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Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

With the very clear caveat that I'd like to see a world where no one is interested or inclined to abuse children or view CSAM in the first place...

I would like to think you are right. The problem is that we already have a comparable with heroin and methadone. And people still want to take the heroin and not the methadone.

(You can get into somewhat conspiracy theory that methadone is designed to either help someone off heroin quickly or otherwise kill the addict more quickly - either way solving the problem. An addicts of wised up to that and avoid it.)

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> And people still want to take the heroin and not the methadone.

The difference is that AI will soon be able to produce something indistinguishable from the real thing.

Methadone is very distinguishable from heroin.

Following that thought through, won't that make "the real thing" that much easier to hide in a sea of indistinguishable, make it much harder to find and prosecute, ease the restrictions currently on those that want to act out IRL and swap their activities online?

The thrust of the article linked here is that:

    the bigger risk is that “AI CSAM is going to bury the actual sexual abuse content,” diverting resources from actual children in need of rescue.

If AI CSAM hides real material in a sea of fake, it means the fake has displaced it and killed its profitability. There will definitely be cases where it will make rescuing victims and persecuting criminals harder, but at the same time it'll rob many of them of the incentive to risk committing the crimes in the first place.

Regardless, I don't know if any of this is preventable. The only strategy that might actually have an effect is for law enforcement to use AI-generated CSAM themselves as a honeypot to periodically "ban wave" consumers and have the hashes of the fakes.

> the fake has displaced it and killed its profitability.

There are very few instance I'm aware of where prolific pedophiles are into it for the profit.

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