A sex offender convicted of making more than 1,000 indecent images of children has been banned from using any “AI creating tools” for the next five years in the first known case of its kind.
Anthony Dover, 48, was ordered by a UK court “not to use, visit or access” artificial intelligence generation tools without the prior permission of police as a condition of a sexual harm prevention order imposed in February.
The ban prohibits him from using tools such as text-to-image generators, which can make lifelike pictures based on a written command, and “nudifying” websites used to make explicit “deepfakes”.
Dover, who was given a community order and £200 fine, has also been explicitly ordered not to use Stable Diffusion software, which has reportedly been exploited by paedophiles to create hyper-realistic child sexual abuse material, according to records from a sentencing hearing at Poole magistrates court.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said the prosecutions were a “landmark” moment that “should sound the alarm that criminals producing AI-generated child sexual abuse images are like one-man factories, capable of churning out some of the most appalling imagery”.
Susie Hargreaves, the charity’s chief executive, said that while AI-generated sexual abuse imagery currently made up “a relatively low” proportion of reports, they were seeing a “slow but continual increase” in cases, and that some of the material was “highly realistic”.
The Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF), which runs the confidential Stop It Now helpline for people worried about their thoughts or behaviour, said it had received multiple calls about AI images and that it was a “concerning trend growing at pace”.
The decision to ban an adult sex offender from using AI generation tools could set a precedent for future monitoring of people convicted of indecent image offences.
Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, said the concerns about child abuse material related to an earlier version of the software, which was released to the public by one of its partners.
It said that since taking over the exclusive licence in 2022 it had invested in features to prevent misuse including “filters to intercept unsafe prompts and outputs” and that it banned any use of its services for unlawful activity.
The original article contains 974 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
How could they possibly enforce this ban?
How will they even know he’s doing it? It doesn’t say they’re monitoring his internet connection. And even if they were monitoring his internet connection, he could go to some public wifi hotspot and sit in a car and do it.
Difficult indeed. Maybe banning him from owning a computer or graphics card capable of running local models. Installing spyware on his devices. I’m sure he could get around it, undetected, for a while, if he was determined. But he would be gambling at getting caught.
To be honest I don’t really see the point. We are getting to a point where anyone can generate any image of anything at any time. Let him have his fun. We can’t sexual conversion therapy him and he isn’t hurting anyone. Ones and zeroes, bits and bytes.
For anyone who thinks conversion therapy works; imagine someone trying to convert you from your sexuality. Let’s say I tried to make you gay. Would that ever work for you?
As a UK citizen, I’m ashamed of my government.
I am firmly against child abusers, but AI images don’t harm anyone and are a safe and harmless way for pedophiles to fulfil their urges, which they cannot control.
I don’t know what the right answer is, but we provide substitutes for drug addicts to help them overcome their addictions. Methadone and nicotine patches come to mind.
Is it completely inconceivable that a similar tool would help with harmful sexual desires?
The underlying behavior is the problem though. While substitutions could potentially be made available, this isn’t the same as drug addiction. The reality is that while a pedo could be satiated with a drop in replacement for a time (and possibly indefinitely), there is a very real risk that after a while they’re not satisfied with pretending and could quickly jump to the real thing in a split second. The due course, in my mind, is either modifying the depraved behavior or removing the person from society. While drug addiction can be a vice that doesn’t inflict harm on the rest of society (ie an addict is potentially able to silo their use from the rest of society), pedophilia is always a crime with a victim. The entire purpose of the situation is ensuring that no one becomes a victim of sex crimes, especially minors, and it is too great a risk to allow in any form.
I was listening to a podcast on moral philosophy (wouldn’t you wanna be as cool as me??), and one suggestion that’s stuck with me was the morality of, trigger warning,
spoiler
‘life like child sex robots’.
As in, would we as a society want to permit such things, knowing that they could potentially save humans from actual harm if they offer an outlet that scratches an itch? On the other hand, would they bring forth more harmful desires in a greater number of potential perpetrators, leading to even more harm?
Anyway, I’m glad it’s not my job to contemplate such disturbing topics.
