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

My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts (sexualization of children). That’s also why I dislike loli/shota media, despite it being fictional.

That said, I still think it’s a much better alternative to CSAM and especially to actually harming a child for those who have those desires due to trauma or mental illness. Though I’m not sure if easy, open access is entirely safe, either.

I'm brave enough to say what I am sure some people are thinking.

If a pedophile can have access to a machine that generates endless child porn for them, completely cutting off the market for the "real thing", then maybe that's a step in a positive direction. Very far from perfect but better than the status quo.

The ideal ultimate solution is to develop a treatment that pedophiles can use to just stop being pedophiles entirely. I bet most pedophiles would jump on such a thing. But until that magical day maybe let's explore options that reduce the harm done to actually real children in the immediate term.

but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn’t seem to be a crime that involves any victims.

Well, there's all the children whose photos were used for the training data. I'd consider them victims, since AIs can't produce truly new images, so real human victims were needed in order to make AI images possible. And it's been established that AIs need to be trained on new human-made content in order to develop, as the images become distorted when trained on AI-generated content, so unless the paedophiles can be convinced to be satisfied with the AIs as they currently are instead of wanting better/more varied child abuse images next year, a whole lot more real children will need to be abused and photographed in order to improve the AI.

Another worry could be: how do you know if it’s a real victim who needs help, or an AI generated image.

Many "AI generated" images are actually very close to individual images from their training data so it's debatable how much difference there is between looking at a generated image and just looking at an image from its training data in some cases at least.

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.

1. No idea, maybe someone else knows
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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.

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

AI needs training data.

Yeah exactly, I don't want to see it but the same goes for a lot of weird fetishes.

As long as no one is getting hurt I don't really see the problem.

We absolutely can make pedos go away.

I guess it depends on what pedophilia is in the end of how it's developed.

If it's more like a sexual preference then it's probably there already when someone is born and not changeable, but if it's more like a fetish then those are (afaik) related to experiences and exposures while growing up and actually can change and develop over time - and in that case it could be really dangerous to have that kind of material floating around freely.

I keep seeing people post this same idea, and I see no proof that it would actually happen.

Why would you need "real" CP if there's like-for-like-quality AI CP out there?

Also, aside from going out of our way to wreck the lives of individuals who look at the stuff, is there any actual concrete stats that say we're preventing any sort of significant number of RL child abuse by giving up rights to privacy or paying FBI agents to post CP online and entrap people? I Don't get behind the "if it theoretically helped one single child, I'd genocide a nation.." bs. I want to see what we've gained so far by these policies before I agree to giving govt more power by expanding them.

Photorealistic images of CP? I think that crosses the line, and needs to be treated as if it was actual CP as it essentially enables real CP to proliferate.

While I absolutely don't want to sound like I'm defending the practice (because I'm not), I'm really not too sure of this. If this was true, would similar logic apply to other AI-generated depictions of illegal or morally reprehensible situations? Do photorealistic depictions of murder make it more likely that the people going out of their way to generate or find those pictures will murder someone or seek out pictures of real murder? Will depictions of rape lead to actual rape? If the answer to those or other similar questions is "no", then why is child porn different? If "yes", then should we declare all the other ones illegal as well?

It's not that I think AI-generated child porn should be accepted or let alone encouraged by any means, but as was pointed out it might actually even be counterproductive to ruin someone's life over AI-generated material in which there is factually no victim, as reprehensible as the material may be; just because something is disgusting to most of us doesn't mean it's a very good justification for making it illegal if there is no victim.

The reason why I'm not convinced of the argument is that a similar one has been used when eg. arguing for censorship of video games, with the claim that playing "murder simulators" which can look relatively realistic will make people (usually children) more likely to commit violent acts, and according to research that isn't the case.

I'd even be inclined to argue that being able to generate AI images of sexualized minors might even make it less likely for the person to move over to eg. searching for actual child porn or committing abuse as it's a relatively easier and safer way for them to satisfy an urge. I wouldn't be willing to bet on that though

The legality doesn't matter, what matters is that the sites will be flooded and could be taken down if they aren't able to moderate fast enough. The only long-term viable solution is image classification, but that's a tall ask to make from scratch.

I can’t believe how hard it is to avoid drawn or generated cp on there— and you can only ignore one tag without premium, so it’s not viable to manually make a blocklist :(