South Korea has jailed a man for using AI to create sexual images of children

Eventually poaching for real horns becomes too expensive and not really worth the trouble.

The easy availability of generated porn does increase the chances of normalising abhorrent behaviour. AI is also restricted to pictures and writing at the moment, you can't generate videos.

If the demand of CSAM does actually go down, I'm all for AI generated CSAM. However, we have little indication that it does, other than "it makes sense that it would".

This scenario is very much illegal in the US. The bar to clear is photorealistic; if you Photoshop a kid's face onto a nude body, you have in fact produced child pornography. Possessing or distributing that image are also crimes.

I had to explain to my wife, many times, that it is absolutely not a good idea to send me nude pics of my own kids playing while bathing. I had to explain that context (the photo in man's photo library vs the photo on mother's phone) is in fact important and can cause a lot of problem for me.

We are asking to clearly delineate on problems that real people can't already do.

I think there's an argument to be made that these pictures provide plausible deniability to blackmail victims, but if the end result is the same (bullying/exclusion/name calling/reputation damage) regardless of whether the images are real or generated, that doesn't really matter. "I will send hundreds of pictures of [someone who looks exactly like you|an AI model of you] unless you do x" is a pretty convincing threat regardless of the origin of those pictures.

So far, the general public lacks understanding about the technology and what it can and can't do. That understanding is a crucial step in getting any benefits from the technology.

Probably not, but social ostracization and targeted bans by law (makes AI CSAM = cannot be a teacher) could stand in for a full legal ban.

Less importantly, your smoking in movies analogy is not very applicable because smoking is legal and smoking in movies is legal. Also, there are ads for smoking in public, like at gas stations.

Are there any studies that prove this?

To be honest, this sounds like the whole “violent video games cause more violence”, which has clearly been debunked.

much like any digital experience, I have a hard time believing that it is somehow a practicing ground.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunny-side-of...

I'm guessing a lot more research needs to be done, but it seems possible that pornography of all types reduces the need for certain behaviors. Given society's current anti-science bent, I don't hold out any hope this research would be done or followed, if it yielded a correlation.

there is a lot of stuff that is obscene at face value but not disallowed by SK law.

most depictions of gore and violence would be considered obscene by definition, yet 'realism shooters' are hugely popular and legally allowed most anywhere.

it's illegal because it's illegal. I don't know enough about SK law reformation to tell you how that came about, but 'obscene' isn't the bar to judge from; plenty of legal obscenity exists most everywhere you look.

Nah. You're citing old data. "On 8 June 2021, the Classification Office re-classified Puni Puni Poemy R16 after granting a request from a member of the public to reconsider the classification of the series."

Here's a screenshot of the current NZ classification board's website regarding it, 16+. https://i.imgur.com/aXHtsVd.png

Search for yourself: https://register.classificationoffice.govt.nz/

Here's a list of where it is/isn't legal to have lolicon. There's notable countries on both sides of the line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...

Just contemplate the long, long history of moral decay panics and what they were panicking over. That's why that is no longer taken seriously.

Do you not have any kinks?

I have a fair amount and the ones I like in porn, I don’t like in real life. The ones I like in real life I don’t really like in porn.

So, specifically concerning your first sentence, which in my opinion is intended as an argument, even though it’s just a question and doesn’t offer any backing, the answer is no.

There's a separate issue, which is that it's highly uncivilized and dangerous to imprison people for what is essentially thought crime (the important caveats here being that he did not distribute the images and that they were not produced by harming anybody), but also his behavior is highly disturbing because of the emotional nature of the crime that it might indicate a preclusion to. Those two factors come into very strong conflict.

Personally I think codified punishment of being "disgusting" or "appearing to want to do something illegal" is a vastly greater evil than looking at fake child porn, both morally and practically. Of course, ultimately the people constituting a society decide (indirectly) what is illegal, and their morality-emotions will unavoidably be expressed in laws as far as their framework allows (e.g. the constitution).

However, if enough members of the society align on the same morality-emotions, you can reach a critical mass that allows for changing the framework, which is the real terror I feel when I see stories like this.

Is this a crime? Things that are inside your head, who else can say what can exist there, other than you yourself?

You have causation backwards. They look at it because they see children sexually, not the other way around. If it worked how you propose, then homosexuality could be changed to heterosexuality simply by viewing the right porn - and vice-versa.

If you think gender is different than age, try making yourself attracted to 70+ year-old women by viewing porn featuring them.

We certainly don't know what drives sexual attraction in our brains. But we do know that it is darned hard to change. People can't choose to be straight vs gay. Gay people remain gay people even when they hate themselves for it, and even in places where they face the death penalty for it. (True, bisexual people do wind up choosing to only act on heterosexual interest in such places. But again the wiring does not get affected by society's approval.)

There have been decades of research into pornography and sexual violence. As https://www.utsa.edu/today/2020/08/story/pornography-sex-cri... says, the overall conclusion is that pornography does not increase sexual violence.

So to this topic. I no more believe that people have a choice about being pedophiles than I believe that people have a choice about being gay. The significant difference is that gay people can be consensually gay with other gay people. Pedophiles cannot consensually abuse children.

Disclaimer. This is a personal topic. I was homosexually abused as a child. I deeply understand the importance of the topic. Which is why I care that people think clearly about it.

Because I value clarity of thought, I consider arguments about encouraging moral decay, or encouraging pedophilia to be complete and utter bullshit. Arguments should be rooted in reality. Those arguments just use revulsion to shy away from the painful truth.

Here is the painful truth. Some fraction of (overwhelmingly) men have a strong sexual interest in children that they struggle with acting on. Nobody really knows what makes someone have that interest. It almost certainly is an orientation that is fixed before puberty. We know of no way to change it. Therefore we have the same four rational choices that we do with every other such "unnatural sexual desire".

1. Kill those men. 2. Lock those men away permanently. 3. Accept that they are among us, protect ourselves in some ways, and only punish those who prove unable to resist their impulses. 4. Make what those men want as normal.

While many of us would be OK with the first two options, as a society we've chosen the third. With gays, opinion has swung over my lifetime towards taking the fourth option with gays. (I'm for it, but this is definitely a change.)

Given that we're choosing the third option as a society, this jailing makes no sense to me. The guy found a harmless outlet for his perverse desires. Yay him? Don't let him work in childcare, but let's save jail for, I don't know, someone who actually ACTS on his desires?

Thoughts are not crimes.

I get what you are saying, but this quote could be changed to reference viewing adults as sexual objects. Thus eliminate all porn.

*But*, I believe people who use child porn have some "wires" crossed in their brain. Too bad they could not voluntary get treatment in a good facility as opposed to being sent to prison.

Also, IIRC, current medical research says people using child porn will eventually act-out, so if there was a place they can go and not have their name revealed, maybe things will get better.

But I doubt that will ever happen, just about all Mental Diseases have stigma attached to them and this is the most stigmatized condition to have.

In most cases, like many other pedo arrests: by going through his devices for a separate criminal concern.

Maybe he was caught downloading CSAM, maybe he was being investigated for fraud, who knows.

One of us misunderstands what “conservative” means here. I was under the impression that it meant the government shouldn’t meddle in private affairs if it doesn’t have to.