Let’s compare it with adult pornography. Does the consumption of adult pornography remove the desire to have sex with another adult in the long term? Or does it reinforce the sexually desirable characteristics of adults?
Current mental help methods for pedophiles include acceptance of their desires as normal, just not something to act on IRL.
It does not prohibit any fictional materials including children, nor can it make someone uninterested in children.
By stripping away safe outlets, we may come at risk of these people increasingly turning to real CSAM, which is way more harmful.
Current mental help methods for pedophiles include acceptance of their desires as normal, just not something to act on IRL.
I am not aware of the research in this area although I have a minor psych background so that’s interesting and makes sense in hindsight. My understanding is that a large part of the compulsion is driven by guilt, shame, feelings of worthlessness, prior victimizations of themselves, etc. Essentially trying to gain a sense of power by taking it from those more vulnerable than them, like an abuser beating their spouse because someone at work put them down. So it makes sense to encourage a sense of power and lessen any sense of guilt and shame.
On a side note, I can’t imagine having their name plastered everywhere does anything but trigger the compulsion to re-offend. Maybe when we advance more as a society, we can separate individuals into categories of has-offended and child-attracted, with the former being on a public danger list and the latter having frequent discreet visits by social workers and mandatory counselors, etc. To lessen the chance of offense and possibly start helping them before they get to the offense stage (those that were ever going to offend.)
What do you know of the current methods. Where did this information come from? I’d really like to see it. You spoke with such knowledge, you must have the data to make it up, right?
I’m pretty sure that this is not true. I’d love to see sources.
There was some research before the ongoing AI-panic, focusing on hentai instead. As it is as “harmless” as the AI-generated content.
And I do recall that at the time there were voices in research making the point that the consumption of material did not have correlation with actually reducing the urges. So this seems highly unlikely.
This sort of problem-solving acumen is how HIV became so widespread in Africa. Have you considered instead trying competence?
Where does the training data come from to create indecent images of children?
It doesn’t need csam data for training, it just needs to know what a boob looks like, and what a child looks like. I run some sdxl-based models at home and I’ve observed it can be difficult to avoid more often than you’d think. There are keywords in porn that blend the lines across datasets (“teen”, “petite”, “young”, “small” etc). The word “girl” in particular I’ve found that if you add that to basically any porn prompt gives you a small chance of inadvertently creating the undesirable. You have to be really careful and use words like “woman”, “adult”, etc instead to convince your image model not to make things that look like children. If you’ve ever wondered why internet-based porn generators are on super heavy guardrails, this is why.
It is true, a 10 year old naked woman is just a 30 year old naked woman scaled down by 40%. /s
No buddy, there isn’t some vector of “this is the distance between kid and adult” that a model can apply to generate what a hypothetical child looks like. The base model was almost certainly trained on more than just anatomical drawings from Wikipedia - it ate some csam.
If you’ve seen stuff about “Hitler - Germany + Italy = Mousillini” for models where that’s true (which is not universal) it takes an awful lot of training data to establish and strengthen those vectors. Unless the generated images were comically inaccurate then a lot of training went into this too.
Thanks for the reply, it’s given me a good idea of what’s most likely happening :)
It’s a shame that the rest of the thread went to shit, but unfortunately it’s an emotional topic, and brings out emotional responses
The whole point of diffusion models is that you can generate new concepts using training data. Models trained on any nsfw images can combine those concepts with any of its non-nsfw concepts. Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t CSAM in any training data, because there objectively has been in the past, but there doesn’t need to be any to generate it.
Ai is able to fill in the last field in a table like “Old / young” vs “Clothed / naked” when given three of the four fields.
Csam is in the training data. From a few months ago
Is he extorting actual kids or just having a computer generate fap material? The difference decides whether or not I give a damn.
Yes, just like the pictures of astronauts on horses were trained on an extensive collection of space derby pictures.
He used Stable Diffusion, which, for all we know, was NOT trained on CSAM.
Csam is in the training data. From a few months ago
UK legislators have a long history of taking actions not informed by science or reason but rather the popular, often hysteric, opinion.
