Danish Supreme Court Finds That AI CSAM Is CSAM
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domstol.fe1.tangora.com
I would counter with this: If it is technically impossible to tell the difference between AI generated images, and real ones, how could anyone ever be prosecuted for having presumptive real ones in their possession ever again? Everyone tried would simply say "AI" and that'd be that, unless there was a victim to testify, or it was a case on generation of it etc.
So AI images of this nature do have victims, just slightly less directly.
Another adjacent question: How would you feel if it was an AI generated image of a specific child. What is the precise threshold of victimhood that is necessary?
Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
> Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
I'm not sure. Is the intuition that it will lead to more? because I think there are data-based arguments to the contrary.
Should we allow victims of child pornography to endorse the distribution of images of themselves as a child once they are an adult too since at that point, each additional viewer doesn't generate an additional victim?
Every convincingly real CSAM encountered online has to be treated as potentially being the real thing. Even material with clear AI markers needs to be treated as such since that could be an attempt to obfuscate real material. Allowing AI generated CSAM while banning real material seems to be impossible to enforce and would only further a normalization of encountering CSAM and pedophilia.
If you catch a pedophile and they have actual CSAM on their machines, you also do not have to litigate which ones are real and which ones are fake. If fake ones are legal the burden of proof is now shifted as the pedophile can easily argue that pic that contains documented abuse of your daughter is in fact just AI generated.
Society is always about weighing rights against each other. And while "protect the children" has become the hypocritical rallying cry of politicians that want to introduce a surveillance state, in this case I would happily argue for keeping a strong stance e en as someone who has repeatedly argued against surveillance. Pedophilia is shunned in most societies for a reason and in my opinion it should remain so. If people have that unfortunate sexual urge, society does not profit from safely enabling it while producing many potential risks for actual victims and a lot of work for those policing it.
Now it is known that many pedophiles never touch a child. Normalizing pedophilia as a society would likely change that. Allowing CSAM if it is AI generated (from real training material btw.!) may change that. And this is not a thing we need.
Instead society should normalize it for non-acting pedophiles to seek therapeutic treatment.
No they shouldn't?
People are already using AI to generate porn of real minors, so you don't have to get hypothetical to see how the technology is used to abuse children. If it's easy for any predator to do this, then it's not hard to imagine that they will blackmail minors by threatening to release AI nudes to their friends and family unless they send them real CSAM.
If you generate defamatory AI pics of actual people, there are already laws against that, and the CSAM aspect can be exacerbating.
Otherwise, you should be free to jerk it to whatever your heart desires, which seems to be the real crux of the matter.
If I get pulled over with an airsoft identical to an AK47 and charged with trafficking illegal firearms, I think you will agree that I shouldn't be. It's not an AK47, it's an airsoft.
Similarly, calling AI generated imagery CSAM might be a pure category error. If there is no C being SA, it's not CSAM by definition.
Now if that imagery came about because real CSAM material was in the training data, or because someone used AI to generate sexual imagery of a real person, that's a different story. You now have a derivative work based on a real crime with real victims. But we'd also have some very real and important questions to be asking the model trainers.
In a vacuum though? Sorry no, it doesn't make any sense.
Hold on, is there any evidence of this? This is a very delicate topic and gut reactions are often wrong. Playing violent video games doesn't cause violent behavior, for example.
We should be preventing harm to real children, as well as treating/managing people's psychological disorder of being attracted to children (instead of simply criminalizing it).
The war on drugs comes to mind - it criminalized a substance use disorder, gave power to organized crime, made it harder for people to seek help, allowed the market to be flooded with the most harmful versions of those substances which ultimately killed more people than it saved.
And to be clear I'm not a consumer of such things nor am I attempting to normalize anything. I just want to find out the truth about stuff.
And yes, weapons that are indistinguishable from automatic weapons should be expected to be treated as such. I likely live in a world region with far less people dead from gun violence than you. And I gladly make that choice to keep my fellow humans alive, every single day. Only a brainwashed sociopath would not.
I know this is a different discourse in the US with different positions you all became propagandized to accept as "normal", but the numbers speak for themselves.
Like once the cop finds out the gun isn't real, he retracts the charges for arms trafficking. Right?
