Technology

Things that you want to understand but sure as fuck ain't gonna Google.

Look again. The explanation is that these images simply don't look like any kind of CSAM. The whole story looks like some sort of scam to me.

And we have absolutely no data to suggest that's happening. It's purely hypothetical.

As a counterpart, the fact that it is so easy and simple to get those AI images, compared to the risk and extra effort of doing it for real, could make the actual child abuse become less common and less profitable for mafias and assholes in general. It's a really complex topic that no simple straight answer would solve.

Normalising it would be horrible and should be avoided, but there will always be some amount of people looking for that content. I rather have them using AI to create it than having to go searching for real content. Persecuting the AI content is not only very inefficient, it might also be harmful as the only other content left would be the real one that is much harder to catch those who make it.

Yeah without doubt we’re entering a weird and scary time with all this non-consensual AI training and data models.

Especially with the amount of data Meta has across all its platforms.

What's the follow on effect from making generated images illegal?

Do you want your freedom to be at stake where the question before the Jury is "How old is this image of a person (that doesn't exist?)". "Is this fake person TOO child-like?"

When that happens, how do you tell which images are AI generated and which are real? How do you know who is peddling real CP and who isn't if AI-generated CP is legal?

You won't be able to tell, we can assume that this is a given.

So the real question is:

Who are you trying to arrest and put in jail and how are you going to write that difference into law so that innocent people are not harmed by the justice system?

To me, the evil people are the ones harming actual children. Trying to blur the line between them and people who generate images is a morally confused position.

There's a clear distinction between the two groups and that distinction is that one group is harming people.

If pedophiles won't be able to tell what's real and what's AI generated why risk jail to create the real ones?

What's to stop actual child abusers from just photoshopping a 6th finger onto their images and then claiming that it's AI generated?

Aside from the other arguments people have presented, this wrecks one of the largest reasons that people produce CSAM. Pedophiles are insular data hoarders by necessity, because actually creating and procuring it is such a big risk. Every time they go online to find new content, they’re at risk of stumbling into a honeypot. And producing it requires IRL work, and a LOT of risk of being caught/turned in by the victim. They tend to form tight-knit rings, and one of the only reliable ways to get into a ring as an outsider is to provide your own CSAM to the others. CSAM is traded in these rings like baseball cards, where you need fresh content in order to receive fresh content.

The data hoarding side of things is where all of the “cops bust pedophile with 100TB of CSAM” headlines come from; In reality, it was probably like 1TB of videos, (which is a lot, but not unheard of) but was backed up multiple times in multiple places, because losing it would be catastrophic for the CSAM producer; They can’t simply go grab a new blue ray of it. And the cops counted the full size of each backup disk, not just the space that was used.

Intentionally marking your content as AI-generated would ruin the trading value, because nobody will see it as valuable/worth trading for if it’s fake. At best, you won’t get anything for it. At worst, you’d be labeled a cop trying to pass off AI content to gather evidence.