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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why it needs to be banned. If it is artificial, whether it is a story someone wrote, or an animation someone drew, or a photo-realistic AI generated thing, it’s just not real. There is no harm committed to a victim. It feels like this is a moralistic crusade, adjacent to age verification laws that are just backdoor porn bans (freely admitted by the conservatives who support each laws).

The bigger issue is that these types of bans feel a lot more like banning speech than banning a real crime, and the precedent it sets can end up being used in far-reaching ways. That’s how it always is.

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I can't agree with the photorealistic AI images because they're indistinguishable from an actual photograph.

Everything else I do agree with you on, though.

The probem is, prosecutions are just looking for easier ways to jail people for things they could do based on what they personally believe. (E.g. "Manga causes child abuse")

The United States already considers artwork that resembles a real minor to be outside the First Amendment and hence illegal. Even like, cartoon artwork. If you're fapping to naked Bart Simpson that's one thing, but if it's a drawing of a real child you are using that child's image as a sexual object, that can be profoundly traumatizing, and it is seen to cross the threshold of "actually abusing a child" that justifies not applying the First Amendment. People's likenesses in general are subject to strong protection in the United States and you can face strong penalties for misusing them, even if porn is not involved; consider White v. Samsung.

> but if it's a drawing of a real child

How would you even prove that, though?

You show a jury a picture of the minor and a reproduction of the image in question. It may not matter too much if the creator intended the image to resemble the actual minor; only that they intended to create a sexually explicit image of a minor, which happens to resemble an actual minor. The marginal cases won't be prosecuted.

But some (a lot of) idiots will do your hard work for you. They'll share torrents of "<insert underage celebrity> Nude.mpv" that has been AI-generated, or post an erotic drawing of their favorite streamer's young daughter to a chan board, labelling it as such. The law allows the prosecution to nail those cases to the wall.

> If it is artificial, whether it is a story someone wrote

Already illegal in Australia: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/sydney-... (don't hold your breath on it making any "banned books" lists)

People laughed at Indians believing photos stole one's soul, and now we have legislated even stupider behavior, without the excuse of ignorance.

Australia also believe that women with small breasts in porn causes people to become child abusers...

Datasets such as LAION-5B are found to contain thousands of images of CSAM. So, real victims are involved indirectly.

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