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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

>whether or not it's moral and appropriate to advocate for and work towards its abolition in what you see as the best interest of everyone?

That lines creates justification for anything and even everyone to be banned, sadly.

>Is "Don't like X? Don't buy it" as far as we should go with... AI-produced child porn?

My line is "is there a victim harmed with the action". Shooting a gun? Yes, someone is often harmed and killed. We should and do regulate gun usage.

simulated CSAM is repulsive but does not have a victim, in theory. The jury is out on how you train such content, so I won't saw "AI porn has no victim", but the animated stuff within Steam definitely has no victim (and Steam pretty much forbids live actors of any form for such content. They dealt with such a case in 2023)

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That's your line, but others have other lines; violence in games was a big thing twenty years ago, and some pearl clutchers tried to have all violent video games banned.

Thing is though, if violent video games caused people to become violent, Columbine wouldn't have been a rare incident.

But it's a difficult one. People play video games but for most people it doesn't change their moral compass; it doesn't make them think ripping out people's spines is normal or acceptable. It desensitizes them to a point I suppose.

Does porn, porn games or simulated CSAM make people normalize objectification and violence towards people and children? I can't answer that, and I don't know if there's been any studies towards especially CSAM since it's such a taboo. N=1, but 20+ years of porn on occasion hasn't turned me into some rampant sex addict.

The problem with simulated CSAM is that there is a risk that the viewer develops a fetish for such repulsive practices. It has then destructive consequences for the viewer and, should he try to perform it, his victims.

Either way, I don't see the harm of forbidding it. The web doesn't lack regular pornography alternatives, free or paid.

Gay conversion therapy, which has an entire society backing it, failed consistently despite trying pairing it with torture and social ostracism.

This seems to suggest that broad sexual preferences are remarkably stable.

I would imagine that it is probably easier to make someone find something sexually exciting than to make them no longer find a thing sexually exciting?

When a river had carved a canyon, it is hard to redirect it. That doesn’t mean the canyon was always there.

By that logic, one would think that gay people would at least also be heterosexual because they're drowning in an ocean of heterosexual material.

Why is the pornography served to each generation more violent then? It's one thing to be homosexual, it's another to be into the most extreme acts that some homosexuals perform. Do we really need porn that scenarizes incest?

It's kind of interesting that you're claiming a slippery slope argument, when the words we use to describe incest Oedipal and Electra complex come from wildly popular pre-CE fictional accounts of incest.

As for violence, that's because such acts on film were illegal. Pornography was tightly regulated before this era of free speech. Even now the UK, is constantly trying to maintain BDSM porn as criminal [1] and Australia has similar tight restrictions [2]. This is to say nothing of the countries where pornography is completely banned: China, North Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Malta, Myanmar, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Yemen.

So if the question is why do you see more of Y in XXX, it's because it is now allowed so content is created to satisfy needs that were already there.

[1] https://reason.com/2014/12/02/uk-bans-fetish-porn/ [2] https://www.kptlegal.com.au/resources/knowledge/pornography-...

This is the same "violence in video games" argument, no? I'm open to reading studies on the issue, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that simulated CSAM "converts" people who otherwise is not attracted to children.

I don’t know how you would study that specifically, but it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that sexual experiences can contribute to formation of fetishes. Iirc there was an experiment on mice or rats or something where they had them wear some sort of structure the first times they mated and then later on they uh, mated more strongly when wearing the thing than when not wearing it (and I think when not wearing it, produced less emissions than rats or mice that had never been made to wear the thing).

I mean, this seems to be a pattern people have seen in many cases?

I seem to recall something about people in the military developing scat fetishes after repeatedly masturbating in restrooms that smell of feces, due to a lack of other private places?

The phrase “fetish fuel” is a fairly standard phrase I think.

Generally, it’s pretty clear that some fetishes come from somewhere. Like, the “woman turns into a giant blueberry” one seems to pretty clearly trace back to someone’s experience with the scene in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.

And, like, if someone starts out looking at/for breast expansion porn, they’re probably going to be exposed to a far bit of lactation porn as well, and I think there’s a fair chance that they’ll start seeking that out as well? For example.

Why would we expect this pattern to not apply in the case of CP/CSAM?

