It’s worth mentioning that in this instance the guy did send porn to a minor. This isn’t exactly a cut and dry, “guy used stable diffusion wrong” case. He was distributing it and grooming a kid.
The major concern to me, is that there isn’t really any guidance from the FBI on what you can and can’t do, which may lead to some big issues.
For example, websites like novelai make a business out of providing pornographic, anime-style image generation. The models they use deliberately tuned to provide abstract, “artistic” styles, but they can generate semi realistic images.
Now, let’s say a criminal group uses novelai to produce CSAM of real people via the inpainting tools. Let’s say the FBI cast a wide net and begins surveillance of novelai’s userbase.
Is every person who goes on there and types, “Loli” or “Anya from spy x family, realistic, NSFW” (that’s an underaged character) going to get a letter in the mail from the FBI? I feel like it’s within the realm of possibility. What about “teen girls gone wild, NSFW?” Or “young man, no facial body hair, naked, NSFW?”
This is NOT a good scenario, imo. The systems used to produce harmful images being the same systems used to produce benign or borderline images. It’s a dangerous mix, and throws the whole enterprise into question.
Mhm I have mixed feelings about this. I know that this entire thing is fucked up but isn’t it better to have generated stuff than having actual stuff that involved actual children?
It reminds me of the story of the young man who realized he had an attraction to underage children and didn’t want to act on it, yet there were no agencies or organizations to help him, and that it was only after crimes were committed that anyone could get help.
I see this fake cp as only a positive for those people. That it might make it difficult to find real offenders is a terrible reason against.
Yeah, it’s very similar to the “is loli porn unethical” debate. No victim, it could supposedly help reduce actual CSAM consumption, etc… But it’s icky so many people still think it should be illegal.
There are two big differences between AI and loli though. The first is that AI would supposedly be trained with CSAM to be able to generate it. An artist can create loli porn without actually using CSAM references. The second difference is that AI is much much easier for the layman to create. It doesn’t take years of practice to be able to create passable porn. Anyone with a decent GPU can spin up a local instance, and be generating within a few hours.
In my mind, the former difference is much more impactful than the latter. AI becoming easier to access is likely inevitable, so combatting it now is likely only delaying the inevitable. But if that AI is trained on CSAM, it is inherently unethical to use.
Whether that makes the porn generated by it unethical by extension is still difficult to decide though, because if artists hate AI, then CSAM producers likely do too. Artists are worried AI will put them out of business, but then couldn’t the same be said about CSAM producers? If AI has the potential to run CSAM producers out of business, then it would be a net positive in the long term, even if the images being created in the short term are unethical.
Just a point of clarity, an AI model capable of generating csam doesn’t necessarily have to be trained on csam.
That honestly brings up more questions than it answers.
Why is that? The whole point of generative AI is that it can combine concepts.
You train it on the concept of a chair using only red chairs. You train it on the color red, and the color blue. With this info and some repetition, you can have it output a blue chair.
The same applies to any other concepts. Larger, smaller, older, younger. Man, boy, woman, girl, clothed, nude, etc. You can train them each individually, gradually, and generate things that then combine these concepts.
Obviously this is harder than just using training data of what you want. It’s slower, it takes more effort, and results are inconsistent, but they are results. And then, you curate the most viable of the images created this way to train a new and refined model.
Yeah, there are photorealistic furry photo models, and I have yet to meet an anthropomorphic dragon IRL.
A problem that I see getting brought up is that generated AI images makes it harder to notice photos of actual victims, making it harder to locate and save them
And doesn’t the AI learn from real images?
It does learn from real images, but it doesn’t need real images of what it’s generating to produce related content.
As in, a network trained with no exposure to children is unlikely to be able to easily produce quality depictions of children. Without training on nudity, it’s unlikely to produce good results there as well.
However, if it knows both concepts it can combine them readily enough, similar to how you know the concept of “bicycle” and that of “Neptune” and can readily enough imagine “Neptune riding an old fashioned bicycle around the sun while flaunting it’s tophat”.Under the hood, this type of AI is effectively a very sophisticated “error correction” system. It changes pixels in the image to try to “fix it” to matching the prompt, usually starting from a smear of random colors (static noise).
That’s how it’s able to combine different concepts from a wide range of images to create things it’s never seen.
