1y ago

AI-generated child sexual abuse images could flood the internet. A watchdog is calling for action

apnews.com AI-generated child sexual abuse images could flood the internet. A watchdog is calling for action

A new report warns that the proliferation of child sexual abuse images on the internet could become much worse if something is not done to put controls on artificial intelligence tools that generate deepfake photos.

Technology @lemmy.world

apnews.com /article/ai-artificial-intelligence-child-sexual-abuse-c8f17de56d41f05f55286eb6177138d2

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I am sort of curious, bc I don't know: of all the types of sexual abuse that happens to children, ie being molested by family or acquaintances, being kidnapped by the creep in the van, being trafficked for prostitution, abuse in church, etc etc... in comparison to these cases, how many cases deal exclusively with producing imagery?
Next thing I'm curious about: if the internet becomes flooded with AI generated CP images, could that potentially reduce the demand for RL imagery? Wouldn't the demand-side be met? Is the concern normalization and inducing demand? Do we know there's any significant correlation between more people looking and more people actually abusing kids?
Which leads to the next part: I play violent video games and listen to violent aggressive music and have for many years now and I enjoy it a lot, and I've never done violence to anybody before, nor would I want to. Is persecuting someone for imagining/mentally roleplaying something that's cruel actually a form of social abuse in itself?
Props to anybody who asks hard questions btw, bc guaranteed there will be a lot of bullying on this topic. I'm not saying "I'm right and they're wrong", but there's a lot of nuance here and people here seem pretty quick to hand govt and police incredible powers for.. I dunno.. how much gain really? You'll never get rights back that you throw away. Never. They don't make 'em anymore these days.
- I respect your boldness to ask these questions, but I don't feel like I can adequately answer them. I wrote a 6 paragraph essay but using GPT-4 as a sensitivity reader, I don't think I can post it without some kind of miscommunication or unintentional hurt. Instead, I'll answer the questions directly by presenting non-authoritative alternate viewpoints.
  No idea, maybe someone else knows
  That makes sense to me; I would think there would be a strong pressure to present fake content as real to avoid getting caught but they're already in deep legal trouble anyway and I'm sure they get off to it too. It's hard to know for sure because it's so stigmatized that the data are both biased and sparse. Good luck getting anyone to volunteer that information
  I consider pedophilia (ie the attraction) to be amoral but acting on it to be "evil", ala noncon, gore, necrophilia, etc. That's just from consistent application of my principles though, as I haven't humanized them enough to care that pedophilia itself is illegal. I don't think violent video games are quite comparable because humans normally abhor violence, so there's a degree of separation, whereas CP is inherently attractive to them. More research is needed, if we as a society care enough to research it.
  I don't quite agree, rights are hard-won and easy-lost but we seem to gain them over time. Take trans rights to healthcare for example - first it wasn't available to anyone, then it was available to everyone (trans or not), now we have reactionary denials of those rights, and soon we'll get those rights for real, like what happened with gay rights. Also, I don't see what rights are lost in arguing for the status quo that pedophilia remain criminalized? If MAPs are any indication, I'm not sure we're ready for that tightrope, and there are at least a dozen marginalized groups I'd rather see get rights first. Unlike gay people for instance, being "in the closet" is a net societal good because there's no valid way to present that publicly without harming children or eroding their protections.
- The issue here is that it enables those who would make the actual CP to hide their work easier in the flood of generated content.
  Animesque art is one thing, photorealistic is another. Neither actually harms an underaged person by existing, but photorealistic enables actual abusers to hide themselves easily. So IMO, photorealistic 'art' of this sort needs to be criminalized so that it can not be used as a mask for actual CP.
  
  If their work gets flooded then wouldn't that decrease incentive to produce it?
- Points about real stuff hiding in a sea of fake stuff aside, because these ais would likely have been trained on images of real children and potentially real abuse material, each new generated image could be considered a re-exploitation of that child.
  Of course, i don't think that's true in a legal sense but definitely in an emotional and moral sense. I mean look at the damage deepfakes have done to the mentals for so many celebrities and other victims, then imagine literally a minor trying to move past one of the most traumatic things that could have happened to them
  
  I really don't think it would actually be trained on that specific data to be able to create it. If it can figure out a blueberry dog "child naked" seems pretty boring.

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