This case is yet another attempt at tightening screws where they shouldn’t be.
AI imagery was produced by Stable Diffusion, the model that, for all we know, did not take real CSAM as inputs and caused no harm to actual children. At the same time, such images are important at discouraging the consumption of real CSAM, with very real children being traumatized.
By banning AI imagery production using safe models, legislators leave no legal way for pedophiles to get something by the harmless means, directing many to the harmful ways as equally illegal, while also prosecuting those who did no harm.
counter point:
if you have a folder of AI generated CP and put in a couple of pictures of actual CP it’s going to muddle the case as the offender could claim all of them are simply AI generated. Real harm could go unnoticed if those two were to be treated differently.
Additionally, not every offender will stop at AI generated images, and if their curiosity becomes enough they could go on to want to experience “the real thing”.
I think the solution here is not banning AI materials outright but to make them identifiable - even by means of digital signatures if you want.
For example, Stable Diffusion could insert particular piece of metadata into the picture containing the signature and proving the image is AI-generated, etc.
Without AI materials, said curiosity may lead people straight to the “real thing”, and every darknet or even Telegram dweller will tell you it’s frighteningly easy to find it even if you never intended to. With AI materials, people can have a chance to stop there.
meta data is trivially easy to strip off a picture, you don’t even need to bother using tools for it - just take a screenshot and delete the original
You do realize that slippery slope argument is what’s used when it comes to banning anything else, right?
“Can’t legalize marijuana or people will start wanting to do meth” for example.
I don’t believe those two are comparable.
Weed and meth are rather different in how they affect people.
AI images are often used as a way to imitate reality
It’s not a matter of entitlement but of a real world harm. And generated imagery involving imaginary children does not constitude child sexual abuse.
I’d gladly give pedophiles generated imagery if that were to stop them from lurking in search of real CSAM, supporting the industry that creates a very tangible harm - actual child abuse.
And my life has nothing to do with either, so don’t make it personal. I only share my opinion on what we should really do to protect children, not to protect our deeply rooted views.
Using csam in training data causes harm
Try to take your emotion from the discussion. There is finally a way for people with an illness (in this case pedophilia) to “satisfy” urges without causing harm to children. They need professional help which cannot be gained easily in the UK due to a certain government removing funds.
This isn’t a give pedos stuff celebration, it’s a discussion that needs to happen and if you’re not mature enough to not get emotional, don’t partake in the conversation.
My understanding is that CSAM doesn’t satisfy anything. Iirc research on the subject suggests that it causes most pedophiles to go out and look for the real thing.
Which scans. How many people watch normal.porn and think: “well, that’s good enough” and just stop pursuing a real partner?
There’s no csam because there’s no child. Critical thinking is hard I know.
Except when the data is trained on csam
I thought pedophiles looking at CSAM were more likely to attack a child, not less. They are actively fantasizing about it, and that can escalate.
I am basing this belief on what I remember of discussions regarding that “ask a rapist” reddit megathread. Apparently psychologists thought that was horrifying.
The bias with this approach is that it highlights those who did offend, while telling us nothing of those who didn’t. This is often repeated throughout research as well.
It’s very likely that a lot of child abusers did watch CSAM (after all, if you see no issue in child abuse, there’s no issue for you in the creation of such imagery), but how many CSAM viewers end up being abusers and is there an elevated risk? That is the question.
I guess if we’d make an “ask a pedophile” thread instead of “ask a rapist”, we could get some insights. Pedophiles, catch the idea!
But then we cannot say that in either direction. We simply don’t know if they are more or less likely to attack a child without data about it.
I don’t have any of these Tendencies but I like to think that if I did I would chemically remove my sex drive
That’s up to everyone. Besides, most pedophiles do have sexual interest towards adults as well, and current means reduce that drive too.
Chemical castration in this context increases misery and makes building healthy adult relationships harder. Most pedophiles do not opt for that, for all I know.
Current therapeutic methods do include suppressing sex drive in case the client struggles with impulse control. Otherwise, it is not offered, but can be given on request.