I have trouble with this because it’s like 90% grey area. Is it a pic of a real child but inpainted to be nude? Was it a real pic but the face was altered as well? Was it completely generated but from a model trained on CSAM? Is the perceived age of the subject near to adulthood? What if the styling makes it only near realistic (like very high quality CG)?
I agree with what the FBI did here mainly because there could be real pictures among the fake ones. However, I feel like the first successful prosecution of this kind of stuff will be a purely moral judgement of whether or not the material “feels” wrong, and that’s no way to handle criminal misdeeds.
If not trained on CSAM or in painted but fully generated, I can’t really think of any other real legal arguments against it except for: “this could be real”. Which has real merit, but in my eyes not enough to prosecute as if it were real. Real CSAM has very different victims and abuse so it needs different sentencing.
It’s better to have neither.
This mentality smells of “just say no” for drugs or “just don’t have sex” for abortions. This is not the ideal world and we have to find actual plans/solutions to deal with the situation. We can’t just cover our ears and hope people will stop
Removed by mod
It feeds and evolves a disorder which in turn increases risks of real life abuse.
But if AI generated content is to be considered illegal, so should all fictional content.
Or, more likely, it feeds and satisfies a disorder which in turn decreases risk of real life abuse.
Making it illegal so far helped nothing, just like with drugs
That’s not how these addictive disorders works… they’re never satisfied and always need more.
Yes, but the perp showed the images to a minor.
You know whats better? Having none of this shit
Did you just fix menal health?
The arrest is only a positive. Allowing pedophiles to create AI CP is not a victimless crime. As others point out it muddies the water for CP of real children, but it also potentially would allow pedophiles easier ways to network in the open (if the images are legal they can easily be platformed and advertised), and networking between abusers absolutely emboldens them and results in more abuse.
As a society we should never allow the normalization of sexualizing children.
Interesting. What do you think about drawn images? Is there a limit to how will the artist can be at drawing/painting? Stick figures vs life like paintings. Interesting line to consider.
If it was photoreal and difficult to distinguish from real photos? Yes, it’s exactly the same.
And even if it’s not photo real, communities that form around drawn child porn are toxic and dangerous as well. Sexualizing children is something I am 100% against.
It feels like driving these people into the dark corners of the internet is worse than allowing them to collect in clearnet spaces where drawn csam is allowed.
Actually, that’s not quite as clear.
The conventional wisdom used to be, (normal) porn makes people more likely to commit sexual abuse (in general). Then scientists decided to look into that. Slowly, over time, they’ve become more and more convinced that (normal) porn availability in fact reduces sexual assault.
I don’t see an obvious reason why it should be different in case of CP, now that it can be generated.
The headline/title needs to be extended to include the rest of the sentence
“and then sent them to a minor”
Yes, this sicko needs to be punished. Any attempt to make him the victim of " the big bad government" is manipulative at best.
Edit: made the quote bigger for better visibility.
I’d be torn on the idea of AI generating CP, if it were only that. On one hand if it helps them calm the urges while no one is getting hurt, all the better. But on the other hand it might cause them not to seek help, but problem is already stigmatized severely enough that they are most likely not seeking help anyway.
But sending that stuff to a minor. Big problem.
Cartoon CSAM is illegal in the United States. Pretty sure the judges will throw his images under the same ruling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003
https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/possession-of-lolicon
It won’t. They’ll get them for the actual crime not the thought crime that’s been nerfed to oblivion.
That’s a very important distinction. While the first part is, to put it lightly, bad, I don’t really care what people do on their own. Getting real people involved, and minor at that? Big no-no.
America has some of the most militant anti pedophilic culture in the world but they far and away have the highest rates of child sexual assault.
I think AI is going to revel is how deeply hypocritical Americans are on this issue. You have gigantic institutions like churches committing industrial scale victimization yet you won’t find a 1/10th of the righteous indignation against other organized religions where there is just as much evidence it is happening as you will regarding one person producing images that don’t actually hurt anyone.
It’s pretty clear by how staggering a rate of child abuse that occurs in the states that Americans are just using child victims as weaponized politicalization (it’s next to impossible to convincingly fight off pedo accusations if you’re being mobbed) and aren’t actually interested in fighting pedophilia.
