This argument seems to boil down to "If we cannot tell the difference between an innocent and a guilty person, we must find everybody guilty".
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 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.
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.
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?