If AI CSAM is legal, the market for real CSAM is effectively destroyed. It's heartbreaking to me that--incredibly--we're making our best weapon in the fight against child abuse illegal. It's the methadone of CSAM. What the fuck are we doing?
(Side note, talk to someone whose done methadone sometime, it's not as magical as it sounds)
The argument that producing this material caused harm always made sense but when it came to stories and loli anime drawings, it never made sense.
Back in the 2010s when Germany started censoring DNS with csam sites (of which 99% were false listings) I attended a protest and got to talk to a policeman who talked about the methods they use to catch producers by looking at background sounds, unique identifiers on both perpetrator and victim (tattoos, scars, etc), where light came from, where shadows landed, visible products in the background that might help triangulate possible locations or narrow down to country/city/etc.
I don't see why police wouldn't have to keep doing their job to get to hunt down predators.
Making generated content outright illegal doesn't align with my understanding of free speech.
AI is not something new in this space, it just means that a lot more grotesque fictional CSAM can be produced. It has been possible to create realistic-looking-but-fictional CSAM since Photoshop came out (and then some).
This interests me. I don't know of any specific ruling we can draw any conclusion from, but the ruling in question here cites some procedural texts that specifically state that the danish CSAM laws only cover "reproductions", which they then also specifically define as not including "drawing and paintings, such as antique vases".
It seems to me that a compelling argument could be made on both sides of that distinction. On the one hand, lolicon shared on X share nothing in common with art on antique vases. On the other, they would not be included in the textual definition of reproduction.
In this specific matter I think it's most likely that drawings of CSAM is legal, at least under these statutes.
CSAM is an American legal concept, and the idea that child porn should be legal as long as there's no provable abuse is a peculiarly American take. Most European countries don't work like that.
Danish law appears to outlaw (roughly translated) "sexual material containing visual representations of persons under the age of 18". Whether or not a specific minor was abused doesn't come into it. So clarifying that that covers AI-generated imagery seems to be a much smaller step than many in this thread are assuming.
In my mind, this is pretty substantial technology news, at least in Denmark, since it rejects the notion that AI generated pictures are substantially different from other pictures, and therefore has to abide by the same laws.
I will be interested in seeing if anybody charges the big AI providers for producing these photos.
So I think one has to find other logic to contain this crap.
For instance, what if we're NOT talking about CSAM, are generated images ALSO considered equivalent to photos of real things in other domains? Or is CSAM a special carve out and based on what principles? Legal frameworks are stronger when they limit arbitrary rules.
(to be clear, there might be a good logic argument, e.g. it isn't about protecting children, it is about protecting adults - so it doesn't matter how the image came into being).
So, then: What specific and immediate — not potential, but actual — harms does this CSAM-context decision impose on non-CSAM contexts?
At a glance, I don’t see any such harms imposed. One could perhaps argue that AI must take more care now, and that this is a harm; plausible enough, but is that an undue harm? Not likely: the cultural and legal hostility to crossing from non-CSAM contexts into CSAM-context has no reason to yield to the AI operations difficulties imposed by restricting generation of CSAM-context materials.
That’s neither a CSAM-context nor a CSAM-adjacent question as presented, and so is ineligible for the CSAM-context “carve-out” discussions of this post and thread.
However, your question is a boringly incompetent attempt to inflame my emotions in order to trigger illogical responses meant to weaken the impact of my dissection and analysis of this discussion — a particularly ineffective strategy against this high-functioning sociopath. Please don’t use conversational warfare tactics on HN.
The argument that ‘the illegality of AI-generated CSAM would therefore apply to all AI-generated illegality and thus is undue harm upon non-CSAM contexts’ is constructed on the basis that ‘A therefore B’ implies ‘B therefore A’, which is untrue here as detailed above. If you have a better argument in defense of the right to generate CSAM, I recommend a refresher on obscenity laws, how they vary per country, and why they cannot be reduced so simply to ‘CSAM, therefore non-CSAM’ before presenting it; that’s not how it works, no matter how unpalatable or displeasing the one-way discontinuities of CSAM law may be. It’s also worth considering why Apple would both support individual freedoms and privacies while also refusing to deliver the overreach of privacy-destroying CSAM scanning that they at one point had announced last year; that is a very concrete example of undue harm to non-CSAM contexts, and the quality of this discussion would greatly benefit from familiarity in depth with the topic.
