You have a point, but in at least one of these cases the images used were of the girls around them and even tried extorting one is then. Issues like this should be handled on a case by case basis.

That’s basically how I feel. I’d much rather these kinds of people jack it to drawings and AI Generated images if the alternative is that they’re going to go after real chidlren.

In the US we ignore mental illness, make excuses for it, and then patiently wait until sometime terrible happens.

deleted by creator

Some of the comments here are so stupid: “either they unpedophile themselves or we just kill them for their thoughts”

Ok so let me think this through. Sexual preferences in any way or pretty normal and they don’t go away. Actually if you tend to ignore them they become stronger. Also being a pedophile is not a crime currently. It’s the acting on it. So what happens right now is that people bottle it up, then it gets too much and they act on it in gruesome ways, because “if I go to prison I might as well make sure it was worth it”. Kids get hurt.

“But we could make thinking about it illegal!” No we can’t. Say that’s a law, what now? If you don’t like someone, they’re a “pedophile”. Yay more false imprisonment. Also what happens to real pedophiles? Well they start commit more acts because theres punishment even for restraint. And the truth is a lot of ppl have pedophilic tendencies. You will not catch all of them. Things will just get worse.

So why AI? Well as the commenter above me already said, if there’s no victim, there’s no problems. While that doesn’t make extortion legal (I mean obv. it’s a different law), this could make ppl with those urges have more restraint. We could even still limit it to specific sites and make it non-shareable. We’d have more control over it.

I know ppl still want the easy solution which evidently doesn’t work, but imo this is a perfect solution.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

No, its not.

Exxept for the source csam required to get the model started, of course.

I dont beleive its a sickness. Humans vary in innumerable ways and defining natural variations as sickness is a social decision, not medical. If you look at the DSM you will find that that social problems are sometimes given as a reason for defining something as illness. This is just the medicalisation of everything.
Even if you grant that its a sicknesd, how does it follow that sickness should therefore be treated by AI? I see no argument or logic here. Do you think harm would be done if the paedophile knows the child? If the child finds out they are the object of rape fantasies? If you find you are married to a person who gets off on raping children? Your children?
Do you allow for disgust and horror at sadistic desires or are we ‘not allowed to kink shame’.

What do you think those AIs models are trained on?

Sex offenders aren’t allowed to watch porn at all in my state.

Because science suggests watching porn, and getting your fix as you put it, through porn, encourages the behavior.

Watching child porn teaches the mind to go to children to fulfill sexual urges. Mindfulness practice has been shown to be effective in curbing urges in all forms of addiction.

So, no. Just no to your whole post.

There’s effective treatment for addictions, rather sexual or otherwise. Rather the addiction feeds on children or heroin. And we don’t need to see if fake child porn helps. Evidence already suggests it doesn’t and we already have effective treatments that don’t put children at risk and that don’t encourage the behavior.

Because eventually looking at images might not be enough

That’d be like giving an alcoholic a pint by the end of the week to reward their alcoholic behavior that they’d want out of.

That’d be like giving money to a gambling addict as they promise to ‘pay you back’ for the loan you’ve given them.

My point is, enabling people’s worst habits is always a bad idea.

And how can you guarantee for certain that after awhile of these AI-generated CP crap, that they eventually wouldn’t want the real thing down the road and therefore, attempt crimes?

Your solution is just dumb altogether.

While I don’t disagree with the initial premise, image AI requires training images.

I suppose technically you could use hyper-realistic CGI CSAM, and then it could potentially be a “victimless” crime. But the chances of an AI being trained solely on CGI are basically non-existent. Photorealistic CGI is tough and takes a lot of time and skill to create from scratch. There are people whose entire careers are built upon photorealism, and their services aren’t cheap. And you’d probably need a team of artists (not just one artist, because the AI will inevitably end up learning whatever their “style” is and nothing more,) who are both capable and willing to create said images. The chances of all of those pieces falling into place are damned near 0.