Violence in video games is quite different from paraphilias. While they usually have an origin deep buried in the psyche, exposure to specific types of porn can act as a trigger and reinforcement to it.

I fail to see how. We have entire sections of our brain dedicated to aggression and adrenaline management. Knowing how to recognize a threat, fight, and flight is every bit as base as knowing how to breed.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11757-020-00607-y

End of page 3, the author does a litterature review and finds that current studies show that exposure to CSAM increases probability of offending for those with predispositions.

Haven't read this yet, but I'm going to take a wild stab and guess that none of those "current studies" mentioned in the literature review were RCTs, because an RCT would entail deliberately exposing people with a predisposition towards paedophilia to CSAM, and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would ever be allowed by an ethics board.

If that's the case, then all these studies were observational studies, which lack the ability to infer causality. They can at best hint at directions to pursue for studies that can infer causality.

As a concrete example of the way that observational studies can go wrong despite good intentions: It was believed for a long time that paedophiles have lower average IQs than the general population. This was based on the observation that a larger fraction than would be expected of those caught and sentenced for sexual crimes involving children were of low IQ. Of course, a better explanation of this observation is that paedophiles with higher IQs are better at covering their tracks and evading suspicion.

There are many publications studying how porn exposure shapes sexuality and our vision of the human body, especially in the young age, but not only.

By your logic, CSAM consumers would be "magically" unaffected by viewing this porn subcategory.

How convienient.

Read carefully: I'm only claiming absence of (genuine) evidence, not evidence of absence.

Until genuine evidence is available, either outcome seems plausible. It could be that consuming CSAM pushes people towards committing sex crimes, or it could be that it "magically" doesn't, the same way people playing violent video games are "magically" unaffected by doing so.

ETA: An example of the inability of porn to influence sexual behavior is the plight of gay Western men in the 1950s-1980s. During this time homosexuality was absolutely demonised across essentially all of Western society, so there was ample interest from gay men in "correcting" their "errant" desires (this is not to say that all gay men felt this way). At the same time, heterosexual porn was widespread and easily available, though admittedly to a lesser extent than it is today. Given these forces at play, if it were possible for a gay man to develop an interest in having sex with women merely by looking at heterosexual porn, it does seem like there would have been large numbers of gay men who successfully "converted" to straight men. But AFAIK it is disputed that any such genuine conversion has ever taken place.

Thar seems to fit with my previous readings. "those woth predispositions". The equivalent of "alcoholics withdraw when exposed to alcohol". The paper cites other studies saying as much for general indidividuals:

>SEM) and psychological outcomes: sexual satisfaction, body satisfaction, sexist attitudes and mental well-being. Participants were 252 adults recruited from universities and online who were asked how often in the last three months they had intentionally looked at (1) pictures with clearly exposed genitals, (2) videos with clearly exposed genitals, (3) pictures in which people were having sex, (4) video clips in which people were having sex. They also included some of the items used by Hald (2006) but these were not specified. There results indicated no significant indirect or direct relationships between online SEM use and any of the psychosocial outcomes and appeared to have a negligible role in current sexual functioning and mental well-being. Similarly, Landripet et al. (20191) in a longitudinal study of 248 male adolescents found that a preference for violent/coercive pornography decreased over time and was unrelated to latent growth in pornography use. The authors noted limitations in this study, but still argued for the importance of sexual education and media literacy programs aimed at a more critical evaluation of sexual media content and its potential adverse outcomes.

Two arguments I can think of:

The first is that you're banning free expression, and banning free expression is inherently harmful.

There's also the displacement theory - with the legal content being much more accessible and regulated to ensure minors aren't involved in production, it displaces illegal content that does harm minors.

I don't think the theory behind "free expression" covers things such as CSAM or incest porn. It's ok to say that content that aim to excite the viewer about minor abuse should be forbidden.

Murder is illegal, but games and stories about murder are protected free expression. None of the games in question involve actual people, let alone people being harmed, and so why wouldn't they be treated the same way?

The assumption they're making is "interactive incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior".

In purely hypothetical terms, what would we if there was evidence for this? I can see some folks standing by their ideals and concluding that even if this was true, we shouldn't ban these games, while others would conclude that there is a moral obligation to future victims to ban them.

How would you behave if you shared the belief that incest and sexual exploitation games influence people's real life behavior?

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