t give in to these urges and seek the help they need.
But still, you can’t just meditate your whole sexuality away. I don’t want to assume, but I bet you also masturbate or pleasure yourself in one way or another, I know I do. And when I was young, fantasy was all I needed, but then I saw my first nude and watched my first porno and it progressed from there, and I’m sure fantasy won’t be enough for these people as well. So when they get to the stage where they want to consume media, I prefer it to be AI created images or some drawn hentai of a naked young girl or whatever, and not real abused children.
Not child porn. AI produces images all the time of things that aren’t in its training set. That’s kind of the point of it.
AI produces images all the time of things that aren’t in its training set.
AI models learn statistical connections from the data it’s provided. It’s going to see connections we can’t, but it’s not going to create things that are not connected to its training data. The closer the connection, the better the result.
It’s a pretty easy conclusion from that that CSAM material will be used to train such models, and since training requires lots of data, and new data to create different and better models…
Because eventually looking at images might not be enough
Edit: Do we want to be normalising this? It’s disturbing how there’s people defending it.
Bro I’ve watched a lot of regular porn and never once have I gone out and thought “why yes I’d sure like to rape that person”
But you will at least have an outlet if you get yourself a partner or hire an escort. There’s the prospect of sex in real life. You’re not forever limited to porn.
That’d be like giving an alcoholic a pint by the end of the week to reward their alcoholic behavior that they’d want out of.
That’d be like giving money to a gambling addict as they promise to ‘pay you back’ for the loan you’ve given them.
My point is, enabling people’s worst habits is always a bad idea.
And how can you guarantee for certain that after awhile of these AI-generated CP crap, that they eventually wouldn’t want the real thing down the road and therefore, attempt crimes?
Your solution is just dumb altogether.
You really like spamming that “slippery slope” term, don’t you? It’s like your ultimate go-to for feeling like you’re superior. Just wait until you use it in a context where you’ll look like a dumbass, one of these days in where it doesn’t fit.
I’m not an expert on the psychology of pedophilia, but I don’t think it has anything to do with addiction. It seems to be a paraphilia/disorder.
While I don’t disagree with the initial premise, image AI requires training images.
I suppose technically you could use hyper-realistic CGI CSAM, and then it could potentially be a “victimless” crime. But the chances of an AI being trained solely on CGI are basically non-existent. Photorealistic CGI is tough and takes a lot of time and skill to create from scratch. There are people whose entire careers are built upon photorealism, and their services aren’t cheap. And you’d probably need a team of artists (not just one artist, because the AI will inevitably end up learning whatever their “style” is and nothing more,) who are both capable and willing to create said images. The chances of all of those pieces falling into place are damned near 0.
Maybe you could supplement the CGI with young-looking pornstar material? There are plenty of pornstars whose entire schtick is looking young. But they definitely don’t look like children because the proportions are obviously all wrong; Children have larger heads compared to their bodies, for example. That’s not something that an adult actress can emulate simply by being flat chested. So these supplemental images could just as easily end up polluting (for lack of a better word) your AI’s training, because it would just learn to spit out images of flat chested adult women.
My autism can also be cured by d*ing… my ADHD can be fixed forever by the same thing. They come with intrusive thoughts, do you also want the final penalty for people like me?
I’m not apologizing for people’s crimes or intentions of a crime at all, but your argument is complete bonkers if you want societies to just behave like that.
Cool solution to kill people that did not offend. You sound like a real humanist. Do you by any chance run some for profit prison?
This is like telling someone to “stop liking rock music” or “stop enjoying ice cream.” People don’t decide what their preferences are, they just have them. If we can give pedophiles a way to release those urges without harming children that should be a good thing. Well not good, but positive in the relative sense at least.
That’s like telling gay dudes to stop liking dick. It’s brain chemistry and neural circuits, you can’t exactly just snap your fingers and be rid of the problem. Humans are complex creatures.