Maybe you could supplement the CGI with young-looking pornstar material? There are plenty of pornstars whose entire schtick is looking young. But they definitely don’t look like children because the proportions are obviously all wrong; Children have larger heads compared to their bodies, for example. That’s not something that an adult actress can emulate simply by being flat chested. So these supplemental images could just as easily end up polluting (for lack of a better word) your AI’s training, because it would just learn to spit out images of flat chested adult women.

Removed by mod

My guess would be he wasn’t self hosting the AI network so the requests were going through a website.

He was found extorting little girls with nude pics he generated of them.

Edit: So I guess he just generated them. In that case, how’d they become public? I guess this is the problem if you don’t read the article.

Every country has different rules, standing on wikipedia.

Personally, I feel that if making completely fictitious depictions of child porn, where no one is harmed (think AI-generated, or by consenting adults depicting minors) was legal, it might actually prevent the real, harmful ones from being made, thus preventing harm.

In America at least, people often confuse child pornography laws with obscenity laws, and they do end up missing the point. Obscenity laws are a violation of free speech, but that’s not what a CSAM ban is about. It’s about criminalizing the abuse of children as thoroughly as possible. Being in porn requires consent, and children can’t consent, so even the distribution or basic retention of this content violates a child’s rights.

Which is why the courts have thrown out lolicon bans on First Amendment grounds every time it’s attempted. Simulated CSAM lacks a child whose rights could be violated, and generally meets all the the definitions of art, which would be protected expression no matter how offensive.

It’s a sensitive subject that most people don’t see nuance in. It’s hard to admit that pedophilia isn’t a criminal act by itself, but only when an actual child is made a victim, or a conspiracy to victimize children is uncovered.

With that said, we don’t have much of a description of the South Korean man’s offenses, and South Korea iirc has similar laws to the US on this matter. It is very possible that he was modifying real pictures of children with infill or training models using pictures of a real child to generate fake porn of a real child. This would introduce a real child as victim, so it’s my theory on what this guy was doing. Probably on a public image generator service that flagged his uploads.

The intent is to get off on fucking children, how you make that happen shouldnt matter

Normalising CSAM does harm. Crap argument.

That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how diffusion models work. These models extract concepts and can effortlessly combine them to new images.

If it learns woman + crown = queen

and queen - woman + man = king

it is able to combine any such concept together

As Stability has noted. any model that has the concept of naked and the concept of child in it can be used like this. They tried to remove naked for Stable Diffusion 2 and nobody used it.

Nobody trained these models on CSAM and the problem is a dilemma in the same way a knife is a dilemma. We all know a malicious person can use a knife for murder, including of children Yet society has decided that knives sufficient other uses that we still allow their sale pretty much everywhere.

Getting an AI image generator to produce CSAM means it knows what to show

Not necessarily. Part of AI is blending different concepts. AI trained on images of regular children and nude adults in principle should be able to produce underage nudity. This is a side effect of the intelligence in the AI

I think pedophiles should be treated with compassion, as being a pedophile doesn’t make someone a sexual predator.

IMO the stigma against pedophiles worsens their mental state and could push them to become sexual predators. This is just a guess though.

However, I do think “treatment” of pedophilia with generated CP should only be tried after conducting proper research into the actual effectiveness of it (maybe with general sex offenders and regular porn). In the end I think the top priority should be to minimize the amount of pedophiles who are also predators.

Not that I think they should be included in LGBTQ+ but as someone who is bisexual I feel they’re not as far from us as you seemingly believe. Why wouldn’t we compare them? Both are sexual attractions that deviate from the norm. A pedophile didn’t choose to be a pedophile anymore than I chose to be bi.

Growing up in a conservative household and town was a miserable experience for me. I hated myself, didn’t want to accept it, and felt utterly alone. Now think about how much worse it must be to realize you’re attracted to children. You have zero allies, you have zero people you can talk to, and a lot of people hate you merely for existing and/or want you dead. From where I stand their experience echoes my experience being LBGTQ+ quite heavily. Except over my lifetime LBGTQ+ acceptance grew quite rapidly and my husband was the light at the end of the tunnel. But pedophiles will never get that, probably ever. I feel nothing but sympathy for their situation.