The answer to if it generalizes is, as with all new law, that we just don't know. In this case, the procedural for the passing of the last amendment to the relevant section includes the specific point that fictive CSAM should be included. It seems doubtful that other such procedurals would contain the same language. That doesn't rule out that this case is used as a basis for claiming that AI generated images should be treated similarly to real photographs when the two are indistinguishable.
just their "source code" is legaleese.
lots of overlapping concepts even... most contracts have a section where they define all the terms, like defining variables/types. there are clauses and such that guard against specific outcomes, like uhh guard clauses i guess....
even numbered sections like functions to reuse langage.
imean... they even call laws "codes" in places
the one thing that makes it very different is just that they are all stuck with a codebase that has been worked on for 500+ years and its very very hard to actually refactor anything.
also sometimes you dont know if the code will work or what it actually does until its run through the compiler to be executed (courts)
so yea engineers but for a different kind of system.
CSAM laws exist to punish abusers, and seek justice for the abused. Not one or the other, but both. The law cannot function without the victims, else you're just attacking people for what amounts to thought crimes.
I find CSAM and pedophiles disgusting, and I imagine 100% of HN users agree with me on this, but this just opens the door for world governments to a) claim LLM output is real and factual (!), but b) minimizes the danger to victims and equates victimhood to being a fictional character.
I'm not Danish and I'm hoping this is just some Dane-specific weird quirk of their law, but from what I can see, this is a politically-biased ruling to "think of the children".
The law must recognize the right to self-determinism and bodily autonomy, and you can't inherently be both the victim and the abuser. There is no one size fits all law, and many governments are trying to act like they have one.
Do you have a concrete example of this happening? Every time I have heard of a minor being persecuted for possession or distribution is when one person sent an image of themselves to another person and then that other person further distributed it to other people without their consent, which to be clear is wrong.
https://www.aclu.org/news/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecu...
This is one such case, but hardly unique.
No not really, sharing sexual images to others that were shared to you directly by a person should be (and in some countries is) a crime. The boy in the linked case should be the one charged with the distribution of child pornography, or something akin to revenge porn since they are both minors.
It is probably very hard to carve out these exceptions for minors sexting, but we already have (in some countries) consent laws that factor in relationships between minors. I don't see why this would be different
Generally the process isn't worth it unless they think they have a near certain chance of winning against the child.
I do agree, however, that in bird culture, sharing nudes that were sent to you is considered a dick move.
Look at the recent news that Anthropic will ban users that insult their models. How can it make any logic sense?
But it could easily become "punishable by law" also:
- Abusing (non sexually) a fictitious person that is a LLM.
- Insulting a LLM in a chat box, based on a fact that it speaks and appear to behave like a human. The LLM can pretend and simulate that it is offended if you forget that it is just bytes behind.
And in the end, how to consider the following case:
- You have a government call center for a public service, you are aggressive and insult the agent -> it is potentially a legal crime
- Now the agent of this public service that you are talking to is in fact an AI, clearly stated as so, an you insult it very aggressively. -> No human being is hurt so should it be an legal offense?
Yeah those guys are so not free because they ban CP, a thing you think should be allowed as long as it's not real. Do you see how easy it is to make a bad argument?
Nope, I just see someone making bullshit excuses.
Outlawing materials that are designed to produce pedophilic thoughts and consistently do so for some people is a way for society to say that such thoughts are wrong. I think part of being a responsible human being is controlling ones own thoughts to some ways.
> The expression became one of the best-known phrases in the history of the Supreme Court.[4] Though "I know it when I see it" is widely cited as Stewart's test for "obscenity", he did not use the word "obscenity" himself in his short concurrence, but stated that he knew what fit the "shorthand description" of "hard-core pornography" when he saw it.
As far as an argument for why this is bad, I produced it in my first comment, and you have not responded to it.
I think that we have both made our positions clear to anyone who has been reading this comment thread, so I am not going to reply to any future comments you might make, and I will just leave it up to people to dedide for themselves which of us is right.