Pedophilia is not akin to being gay (and kindly fuck off with that tyvm). It’s akin to rape, or sexual sadism (and I mean real, violent sadism, not roleplay). It is a predatory inclination and @nxsfi is right - trying to frame it as an “orientation” does sound like MAP acceptance rhetoric.
“Anyone who disagrees with me is a child rapist.” That’s the level of argumentation I expect from a child or a fascist.
Stop veing gay, stop being trans, stop being attracted to fatties, stop being attracted to small people.
One thing I have to ask for those that say pedos should seek psychological/psychiatric treatment: do you even know a professional that won’t immediately call the cops if you say “i have sexual desires for kids”?
I wholly agree that this is something that should receive some form of treatment, but first the ones afflicted would have to know that they won’t be judged, labeled and exposed when they do so.
Things that happen inside your head = not illegal
Things that happen outside of your head = can potentially be illegal.
No, it does not. Many people struggle with , as an example.
An intrusive thought is an unwelcome, involuntary thought, image, or unpleasant idea that may become an obsession, is upsetting or distressing, and can feel difficult to manage or eliminate.
Bad thoughts ≠ bad person.
Bro everyone has dark intrusive thoughts, these folks just have ones that they’re wildly ashamed of and that they’re scared of not knowing how to control most of the time.
There are some who cross the threshold into action, but in all likelihood those are a comparable ratio to people who actually turn into serial killers compared to people who have intrusive thoughts about wanting to throttle someone out of frustration with them.
What are the cops going to do? Round here at least, thought crime isn’t yet a thing. It’d essentially be the same as if you said “Sometimes, I want to hurt people”. If you’re actually speaking with a medical professional, what you say is legally privileged information, and AFAIK for the US at least, that continues until there is reasonable belief that you will harm someone or commit a crime.
This totally glosses over the social aspect, but for any legitimate medical provider that shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t want anyone who needs help to be afraid of seeking it.
What are the cops going to do? Round here at least, thought crime isn’t yet a thing.
True, but anyone admitting to being a pedo is very likely to have something in their phones or computers that they really hope nobody ever sees, especially the cops (whether real CP, AI generated or drawn, and whether the possession is a crime, varies). An “anonymous” tip leading into an investigation could easily end up with jail time.
But doctors are required to report anything that they identify as an immediate physical threat (e.g., to the patient or because of the patient). I found out recently that this is entirely subjective - different doctors have different ideas about what constitutes a threat. So, in a lot of ways, no, medical secrecy may not protect you if you tell the wrong doctor.
While that is true it would be enough for a therapist to say they see someone as a threat. As hate for pedophiles is on a rather high level i understand the fear however unwarranted it might be. Luckely at least in germany there is some kind of help group named somewhat like “Kein Täter werden” if i remember correctly. I think we could use more of that in more countries.
I’m very conflicted on this one.
Child porn one of those things that won’t go away if you prohibit it, like alcohol. It’ll just go underground and cause harm to real children.
AI child pornography images, as disturbing as they might be, would serve a “need”, if you will, while not actually harming children. Since child pornography doesn’t appear to be one of those “try it and you’ll get addicted” things, I’m genuinely wondering if this would actually reduce the harm caused to real children. If so, I think it should be legal.
Normalisation in culture has effects on how people behave in the real world. Look at Japan’s sexualization of women and minors, and how they have huge problems with sexual assault. It’s not about whether or not real children are getting hurt, it’s about whether it’s morally right or wrong. And as a society, we’ve decided that CP is very wrong as a moral concept.
Here’s the thing though, being too paranoid about normalization also makes the problem worse, because the truth is that these are people with severe mental problems, who in all likelihood want to seek professional help in most cases.
The problem is the subject is SO taboo that even a lot of mental health professionals will chase them off like rabid animals when the solution is developing an understanding that can lead to a clinical treatment plan for these cases.
Doing that will also help the CSAM problem too since getting people out of the alleyways and into professional help will shrink the market significantly, both immediately and overtime, reducing the amount of content that gets made, and as a result, the amount of children victimized to make that content.
