South Korea has jailed a man for using AI to create sexual images of children in a first for country's courts

You have a point, but in at least one of these cases the images used were of the girls around them and even tried extorting one is then. Issues like this should be handled on a case by case basis.

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.

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.

In the US we ignore mental illness, make excuses for it, and then patiently wait until sometime terrible happens.

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.

No, its not.

Exxept for the source csam required to get the model started, of course.

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'.

What do you think those AIs models are trained on?

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.

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.

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.

Just stop being attracted to kids you sicko

Things that happen inside your head = not illegal

Things that happen outside of your head = can potentially be illegal.

Medical secrecy is a thing

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.

In the US, they will call the cops if they know you did something illegal, so it does require some form of secrecy from the patient.

People are attracted to whoever they're attracted to. Saying someone should get psychiatric treatment for the sexual preferences in their own head sounds misguided, similar to "pray the gay away"

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

Isn't AI art based on pre-existing content that's been fed into the model?

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.

Fuck them kids

There's no conflict and no discussion, fuck these piece of shit!

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.

My guess would be he wasn't self hosting the AI network so the requests were going through a website.

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.

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.

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

He probably just used a cloud service that wasn't private.

Normalising CSAM does harm. Crap argument.

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how diffusion models work. These models extract concepts and can effortlessly combine them to new images.

If it learns woman + crown = queen

and queen - woman + man = king

it is able to combine any such concept together

As Stability has noted. any model that has the concept of naked and the concept of child in it can be used like this. They tried to remove naked for Stable Diffusion 2 and nobody used it.

Nobody trained these models on CSAM and the problem is a dilemma in the same way a knife is a dilemma. We all know a malicious person can use a knife for murder, including of children Yet society has decided that knives sufficient other uses that we still allow their sale pretty much everywhere.

Getting an AI image generator to produce CSAM means it knows what to show

Not necessarily. Part of AI is blending different concepts. AI trained on images of regular children and nude adults in principle should be able to produce underage nudity. This is a side effect of the intelligence in the AI

I think pedophiles should be treated with compassion, as being a pedophile doesn’t make someone a sexual predator.

IMO the stigma against pedophiles worsens their mental state and could push them to become sexual predators. This is just a guess though.

However, I do think “treatment” of pedophilia with generated CP should only be tried after conducting proper research into the actual effectiveness of it (maybe with general sex offenders and regular porn). In the end I think the top priority should be to minimize the amount of pedophiles who are also predators.

Not that I think they should be included in LGBTQ+ but as someone who is bisexual I feel they're not as far from us as you seemingly believe. Why wouldn't we compare them? Both are sexual attractions that deviate from the norm. A pedophile didn't choose to be a pedophile anymore than I chose to be bi.

Growing up in a conservative household and town was a miserable experience for me. I hated myself, didn't want to accept it, and felt utterly alone. Now think about how much worse it must be to realize you're attracted to children. You have zero allies, you have zero people you can talk to, and a lot of people hate you merely for existing and/or want you dead. From where I stand their experience echoes my experience being LBGTQ+ quite heavily. Except over my lifetime LBGTQ+ acceptance grew quite rapidly and my husband was the light at the end of the tunnel. But pedophiles will never get that, probably ever. I feel nothing but sympathy for their situation.

And what "serious psychiatric care" do you even think there is for it? Unless you also believe in gay conversion camps, we have nothing. We don't even really know how sexuality actually works in the brain, we definitely aren't anywhere close to being able to treat it.

I'm trying to be better by not treating all pedophiles as child-abusers-in-waiting. Humans are capable of not acting on base immoral instincts.

Off the bat, I wholly disagree with the idea that this should have been legal. That filth, even if AI generated, should be illegal for a multitude of reasons, one of them being that it allows those… urges to be practiced. I’m not one for the slippery slope fallacy but in situations where it could escalate to real child abuse, there should be zero tolerance and indulgence. If it’s a mental illness, they don’t need to fulfill that urge.

That said, I think the people suggesting otherwise here are just looking at it from a perspective of numbers and nothing else, with little consideration of the significant downsides. The stance also ignores that offenders are likely in it for the taboo more than actual interest in kids— it sure seems like Epstein’s friends were mostly doing it because they could, and it was a new level of depravity to try. If you ignore all of these, AI generated filth could indeed reduce actual child abuse. That’s a good thing and theoretically comes with no additional suffering, right?

I see this as naivety. Rude to imply about others here but better than CSAM apologism. It’s about the best I can think of, and I try to assume the best in people these days.

Also to make clear why I think the slippery slope is valid here, making some form of that awful “interest” legal dramatically lowers the bar of entry. And unlike violent films that are accused of increasing violence, that filth will never have wider societal acceptance, so a legal but taboo on-ramp is more likely to lead to illegal and taboo viewing, then perhaps onto the real thing. Society should never be willing to risk that by indulging in their mental illness.

The psychologists have tried to normalize everything and sympathy for the devil is the greatest signal of one's virtuous compassion. There is no evil anymore, all characters are grey, just ask the game of thrones fans about all the sadistic psychopaths in that story, none are truly bad.
One day soon someone will build a robot version of their own child to rape and abuse and people will hail it as the perfect solution. And when that child finds out they will be told to take a chill pill because there is no harm done.
Paepophiles are not sick, they are part of the natural variation of the species. Sometimes those variations are harmful and that needs to be addressed. If someone died and made me god i would murder suicide everyone who isnt a card carrying vegan pacifist. Yes, im a monster too. Failing that, i vote we name, shame and imprison the bad people. Yes, i beleive in good and bad. No im not religious.
The left will never get anywhere with this moral nihilism.

Can't have any nuanced discussion here! Glad to see people such as yourself engaging in reductionism and shutting down thinking, because all interactions online have to be boiled down to five words TL;DR pithy sound bites.

Leave the shit on Twitter, we can do better here.

Isn't the point that Noone was harmed and that you shouldn't get in prison for stuff that harmed nobody. I mean ew its disgusting but not worth jailing someone for it...

You clearly have chosen not to understand the assignments people are making in this thread. Either that or you're choosing to misrepresent them. Literally nobody is supporting sexual assault of children or anyone else. But hey, don't let that stop you from gloating about how morally superior you are.

Yeah a lot of the comments, and votes in this thread are really gross.

Yeah, I thought he whole MAP bullshit died out, but apparently it's alive and well on lemmy. It's pretry sad.

Comments in this thread makes me laugh especially the 'its not pedophila' parts LOOOOOOOOOOOL