Technology

It sounds like a very iffy thing to police. Since drawn stuff doesn't have actual age, how do you determine it? Looks? Wouldn't be great.

There's not an epidemic of child porn.

There's an epidemic of governments wanting greater surveillance powers over the Internet and it is framed as being used to "fight child porn".

So you're going to hear about every single case and conviction until your perception is that there is an epidemic of child porn.

"You can't possibly oppose these privacy destroying laws, after all you're not on the side of child porn are you?"

Legality is not the same as morality.

It's not a gray area at all. There's an EU directive on the matter. If an image appears to depict someone under the age of 18 then it's child porn.

So a person that is 18 years old, depicted in the nude, is still a child pornographer if they don't look their age? This gives judges and prosecutors too much leeway and I could guarantee there are right-wing judges that would charge a 25yo because it could believed they were 17.

In Germany, the majority of suspects in child porn cases are minors. Valuable life lesson for them.

Is it though? I don't know about the penalties in Germany but in the US a 17yo that takes a nude selfie is likely to be put on a sex offender list for life and have their freedom significantly limited. I'm not against penalties, but they should be proportional to the harm. A day in court followed by a fair amount of community service should be enough of an embarrassment to deter them, not jail.

That's a directive, it's not a regulation, and the directive calling anyone under 18 a child does not mean that everything under 18 is treated the same way in actually applicable law, which directives very much aren't. Germany, for example, splits the whole thing into under 14 and 14-18.

We certainly don't arrest youth for sending each other nudes:

(4) Subsection (1) no. 3, also in conjunction with subsection (5), and subsection (3) do not apply to acts by persons relating to such youth pornographic content which they have produced exclusively for their personal use with the consent of the persons depicted.

...their own nudes, that is. Not that of classmates or whatnot.

As an advocate for online and offline safety of children, I did read into the research. None of the research I've found confirm with any sort of evidence that AI-generated CSAM materials increase risks of other illicit behavior. We need more evidence, and I do recommend to exercise caution with statements, but for the time being, we can rely on the studies in other forms of illegal behaviors and the effects of their decriminalization, which paint a fairly positive picture. Generally, people will tend to opt for what is legal and more readily accessible - and we can make AI CSAM into exactly that.

For now, people are criminalized for the zero-evidence-its-even-bad crime, while I tend to look quite positively on what it can bring on the table instead.

Also, pedophiles are not human trash, and this line of thinking is also harmful, making more of them hide and never get adequate help from a therapist, increasing their chances of offending. Which, well, harms children.

They are regular people who, involuntarily, have their sexuality warped in a way that includes children. They never chose it, they cannot do anything about it in itself, and can only figure out what to do with it going forward. You could be one, I could be one. What matters is the decisions they take based on their sexuality. The correct way is celibacy and refusion of any sources of direct harm towards children, including the consumption of real CSAM. This might be hard on many, and to aid them, we can provide fictional materials so they could let some steam off. Otherwise, many are likely to turn to real CSAM as a source of satisfaction, or even turn to actually abusing children IRL.

IIRC there was actually a study and pedos with access to synthetic CSAM were less likely to victimize real children.

It's strange to me that it is referred to as CSAM. No people are involved so no one is a being sexually assaulted. It's creepy but calling it that implies a drawing is a person to me.

I don’t think this is actually true. Pretty sure if you feed it naked adults and clothed children it can figure out the rest.

only way

That's just not true.

That said, there's a decent chance that existing models use real images, and that is what we should be fighting against. The user of a model has plausible deniability because there's a good chance they don't understand how they work, but the creators of the model should absolutely know where they're getting the source data from.

Prove that the models use illegal material and go after the model creators for that, because that's an actual crime. Don't go after people using the models who are providing alternatives to abusive material.