The key factor remains, we have to stop treating these people like inhuman monsters that deserve death and far worse whenever they’re found. They’re sick in the head souls who need robust mental health care and thought management strategies.
None of that is an argument for normalisation via legalisation. Offenders and potential offenders should feel safe to seek help. Legalising AI-generated CSAM just makes it much less likely that they’ll see the need to seek help. In much the same way that rapists assume all men are rapists, because most men don’t make it clear that they’re not.
On the other hand, producing porn is illegal in India and they have huge problems with sexual assault too.
I heard an anonymous interview with someone who was sickened by their own attraction to children. Hearing that person speak changed my perspective. This person had already decided never to marry or have kids and chose a career to that same end, low likelihood that kids would be around. Clearly, since the alternative was giving up on love and family forever, the attraction wasn’t a choice. Child porn that wasn’t made with children, comics I guess, was used to fantasize to prevent carrying through on those desires in real life.
I don’t get it, why anyone would be attracted to kids. It’s gross and hurtful and stupid. If people suffering from this problem have an outlet, though, maybe fewer kids will be hurt.
I’d go more in the direction of state sponsored generation and controlled access.
If you want legal unlimited access to AI generated CSM, you need to register with the state for it and in so doing also close off access to positions that would put you in situations where you’d be more able to act on it (i.e. employment in schools, child hospitals, church youth leadership, etc).
If doing that, and no children are harmed in the production of the AI generated CSM, then you have a license to view and possess (but not redistribute) the images registered with the system.
But if you don’t have that license (i.e. didn’t register as sexually interested in children) and possess them, or are found to be distributing them, then you face the full force of the law.
I think this idea rests on the false premise that people both need and have a right to pornography.
Many adults go about their lives without accessing it/getting off on it. It’s not a human need like food or shelter. So government isn’t going to become a supplier. Parallels could be made, I suppose, with safe injecting rooms and methadone clinics etc - but that’s a medical/health service that protects both the individual and the community. I don’t think the same argument could be made for a government sponsored porn bank.
You don’t think there’s an argument to be made that motivating people sexually attracted to children to self-report that attraction to the state in order to be monitored and kept away from children would have a social good?
I guess I just don’t really see eye to eye with you on that then.
I’m thinking it should still be illegal but if they get charged for it, make it less severe than being charged with actual cp. This might naturally incentivize that industry to go for ai generated images instead of trafficking. Also I think if they took an image of an actual child and used AI to do this stuff it should be more severe than using a picture of a legal aged person to make cp.
There are many things still unclear about whether or not this will increase harm.
We don’t know how these images effect people and their behaviour. Many techbros online treat it like it’s a fact that media does not influence behaviour and thought processes, but if you look at the research this isn’t clear cut at all. And some research was able to show that specific media indeed does influence people.
Additionally, something rarely talked about, these images, stories and videos can be used to groom children and teenagers. Either to become victims and/or to become consumers themselves. This was a thing in the past and I bet it is still happening with Manga depicting Loli Hentai. Making these images legal will give groomers even better tool.
It’s an ethical dilemma. It’s just an extremely controversial one. You really have to weigh in whether or not we should keep chaos if it means betterment for society as we advance forward.
I don’t think things should be as black and white as legal or not. I think the answer lies somewhere between something like decriminalizing drugs. Mostly illegal, but could benefit those who are genuinely seeking help. It would just have to take me a lot of convincing on an individual to need to seek out this material or else they are a danger to those around them.
Isn’t AI art based on pre-existing content that’s been fed into the model?
Yes, but not in the way I think you’re implying, it is not trained on csam images. It can put the pieces together to varying degrees of success. If you ask for a Martian hedgehog in a tuxedo riding a motorcycle, it can create something looking like that without being trained on exactly that thing.
Martian hedgehog in a tuxedo riding a motorcycle
Just to prove your point I fed that into an AI (dreamshaper 8). no other prompts or anything, and this was the first image it generated.
