this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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So basically, in order to have AIs that make better child porn, there needs to be humans willing to go through vast quantities of AI generated child porn in order to properly curate the content for the AI. Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries, being paid slave wages, I think it would be fair to add them to the list of potential victims of the creation of child porn AIs.
You don't quite seem to understand how easy it is to train these AI models, and because of that, you're missing a critical point - with open-source technologies like Stable Diffusion, which has models that can be refined and run on a consumer-grade graphics card, the people using models to generate images and the people creating and refining those models are the same people. People who want to generate brand new pokemon sprites can train a model on all the pokemon sprites until it looks good. A few absolute galaxy-brain nerds who want to generate MIDI spectrograms from a text description and convert the output into audio... can apparently do that. And of course, people who want to generate lots of hentai or photorealistic porn can create and fine-tune a model, or multiple models, all by themselves (I won't link any of these, but hundreds are readily available, and thousands exist in total)
In other words, people who already consume CSAM are the people working on models for generating CP, and a subset of those have definitely been trying to make it work with only legal images so that the model itself can be distributed and used without breaking any laws, maybe even hiding in plain sight pretending it's not for making CP. Someone else out there with a different set of fucked-up desires has probably trained a model on gore and snuff images and then used it to create "photos" of people they hate as mutilated messes. There's sick people of all kinds all over the place, and the jury's unfortunately still out on whether this new tool actually causes harm when used in such a manner, or if it's just the newest way they can express their deviance. We don't know yet.
But this genie is already out of the bottle. Banning the use of this technology for specific, narrow use cases just isn't going to be effective without banning AI image generation entirely, and we're past the point where that's feasible. Image generation is a powerful tool that's not going away; it's on us now to figure out what we really believe about harm, health, and personal freedom, and what we want a society with this tool to look like.
Personally, I'm of a mind that if all the data going into the model is legally obtained, anything generated should be considered artistic expression. A person had a thought, then put their thoughts into a tool, which made a picture of those thoughts. No matter how repulsive those thoughts were, I think throwing people in prison for that kind of expression is thought-crime. There's public obscenity at play, of course, but only once they take the step of showing it to other people. If it's just for themselves, and nobody else sees it, who is harmed? Even if it does turn out that it harms the person generating the images (which wouldn't surprise me), that makes it a health issue, like drugs or other addictions, not something to criminalize.
Except if we're talking about allowing regulated use of AI-generated child porn as a treatment for paedophilia (which is the core discussion in this thread, whether AI-generated child porn could be helpful), then it cannot be left to paedophiles themselves to create their own models based on the honour system of promising that nobody will use photos of real children in the training data. Just like absolutely no aspect of AI can be left unregulated, trusting on everyone to behave honourably... because so far, nobody has been. Not just in the field of AI-generated child porn. All of AI has been developed with an astounding level of unethical behaviour, and it's nothing short of complete naivety to believe that anyone is going to behave ethically going forward. If AI is to be considered in any way ethical, then it needs regulation beyond simply asking people to pinky swear that they will only use legally and ethically obtained content for training. Regulation requires oversight and enforcement, otherwise regulation is meaningless. And you can't regulate child porn AI without having innocent human beings subjected to the inputs and outputs to ensure regulations are being followed.
Dude how are you going to regulate AI?!!
Like by all means go after people harming others, but man... You realize you have no control right? Black markets THRIVE in this world. Like fuck, they can't even keep drugs out of prison.
They don't have a plan they just want to blissfully hand law enforcement more power to spy on citizens and toss non violent offenders in prison. War on drugs called, wants its script back.
The fact that regulation is imperfect doesn't mean the solution is to do absolutely nothing and let AI be used by bad actors (including those feeding real child porn into it) with impunity.
The entire conversation in the comments here have been "well if AI child porn stops paedophiles from hurting real children, then it has a use", but in order to prevent real children being used for the training data, it has to be regulated. In fact, you'll find that the majority of Beehaw users (since I notice you are from a different instance) are in favour of AI being properly regulated. "Some people will break the law anyway" is no excuse not to have laws.
Sorry, I really don't support your perspective. If you have reasonable suspicion to believe real child porn is being used in these models prove it to a judge and get a warrant. If someone is a bad actor to the point of criminal intent, prove it to a judge, and bring it to court.
That's not how the law works.
Wrong.
Right, actually. People who aren't law enforcement can't just walk into a court to ask a judge to give them a warrant to take action against a criminal. That is the job of the police. And it's the job of government to decide what constitutes breaking the law. In due time, governments will, in fact, decide that using real child porn to train AI models is illegal, and enforcing that law will remain the purpose of the police. It will never be the job of private citizens to prove it to a judge, or to do anything else to the criminal except report the crime.
Libertarian, anarchist, and sovereign citizen deulisional fantasies are not reality. The law is literally structured around not having random people enforcing the law or investigating crimes.