And what “serious psychiatric care” do you even think there is for it? Unless you also believe in gay conversion camps, we have nothing. We don’t even really know how sexuality actually works in the brain, we definitely aren’t anywhere close to being able to treat it.

I’m trying to be better by not treating all pedophiles as child-abusers-in-waiting. Humans are capable of not acting on base immoral instincts.

Off the bat, I wholly disagree with the idea that this should have been legal. That filth, even if AI generated, should be illegal for a multitude of reasons, one of them being that it allows those… urges to be practiced. I’m not one for the slippery slope fallacy but in situations where it could escalate to real child abuse, there should be zero tolerance and indulgence. If it’s a mental illness, they don’t need to fulfill that urge.

That said, I think the people suggesting otherwise here are just looking at it from a perspective of numbers and nothing else, with little consideration of the significant downsides. The stance also ignores that offenders are likely in it for the taboo more than actual interest in kids— it sure seems like Epstein’s friends were mostly doing it because they could, and it was a new level of depravity to try. If you ignore all of these, AI generated filth could indeed reduce actual child abuse. That’s a good thing and theoretically comes with no additional suffering, right?

I see this as naivety. Rude to imply about others here but better than CSAM apologism. It’s about the best I can think of, and I try to assume the best in people these days.

Also to make clear why I think the slippery slope is valid here, making some form of that awful “interest” legal dramatically lowers the bar of entry. And unlike violent films that are accused of increasing violence, that filth will never have wider societal acceptance, so a legal but taboo on-ramp is more likely to lead to illegal and taboo viewing, then perhaps onto the real thing. Society should never be willing to risk that by indulging in their mental illness.

The psychologists have tried to normalize everything and sympathy for the devil is the greatest signal of one’s virtuous compassion. There is no evil anymore, all characters are grey, just ask the game of thrones fans about all the sadistic psychopaths in that story, none are truly bad.
One day soon someone will build a robot version of their own child to rape and abuse and people will hail it as the perfect solution. And when that child finds out they will be told to take a chill pill because there is no harm done.
Paepophiles are not sick, they are part of the natural variation of the species. Sometimes those variations are harmful and that needs to be addressed. If someone died and made me god i would murder suicide everyone who isnt a card carrying vegan pacifist. Yes, im a monster too. Failing that, i vote we name, shame and imprison the bad people. Yes, i beleive in good and bad. No im not religious.
The left will never get anywhere with this moral nihilism.

In the US, they will call the cops if they know you did something illegal, so it does require some form of secrecy from the patient.

I heard an anonymous interview with someone who was sickened by their own attraction to children. Hearing that person speak changed my perspective. This person had already decided never to marry or have kids and chose a career to that same end, low likelihood that kids would be around. Clearly, since the alternative was giving up on love and family forever, the attraction wasn’t a choice. Child porn that wasn’t made with children, comics I guess, was used to fantasize to prevent carrying through on those desires in real life.

I don’t get it, why anyone would be attracted to kids. It’s gross and hurtful and stupid. If people suffering from this problem have an outlet, though, maybe fewer kids will be hurt.

Normalisation in culture has effects on how people behave in the real world. Look at Japan’s sexualization of women and minors, and how they have huge problems with sexual assault. It’s not about whether or not real children are getting hurt, it’s about whether it’s morally right or wrong. And as a society, we’ve decided that CP is very wrong as a moral concept.

There’s no conflict and no discussion, fuck these piece of shit!

Can’t have any nuanced discussion here! Glad to see people such as yourself engaging in reductionism and shutting down thinking, because all interactions online have to be boiled down to five words TL;DR pithy sound bites.

Leave the shit on Twitter, we can do better here.