You can certainly argue that AI-generated CSAM does less harm but you can’t argue from that to legalising it because it still does a bucketload of harm. Consumers of CSAM are very likely to harm real children and normalising CSAM makes that much more likely.
This argument is a non-starter and people really need to stop pushing it.
I’m genuinely wondering if this would actually reduce the harm caused to real children. If so, I think it should be legal.
So tired of seeing this point made. Allowing animated or AI generated CSAM to exists openly and legally will not reduce violence against childern. It will increase it. It will normalized it.
You seem to think people who are willing and capable of commiting sexual violence against childern are going to do it less when theres a robust market of leaglly accessable CSAM.
It wont. it will instead create predator pipelines. It will take people with mild sexual disorders and histories of their own sexual assualts as childern and feed them CSAM. It will create more predators.
It will allow for communities of pedophiles to exist openly, findable on google searchs and advertised on regular porn sites.
Also the people who make AI generated CSAM are not going to be water marking it a AI genrated.
They are going to make it as real as possible. it will be indistinguishable to the naked eye and thus allow for Actual CSAM to masquarade and AI generated.
I could go on. But im not an expert on any of this.
You completely ignored the “state controlled generation and access” part of the argument. Experience with addictive drugs has shown us that tightly controlled access, oversight and possibly treatment can be a much better solution than just making it illegal. The truth is that we just don’t know if it would work the same with CSAM, but we do know that making it a taboo topic doesn’t work.
There’s no parallel here. Providing safe access to drugs reduces harm to the user and the harm done by the black-market drug trade. Normalising AI-generated CSAM might reduce the harm done to children during production of the material but it creates many more abusers.
The parallel only works if the “state controlled generation and access” to drugs was an open shop handing out drugs to new users and creating new addicts. Which is pretty much how the opiate epidemic was created by drug companies, pharmacists and doctors using their legitimate status for entirely illegitimate purposes.
You make a huge amount of claims, all as fact. How do you know that any of it is true? I’m not trying to defend rapists and pedophiles, I’m trying to think rationally and pragmatically about how to solve or at least improve this problem. Your reaction to it seems to be more emotional than rational and factual.
I’m trying to think rationally and pragmatically
Ahh yes the rational thought process which leads you to think a government is capable of Safely facilitating the production of csam. ???
They are unable to stop child poverty but totally capable to producing CSAM in a safe way…
Spare me Your fact finding mission.
Im not an expert or a social worker but i can tell But i can tell you that drug addiction and pedophilia are not the same.
To consider these two the same, as the original commentor did, is disgisting, offensive and ignorant.
There is no inherent victim with drug use. The same cannot be said pedophilia and Child sexual assualt.
While there is always a spectrum of people particpating in child victimization. The people who are the creators of the CSAM and those who participate in its distribution are not addicts. The are predators.
I’m not trying to defend rapists and pedophiles
Well you are…
If the man did not distribute the pictures, how did the government find out? Did a cloud service rat him out? Or spyware?
My guess would be he wasn’t self hosting the AI network so the requests were going through a website.
The service should have NSFW detection and ban them instantly if they detect it
Why should it have that? Stable Diffusion websites know that most of their users are interested in NSFW content. I think the idea is to turn GPUs into cash flow, not to make sure that it is all wholesome.
I suppose they could get some kind of sex+children detector going for all generated image, but you’re going to have to train that model on something, so now it’s a chicken and egg problem.
He was found extorting little girls with nude pics he generated of them.
Edit: So I guess he just generated them. In that case, how’d they become public? I guess this is the problem if you don’t read the article.
Earlier this month, police in Spain launched an investigation after images of underage girls were altered with AI to remove their clothing and sent around town. In one case, a boy had tried to extort one of the girls using a manipulated image of her naked, the girl’s mother told the television channel Canal Extremadura.
That was another case in Spain. Not the guy in Korea. The person in Korea didn’t distribute the images.
I really gotta wonder what the difference is between prosecuting someone for their thoughts and prosecuting them for jerking it to their own artwork/generative whatever they kept entirely to themselves. The only bad I see here is someone having their privacy invaded by someone else bigger than them and being put on display for it. Sounds familiar?
