Why Are We Building Jailbait Sexbots?
fastcolabs.com
fastcolabs.com
"In the United States, the PROTECT Act of 2003 made significant changes to the law regarding virtual child pornography. Any realistic appearing computer generated depiction that is indistinguishable from a depiction of an actual minor in sexual situations or engaging in sexual acts is illegal under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A."[1]
Maybe the government could get away with it, but if independent researchers did it, they could be charged with producing child porn.
Yes, Orwell's "thoughtcrime" is an actual criminal offense in the U.S.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography#Vi...
Would we have so many men interested in having sex with children if the porn industry wasn't so big ?
Is it really? Isn't "catholic schoolgirl" stereotypically one of the most popular 'fetishes', right up there with "pizza delivery guy" (not sure I'd call roleplaying a fetish per-say)?
Producing virtual child pornography is not obviously wrong. But no politician will speak up, because THINK OF THE CHILDREN (what children? DOESNT MATTER THINK OF THEM).
Thus orwellian thoughtcrime.
EDIT: I'm willing to agree that leaving real producers an escape path by letting them claim everything was virtual is bad. So the US clause for 'realistic' virtual porn is okay in my book.
But in the UK stylised drawings of child pornography are illegal. That's just silly.
Make causing actual harm to an actual child illegal. Make profiting from it (eg selling pictures of said actual harm) illegal. Make possessing pictures not illegal, but something that will get you asked where the pictures came from.
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But really it is about thoughtcrime. Society (or at least politicians) have decided that having certain interests/desires is wrong (or rather, that those people are creepy and dangerous and can't possibly have the self-control to not fully act on said thoughts). And so anything that may indicate someone having said thoughts is made illegal, even if it doesn't hurt anyone, and even if it indicate that they know not to act in harmful ways.
Can't someone accused of selling child porn claim it's fake just as easily as someone simply accused of possessing it?
I would think that sellers having ties to producers would have a harder time arguing they were selling fakes. And if they don't have those ties -- if they're not supporting the people causing the harm -- then their actions are only illegal for the sake of simplifying the prosecution's work. Which means their likely being able to get off at trial is less of an issue.
* In this scenario it's something creepy but harmless. In another it might be fake guns or fake drugs * *
* * Consider the implications of outlawing bags of sugar.
If an MMORPG had "100 year old elvish" NPCs which had childlike features and full nudity, then playing the game might be distasteful but probably should fall under constitutional protection.
The law is very cognizant of intent and willfulness. If you willfully intend to break the law, but fail to actually break the law, you can still be charged and convicted of a crime. I don't have a problem with that.
I think you must agree that if you solicit a bot then there is no crime, just like if you "murder" a bot there is no crime. Ultimately we have juries to decide of the accused if full of shit claiming they were soliciting bots when they were actually soliciting children. The burden of proof falls on the Government to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt.
As bots get increasingly realistic and entertaining enough to create a market for that service (regardless of the physical characteristic of the avatar) it will be interesting to watch jurisprudence evolve.
A convincing avatar which can be synchronized with a human's text input, and/or speech alteration (not text-to-speech) is one way you approach 'the singularity' without having to synthesize human thoughts and emotions. Such a system, if it can cross the uncanny valley, would radically improve quality of live for millions of (and I hate this term) 'genetic lottery losers'.
No, you can't.
If you take concrete action in an attempt to commit a crime, that is often itself a crime (usually a lesser offense than the one attempted; e.g., "attempted murder" is a distinct crime, and a lesser offense than murder.) But if you are not proven to have broken the law (and, more specifically, committed a crime -- not all lawbreaking is criminal), you cannot be convicted of a crime.
This is a concern to me because it doesn't make sense to me that somebody who tries to kill somebody but does a poor job of it should be punished less harshly than somebody who tries to kill somebody and manages to pull it off. Nobody should get off lighter just because their victim was particularly hearty.
Of course on the opposite end of the spectrum, if I try to break the speed limit with my beat up '65 Volkswagen beetle, but fail to do so, obviously I don't deserve a speeding ticket. Attempted speeding isn't a crime, not all "attempted [whatevers]" need to be punished.
Yes.
> This is a concern to me because it doesn't make sense to me that somebody who tries to kill somebody but does a poor job of it should be punished less harshly than somebody who tries to kill somebody and manages to pull it off.
Typically, both the degree of "wrongness" of the act and the degree of harm inflicted by it are factors in setting criminal punishments. While attempted murder might be as morally wrong as actual murder, the harm inflicted is different.
