You're just making more criminals this way. It's the same as saying air rifles that are indistinguishable from fully automatic weapons should be treated as fully automatic weapons.
No they shouldn't?
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?