Ah yes, more bait articles rising to the top of Lemmy. The guy was arrested for grooming, he was sending these images to a minor. Outside of Digg, anyone have any suggestions for an alternative to Lemmy and Reddit? Lemmy’s moderation quality is shit, I think I’m starting to figure out where I lean on the success of my experimental stay with Lemmy
Edit: Oh god, I actually checked digg out after posting this and the site design makes it look like you’re actually scrolling through all of the ads at the bottom of a bulshit clickbait article
you are too optimistic about the internet
I fail to see what part of my comment is optimistic? xD
That anywhere else is better.
You can go to an instance that follows your views closer and start blocking instances that post low quality content to you. Lemmy is a protocol, it’s not a single community. So the moderation and post quality is going to be determined by the instance you’re on and the community you’re with.
Bad title.
They caught him not simply for creating pics, but also for trading such pics etc.
You can get away with a lot of heinous crimes by simply not telling people and sharing the results.
You consider it a heinous crime to draw a picture and keep it to yourself?
Read the article. He was arrested for sending the pictures to at least one minor.
Re-read RickyRigatoni’s comment.
Does this mean the AI was trained on CP material? How else would it know how to do this?
It would not need to be trained on CP. It would just need to know what human bodies can look like and what sex is.
AIs usually try not to allow certain content to be produced, but it seems people are always finding ways to work around those safeguards.
AIs usually try not to allow certain content to be produced, but it seems people are always finding ways to work around those safeguards.
Local model go brrrrrr
He then allegedly communicated with a 15-year-old boy, describing his process for creating the images, and sent him several of the AI generated images of minors through Instagram direct messages. In some of the messages, Anderegg told Instagram users that he uses Telegram to distribute AI-generated CSAM. “He actively cultivated an online community of like-minded offenders—through Instagram and Telegram—in which he could show off his obscene depictions of minors and discuss with these other offenders their shared sexual interest in children,” the court records allege. “Put differently, he used these GenAI images to attract other offenders who could normalize and validate his sexual interest in children while simultaneously fueling these offenders’ interest—and his own—in seeing minors being sexually abused.”
I think the fact that he was promoting child sexual abuse and was communicating with children and creating communities with them to distribute the content is the most damning thing, regardless of people’s take on the matter.
Umm … That AI generated hentai on the page of the same article, though … Do the editors have any self-awareness? Reminds me of the time an admin decided the best course of action to call out CSAM was to directly link to the source.
Wait do you think all Hentai is CSAM?
And sending the images to a 15 year old crosses the line no matter how he got the images.
Hentai is obviously not CSAM. But having a hentai image on an article about CSAM and child grooming is pretty poorly thought out
You know, looking at it again, I think it’s an ad.
It’s an ad for another article on that site.
Umm … That AI generated hentai on the page of the same article, though … Do the editors have any self-awareness? Reminds me of the time an admin decided the best course of action to call out CSAM was to directly link to the source.
The image depicts mature women, not children.
Correct. And OP’s not saying it is.
But to place that sort of image on an article about CSAM is very poorly thought out
Article title is a bit misleading. Just glancing through I see he texted at least one minor in regards to this and distributed those generated pics in a few places. Putting it all together, yeah, arrest is kind of a no-brainer. Ethics of generating csam is the same as drawing it pretty much. Not much we can do about it aside from education.
Lemmy really needs to stop justifying CP. We can absolutely do more than “eDuCaTiOn”. AI is created by humans, the training data is gathered by humans, it needs regulation like any other industry.
It’s absolutely insane to me how laissez-fair some people are about AI, it’s like a cult.
One of two classic excuses, virtue signalling to hijack control of our devices, our computing, an attack on libre software (they don’t care about CP). Next, they’ll be banning more math, encryption, again.
It says gullible at the start of this page, scroll up and see.
No no no guys.
It’s perfectly okay to do this as this is art, not child porn as I was repeatedly told and down voted when I stated the fucking obvious
So if it’s art, we have to allow it under the constitution, right? It’s “free speech”, right?
Well yeah. Just because something makes you really uncomfortable doesn’t make it a crime. A crime has a victim.
Also, the vast majority of children are victimized because of the US’ culture of authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism. That’s why far and away children are victimized by either a relative or in a church. But y’all ain’t ready to have that conversation.
That thing over there being wrong doesn’t mean we can’t discuss this thing over here also being wrong.
So perhaps pipe down with your dumb whataboutism.