It isn't clear to me that an attempted murderer is less dangerous to society than a successful murderer (unless we assume that all failed murder attempts failed due to incompetence, but I don't think that is safe to say), surely they should both be kept off the streets for the same amount of time.
It could be argued that someone with both demonstrated bad intent and demonstrated capacity is still more dangerous than someone with equally bad intent that fails to demonstrate the capacity to successfully carry that intent into fruition.
Your friend calls you. The police have discovered you tried to hire a hitman to kill your wife. You despair, but then realize you won't get punished any worse for killing her before they show up...
I understand not increasing the punishment of certain types of crimes so that we don't create incentives to escalate (for example, don't give the death penalty for armed robberies, because then all armed robberies would turn into murders as well), but in the case of attempted murder, the person doing it has already committed themselves to killing somebody. There aren't really many ways that can escalate. If they tried to kill somebody, realized that they failed, and had the opportunity to try again, I don't think there is much incentive currently for them to not try again.
Yes.
(Well, hiring the hitman may itself be other crimes, but once you've done it, its the same set of crimes for "hiring the hitman to kill somebody" + "hitman kills them" and "hiring the hitman to kill somebody" + "you kill them yourself". For you, at least. Less crimes for the hitman, though.)
Not in strict liability offenses, such as statutory rape. Which isn't entirely relevant to playing a game, until the legislature makes 'possession of child pornography' strict liability and includes drawings as being child pornography.
But what you suggest is unlikely to occur because the Supreme Court has consistently found strict liability for first amendment issues is unconstitutional. See: http://www.volokh.com/posts/1218485530.shtml
Suppose I try to kill you using my specially crafted voodoo doll, but fail to do so (my magic powers are not what they used to be) then I can still be convicted? What if I curse someone, is that enough to be convicted? I doubt it.
There is something called "moral luck" in philosophy, which relates to this.
By 'willfully intend' I meant basically what jlgreco said, 'take concrete action in an attempt to commit a crime' and I fully understand that the charge for that is different than the charge if you were successful in the act.
If you 'willfully intend' to commit murder by sticking pins in a voodoo doll, you are crazy but probably not guilty of attempted murder.
I'm not exactly sure what the jury instructions would say. Is it whether the act would reasonably result in death, or whether the defendant believed at the time that the act would result in the death of their chosen victim?
Often times, trying to kill someone in a way that is extremely unlikely to actually result in their death doesn't save you from getting charged. A good example is Ross Ulbrich hiring a hitman online for bitcoins. Twice.
If there are actual human victims, then prosecute with all the harshness possible; but if some pedophile gets off on 100% computer-generated images, well, then that's probably a win for society that reduces violence and exploitation.
More research is needed. Some people suggest that users of pornography need to collect more and more of it. Some people who collect images of child sexual abuse are caught with hundreds of thousand of images.
A person collecting pseudo-photograph images of child sexual abuse might be a risk to children. (Data is tricky to find.)
But yes, if people can stay away from children and real images of child sexual abuse then pseudo photographs would be great.
(I agree with you about the bots too.)
Obviously it's very hard to test that, but it's at least credible.
The other point about pseudo-photographs is that it's a historical remainder from times before we had photo-realistic rendering.
People would take real images of children, and manipulate those into images of child sexual abuse. Sometimes combining real world children's heads onto real world images of child sexual abuse, or images of adults having sex.
In that case two images are created from one instance of abuse. Two children are shown, but only one has suffered abuse. Or children are shown, but adults were used for the sexual parts of the photograph. Since people thought strongly that possession of images of child sexual abuse was a signal that the person would go on to commit actual abuse they made sure to make these images illegal.
I find this very hard to talk about. I strongly want to protect children from harm. Images of child sexual abuse cover a wide range of harm, from sexually suggestive clothed posing of 15 year olds at one end to brutal rape of small infants at the other. My instinct is to keep these images illegal, but I realise that the demonisation of paedophiles does not help them seek help to stop their offending behaviour, and drives them to "support groups" that attempt to normalise their behaviour. And if we did proper research and found that virtual images reduced real world offending it'd be hard to keep those images illegal.
Or you could just as well argue that people use the imagery to fulfill their needs, and if they didn't have that they'd turn to actual child abuse.
'credible' should not be good enough. (Of course in the current political systems, it doesn't even have to be credible if you can spin it scarily enough: see war on terror, war on drugs, sex offender registrations for urinating in public etc.) You need evidence that actually supports your theory.
So far we have people who collect images of child sexual abuse, and some of those people go on to abuse children more directly.