Why the fuck isn’t that the headline? Jesus, that’s really awful and changes everything.
So this does bring up an interesting point that I haven’t thought about - is it the depiction that matters, or is it the actual potential for victims that matters?
Consider the Catholic schoolgirl trope - if someone of legal age is depicted as being much younger, should that be treated in the same way as this case? This case is arguing that the depiction is what matters, instead of who is actually harmed.
Every country has different rules, standing on wikipedia.
Personally, I feel that if making completely fictitious depictions of child porn, where no one is harmed (think AI-generated, or by consenting adults depicting minors) was legal, it might actually prevent the real, harmful ones from being made, thus preventing harm.
At the same time, an argument could be made that increasing the availability of such a thing could land it in the eyes of a person who otherwise wouldn’t have seen it in the first place and problems could develop.
It could normalize something absurd and create more risks.
I’m no expert and I’d rather leave it to people who thoroughly understand such behaviors to determine what is and isn’t ultimately more or less detrimental to the health of society.
I just know how (anecdotally) pornography desensitizes a person until it makes more extreme things less bizarre and unnatural. I can’t help but imagine a teenager who would have otherwise developed a more healthy sexuality stumbling on images like that and becoming desensitized.
It’s definitely something that needs some serious thought.
“I’m no expert and I’d rather leave it to people who thoroughly understand such behaviors to determine what is and isn’t ultimately more or less detrimental to the health of society.”
One of the big problems with addressing this problem is that NOBODY thoroughly understands these behaviors. They are so stigmatized that essentially nobody voluntarily admits to having pedophilic urges and scientists can only study those who actually act on them and harm children. They are almost certainly not a representative sample of the entire population of pedophiles, and this severely limits our ability to study the psychology of the population as a whole and what differentiates the rapists among them from the non-rapists.
Most of what you’re repeating about porn “normalizing” things and “desensitizing” viewers is straight out of the puritan handbook. There is evidence that men who overconsume porn and don’t have a healthy sex life can fall into self-destructive patterns, but porn consumption doesn’t work like a drug. It’s not like the more you consume the more hardcore of content you desire, or that being exposed to certain types of porn will create new preferences that you wouldn’t otherwise have had. This is just long-standing anti-sex-work propaganda that tries to liken pornography to narcotics.
People who consume CSAM are already into that kind of thing. Seeing CSAM isn’t going to turn anyone into a pedophile just as playing GTA isn’t going to turn anyone into a hardened street criminal. The goal should be to protect children, not to censor any content that sexualizes youth, because that really is a slippery slope. More on that here: https://nypost.com/2010/04/24/a-trial-star-is-porn/
How I see it: creating fake child porn makes it harder for authorities to find the real ones.
In America at least, people often confuse child pornography laws with obscenity laws, and they do end up missing the point. Obscenity laws are a violation of free speech, but that’s not what a CSAM ban is about. It’s about criminalizing the abuse of children as thoroughly as possible. Being in porn requires consent, and children can’t consent, so even the distribution or basic retention of this content violates a child’s rights.
Which is why the courts have thrown out lolicon bans on First Amendment grounds every time it’s attempted. Simulated CSAM lacks a child whose rights could be violated, and generally meets all the the definitions of art, which would be protected expression no matter how offensive.
It’s a sensitive subject that most people don’t see nuance in. It’s hard to admit that pedophilia isn’t a criminal act by itself, but only when an actual child is made a victim, or a conspiracy to victimize children is uncovered.
With that said, we don’t have much of a description of the South Korean man’s offenses, and South Korea iirc has similar laws to the US on this matter. It is very possible that he was modifying real pictures of children with infill or training models using pictures of a real child to generate fake porn of a real child. This would introduce a real child as victim, so it’s my theory on what this guy was doing. Probably on a public image generator service that flagged his uploads.
The intent is to get off on fucking children, how you make that happen shouldnt matter
