AI-created child sexual abuse images 'threaten to overwhelm internet'
theguardian.comWouldn't this be a way to satisfy a hideous market without producing new victims? I think the issue is the abuse not the pictures or the consumption of them.
A concern is the availability will drive people to seek more dangerous behavior.
Drawings, novels and films about Heroin may drive people to seek Heroin (which is illegal), so ban Trainspotting.
They probably do for a small percentage of people, but we value free speech enough that we are willing to trade that.
There’s a huge difference though. If someone listens to 90s industrial music or watches Trainspotting and shoots smack, they are harming themselves. You can’t indulge pedophilia IRL without harming someone else.
Incitement to harming others is an area where we do sometimes draw a line with speech. So I think you could argue that child porn, even if fake, is direct incitement to violence. That would put it in the same category as calls to murder Muslims or Jews, etc.
The same argument could be made about rape porn though, even if it’s fake or simulated with actors. Personally I think that anything we do conclude about CSAM should in fact apply to rape porn, revenge porn, and other porn depicting nonconsensual abuse.
Drawings, novels and films about gunning people down may drive people to seek to gun people down (which is illegal), so ban, er, the whole of American culture.
Good point. I was just expanding the reasoning, but yes that is surely where it goes.
So maybe we do have to tolerate fake CSAM if we tolerate an endless parade of incredibly violent war propaganda films, not to mention hate speech that goes as far as to call for persecution and violence.
My late uncle was a psychologist and always argued that our glorification of violence was far worse than almost anything in porn.
there's no need to talk about banning stuff. the root is not existence. the root is whether those who are at the top or above people give reasons and ways to justify actions that are obviously and unarguably wrong, immoral, unethical and go against humanity, civilization, individuals.
This comment turned me into a junkie
If we accept the premise of the slippery slope, then we must re-examine depictions of crime, abuse and violence in cinema and videogames also. You are proposing that human sexual preferences are vulnerable to suggestion and that humans cannot mentally partition fantasy from reality. That is a profound claim.
Creating and possessing this sort of imagery is already illegal in a lot of places so it's not just about abuse. Further as with adults its possible and perhaps even likely that AI imagery will be generated of real children.
While agree with your sentiment and logic in it’s entirety I guess a difficult pill to swallow would be the fact that someone would ultimately be making money from images, albeit fake, of child abuse.
Were you the parent of a kid whose abuse was put on the internet and used as a matrix to generate endless child pornography, would you be happy about that usage of your kid's material?
I thought most perps were parents, or close relatives, in which case the answer is an indecisive 50% yes/no.
But [1] from 1996 says
> There is increasing recognition that incest offenders may abuse children outside as well as inside the home. In a community sample of over 500 self-admitted male sexual offenders, Abel and colleagues(1987) found that 23.3% of men had offended against both family and non family members; 12% had offended exclusively against family members.
I'm guessing that means 65% are non-family, making your point very relevant.
1. https://www.academia.edu/download/7027369/Victims%20and%20Pe...
Like methadone or nicotine patches. But for sexual predators.
I guess maybe the problem is that if the content progression thesis holds true, some people would get more and more extreme in their pornography needs. This may be an on ramp for more child sex crimes?
the issue is normalization in a polarized society, with rising addiction rates and emerging long-term consequences of a diverse range of meds n stuff, psychedelics entering the mass-markets all while air-, water- and food-quality is declining and one crisis hitting the next with corporations exploiting them all for massive gains that give the pervs in top 13 % the feeling that they are superior and can fuck any child any way they want.
a lot of brains are changing in strange ways. health issues due to consequences of climate change are rising silently and everybody knows whose fault it is. almost nothing was done for mitigation. abusers, murderers, torturers, rapists and the likes all feel the same superiority as the wealthy do making the wealthy abusers, pedophiles and so on even worse, especially in times where almost anything can be justified based on the arguments of corporate and political leadership.
Child (and adult) sex abuse is sickeningly common and pervs with enough money to pay hush money and good lawyers get away with it all the time. I don’t think they need any extra encouragement.
I agree, but those who "needed" or "were waiting" for a little nudge, are getting more and more of those now and in the near future
On a meta-note: I've thought for many years that the next step for cryptography is steganography. (I.e. true ones, not disk encryption that has a hidden partition, and unlocking one will make it obvious there's another...)
I did not expect machine learning to be the platform that paved the way for it. I thought we'd embed one file in an unrelated other file, and that some HMAC/AEAD algorithm would allow you to quickly know if a file has data hidden data you can decrypt. Both files being useful in their own right. Instead, we'll just flood the tubes with variations of the original, hiding the original in the crowd.
Ugh. The stuff we spend energy on producing.
No need to poison the CSAM dbs then?