We don't have groups of people telling us that their collections of images of child sexual abuse help prevent their offending behaviour. (For some obvious reasons, of course.)
The effort involved in collecting images does not scale linearly with the number of images collected.
For instance, if I try to hire a hitman and the deal falls through (maybe I do not offer enough money, maybe he is too busy to take the contract, maybe he is an undercover cop), would you say that my actions should not be a prosecutable crime?
In both cases the person fully believes they're interacting with the genuine article.
But if I try to hire a hitman on a virtual 3d character or Easter Bunny, it shouldn't be a prosecutable crime. In attempted crime there should be a victim that I attempted to harm.
I can agree that the entrapment / undercover cop scenario might make it properly prosecutable, depending on how it's done. I'd be willing to bet that in most of the cases if you'd get a warrant then you'd get evidence of actually harmed kids making the case very clear. However, if the perpetrator knows that the "target" is virtual and noone is harmed, then it shouldn't be illegal.
That still leaves a point about such "avatars" being legal if made/bough/sold for recreational purposes if everyone knows that noone is getting harmed. i.e., treating childporn as evil not in itself, but because it's evidence and financing for actual evil acts.
Once we get that clear, putting all potential victims behind bars becomes one of the way to have 0 victims. The question is how effective that method is and whether it is achievable or can it backfire.
I would say that a bot that can detect a vulnerable child is far more effective in preventing a crime than a one that detects a potential offender.
This will lead to all sorts of legal gray areas, wherein "I just assumed she was digital" could well work as a positive defense, or, even more eerily, a faux-pedophile service provider could staff enough adults to cover for the non-adults that they sometimes use.
For some offences it doesn't matter if you thought the person was a certain age or not.
Compare this section:
Causing or inciting a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/8
With this one:
Meeting a child following sexual grooming etc http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/15
See here, where they include both tests-
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/part/1/crosshead...
> (i)B is under 18, and A does not reasonably believe that B is 18 or over, or
> (ii)B is under 13.
And there's stuff in the photography bit that means pseudo-photographs still count as illegal.
> And there's stuff in the photography bit that means pseudo-photographs still count as illegal.
That's where America differs. We expressly allow pseudo-imagery under the first amendment. Logic being that the harm comes in the exploitation, but for digital representations of images that are pornographic, nobody was exploited in the process of their creation (at least, assuming nobody was exploited in the process of their creation).
The UK laws though seem to both be more tangible than the situation discussed in the article, at least assuming that 'sexual grooming' has been defined and is fairly narrowly interpretable.
I'm not the person to say whether or not pretend pedo-porn is a net good or evil for the world; but I can see arguments in either direction, but if they're actually grooming children who they then meet, clearly, that's a net bad.
Edit: I had it exactly backwards, and now I'm wondering how in the hell I remember it so wrongly. Apparently we do not condone digital representations of child porn under the PROTECT Act of 2003[1].
I would swear I knew it the other way 'round.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_child_pornography#Vi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...
I'm not aware of whether the PROTECT Act (which I believe was a response to this decision) has been challenged in court.
Why would they use non-adults at all, if they have software that can cover the visuals? Adults are easier to control and completely legal.
That said, I was only hypothesizing, so it's very possible that kids would be more problematic than they're worth in such an endeavor, not even counting the increased legal risk.
Its modern-day witch hunt and completely skips over the fact that many sex-offenders where in fact themselves victims when they were children.
Populism when its worst.
But seriously, I have to disagree. I'm aware of the absurdities that arise from populist demonisation of paedophiles. (E.g. the 17-year-old girl who arrested for child porn because she sent a picture of her tits to her boyfriend.) But I really think we should take steps to choke off the demand for live images of child abuse.
Just as in war on drugs.
Seriously though, wouldn't the creators be creating a virtual child designed to encourage pedophilia ? So who would they be to judge ?
That's the part I'm talking about.
There's too many differences for this argument to hold. It is, at best, a good start of an argument, but one that needs to address the practical differences between a program and a human, in terms of cost, morality, sentience, etc. And I think at the end of that process you'd find that you can't just treat code as an undercover cop, and it wasn't actually that great a starting point after all.
I'd recommend the webcomic 'The illustrated guide to law' to everyone, especially many of the commentators on here. It is disturbing to read some of these posts.
By making fake jailbaits, you are baiting adults into... cyber sex with kids! "Hey, the kids love it! Let's keep going!"
This is not a solution.
This really isn't good, and that's what the anti-entrapment statutes are for, but law enforcement finds its way around them... That's one of the best ways to catch "criminals", and catching criminals is their job, right?