It’s not whataboutism, he’s being persecuted because of the idea that he’s hurting children all the while law enforcement refuses to truly persecute actual institutions victimizing children and are often colluding with traffickers. For instance LE throughout the country were well aware of the scale of the Catholic church’s crimes for generations.
How is this whataboutism.
Because it’s two different things.
We should absolutely go after the Catholic church for the crimes committed.
But here we are talking about the creation of child porn.
If you cannot understand this very simple premise, then we have nothing else to discuss.
They’re not two different things. They’re both supposedly acts of pedophilia except one would take actual courage to prosecute (churches) and the other which doesn’t have any actual victims is easy and is a PR get because certain people find it really icky.
OMG. Every other post is saying their disgusted about the images part but it’s a grey area, but he’s definitely in trouble for contacting a minor.
Cartoon CSAM is illegal in the United States. AI images of CSAM fall into that category. It was illegal for him to make the images in the first place BEFORE he started sending them to a minor.
https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/possession-of-lolicon
Yeah that’s toothless. They decided there is no particular way to age a cartoon, they could be from another planet that simply seem younger but are in actuality older.
It’s bunk, let them draw or generate whatever they want, totally fictional events and people are fair game and quite honestly I’d Rather they stay active doing that then get active actually abusing children.
Outlaw shibari and I guarantee you’d have multiple serial killers btk-ing some unlucky souls.
I think the challenge with Generative AI CSAM is the question of where did training data originate? There has to be some questionable data there.
There is also the issue of determining if a given image is real or AI. If AI were legal, that means prosecution would need to prove images are real and not AI with the risk of letting go real offenders.
The need to ban AI CSAM is even clearer than cartoon CSAM.
And in the process force non abusers to seek their thrill with actual abuse, good job I’m sure the next generation of children will appreciate your prudish factually inept effort. We’ve tried this with so much shit, prohibition doesn’t stop anything or just creates a black market and a abusive power system to go with it.
My main issue with generation is the ability of making it close enough to reality. Even with the more realistic art stuff, some outright referenced or even traced CSAM. The other issue is the lack of easy differentiation between reality and fiction, and it muddies the water. “I swear officer, I thought it was AI” would become the new “I swear officer, she said she was 18”.
That is not an end user issue, that’s a dev issue. Can’t train on scam if it isn’t available and as such is tacit admission of actual possession.
Exactly. If you can’t name a victim, it shouldn’t be illegal.
The problem with AI CSAM generation is that the AI has to be trained on something first. It has to somehow know what a naked minor looks like. And to do that, well… You need to feed it CSAM.
So is it right to be using images of real children to train these AI? You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks that’s okay.
If the images were generated from CSAM, then there’s a victim. If they weren’t, there’s no victim.
The images were created using photos of real children even if said photos weren’t CSAM (which can’t be guaranteed they weren’t). So the victims were are the children used to generate CSAM
Let’s do a thought experiment, and I’d look to to tell me at what point a victim was introduced:
- I legally acquire pictures of a child, fully clothed and everything
- I draw a picture based on those legal pictures, but the subject is nude or doing sexually explicit things
- I keep the picture for my own personal use and don’t distribute it
Or with AI:
- I legally acquire pictures of children, fully clothed and everything
- I legally acquire pictures of nude adults, some doing sexually explicit things
- I train an AI on a mix of 1&2
- I generate images of nude children, some of them doing sexually explicit things
- I keep the pictures for my own personal use and don’t distribute any of them
- I distribute my model, using the right to distribute from the legal acquisition of those images
At what point did my actions victimize someone?
If I distributed those images and those images resemble a real person, then that real person is potentially a victim.
I will say someone who does this creepy and I don’t want them anywhere near children (especially mine, and yes, I have kids), but I don’t think it should be illegal, provided the source material is legal. But as soon as I distribute it, there absolutely could be a victim. Being creepy shouldn’t be a crime.
I think it should be illegal to make porn of a person without their permission regardless of if it was shared or not. Imagine the person it is based off of finds out someone is doing that. That causes mental strain on the person. Just like how revenge porn doesn’t actively harm a person but causes mental strafe (both the initial upload and continued use of it). For scenario 1 it would be at step 2 when the porn is made of the person. For scenario 2 it would be a mix between step 3 and 4.
