I don't see how children were abused in this case? It's just AI imagery.
It's the same as saying that people get killed when you play first person shooter games.
Or that you commit crimes when you play GTA.
Then also every artist creating loli porn would have to be jailed for child pornography.
How was the model trained? Probably using existing CSAM images. Those children are victims. Making derivative images of “imaginary” children doesn’t negate its exploitation of children all the way down.
So no, you are making false equivalence with your video game metaphors.
A generative AI model doesn't require the exact thing it creates in its datasets. It most likely just combined regular nudity with a picture of a child.
Can you or anyone verify that the model was trained on CSAM?
Besides a LLM doesn't need to have explicit content to derive from to create a naked child.
It's just AI imagery.
Fantasising about sexual contact with children indicates that this person might groom children for real, because they have a sexual interest in doing so. As someone who was sexually assaulted as a child, it's really not something that needs to happen.
Seems like then fantasizing about shooting people or carjacking or such indcates that person might do that activity for real to. There are a lot of car jackings nowadays and you know gta is real popular. mmmm. /s but seriously im not sure your first statement has merit. Especially when you look at where to draw the line. anime. manga. oil paintings. books. thoughts in ones head.
This creates a significant legal issue - AI generated images have no age, nor is there consent.
The difference in appearance between age 16 and 18 is minimal, but the legal difference is immense. This is based entirely on a concept that cannot apply.
How do you define what's depicting a fictional child? Especially without including real adults? I've met people who believe that preferring a shaved pubic area is pedophilia. This is even though the vast majority of adult women do so. On the flip side, teenagers from the 70s and 80s would be mistaken for 40+ today.
Even the extremes aren't clear. Adult star "Little Lupe", who was 18+ in every single appearance, lacked most secondary sex characteristics. Experts testified in court that she could not possibly be an adult. Except she was, and there's full documentation to prove it. Would AI trained exclusively on her work be producing CSAM?
Do we know that AI child porn is bad? I could believe it would get them in the mood for the real thing and make them do it more, and I could believe it would make them go "ok, itch scratched", and tank the demand for the real stuff.
Depending on which way it goes, it could be massively helpful for protecting kids. I just don't have a sense for what the effect would be, and I've never seen any experts weigh in.
In Australia cartoon child porn is enforced in the same way as actual child porn. Not that it answers your question but it's interesting.
I'd imagine for your question "it depends", some people who would have acted on their urges may get their jollies from AI child porn, others who have never considered being pedophiles might find the AI child porn (assuming legal) and realise it's something they were into.
I guess it may lower the production of real child porn which feels like a good thing. I'd hazard a guess that there are way more child porn viewers than child abusers.
I'd like to know what psychologists think about it. My assumption is the former, it escalates their fantasizing about it and makes them more likely to attack a child.
There seems to be no way to conduct that experiment ethically, though.
I seem to remember Sweden did a study on this, but I don't really want to google around to find it for you. Good luck!
You're missing the point. They don't care what's more or less effective for helping kids. They want to punish people who are different. In this case nobody is really going to step up to defend the guy for obvious reasons. But the motivating concept is the same for conservatives.
Could this be considered a harm reduction strategy?
Not that I think CSAM is good in any way, but if it saves a child would it be worthwhile? Like if these pedos were to use AI images instead of actual CSAM would that be any better?
I've read that CSAM sites on the dark web number into the hundreds of thousands. I just wonder if it would be a less harmful thing since it's such a problem.
Many years ago (about 25) I read an article in a newspaper (idk the name, but it may have been the The Computer Paper, which is archived on line someplace}. This article noted that a study had been commissioned to show that cp access increases child abuse. The study seemed to show the opposite.
Here's the problem with even AI generated cp: It might lower abuse in the beginning, but with increased access it would 'normalise' the perception of such conduct. This would likely increase abuse over time, even involving persons who may not have been so inclined otherwise.
This is all a very complex. A solution isn't simple. Shunning things in anyway won't help though, and that seems to be the current most popular way to deal with the issue.
Actual pedophiles (a lot of CSA is abuse of power, not pedophilia - though to be clear fuck abusers either way) have a high rate of suicidal ideation because they think its as fucked up as everyone else. Of course we can't just say "sure AI material is legal now" but I could imagine a regulated system accessed via doctors akin to how controlled substances work.
People take this firm "kill em all" stance but these people just feel the way they do same as I do towards women or a gay man feels toward men. It just is what it is - we all generally agree gay isnt a choice and this is no different. As long as they dont act on it, I think we should be sympathetic and be open to helping them live a less tortured life.
I'm not 100% saying this is how we do it, but we should be open to exploring the issue instead of full stop demonization.
Hey, remember that terrible thing everyone said would happen?
It's happening.
To be clear, I am happy to see a pedo contained and isolated from society.
At the same time, this direction of law is something that I don't feel I have the sophistication to truly weigh in on, even though it invokes so many thoughts for me.
I hope we as a society get this one right.
It's not really children on these pics. We can't condemn people for things that are not illegal yet
It's Florida. They will simply book him and then present him a deal for "only x years prison", which he'll take and therefore prevent this from going to court and actually be ruled upon.
I must admit, amount of comments that are defending AI images as not child porn is truly shocking.
In my book, sexual images of children are not okay, AI generated or otherwise. Pedophiles need help, counseling and therapy. Not images that enable something I think is not acceptable in society.
I truly do believe that AI images should be subject to same standards as regular images in what content we deem appropriate or not.
Yes, this can be used to wrongfully prosecute innocent people, but it does not mean that we should freely allow AI-CP.
If this thread (and others like it) have taught me aulnything is that facts be damned, people are opinionated either way. Nuance means nothing and it's basically impossible to have a proper discussion when it comes to wedge issues or anything that can be used to divide people. Even if every study 100% said Ai generated csam always led to a reduction in actual child harm and reduced recidivism and never needed any actual real children to be used as training material, the comments would still pretty much look the same. If the studies showed the exact opposite, the comments would also be the same. Welcome to the internet. I hope you brought aspirin.
He wasn’t arrested for creating it, but for distribution.
If dude just made it and kept it privately, he’d be fine.
I’m not defending child porn with this comment.
Honestly, I don't care if it is AI/not real, I'm glad that the man was arrested. He needs some serious help for sexualising kids.
You and I both know he's not going to get it. I have a kinda sympathy for ppl attracted to kids but refuse to act on it. They clearly know it's not normal and recognize the absolute life destroying damage they can cause if they act on it. That being said there's not many places you can go to seek treatment. Any institutions that advertised treatment would have ppl outside with pitchforks and torches.
Before anyone tries to claim I'm pro pedo you can fuck right off. I just wish it was possible for ppl who are attracted to kids and not out touching them to get some kind of therapy and medication to make them normal (or destroy their sex drive) before something terrible happens.
to get some kind of therapy and medication to make them normal
Hi, Psychologist here. Does society have strong evidence that therapeutic interventions are reducing rates of, say, the most common disorders of anxiety and depression? Considering that the rates of these are going up, I don't think we can assume there's a hugely successful therapy to help those attracted to CSA images to change. Psychology is not a very good science principally because it offers few extremely effective answers in the real world.
In terms of medication androgen antagonists are generally used. This is because lowering testosterone generally leads to a lower sex drive. Here is an article about those drugs, including an offender who asked for them: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/01/what-should-we-do-about-paedophiles
TW: the article contains discussion of whether offenders are even psychologically disordered, when set within a historical cultural context of child-marriage. This paragraph is two above the illustration of people trapped within concentric circular walls, and starts "In the 2013 edition ...".
Collis began to research the treatment and decided that it was essential to his rehabilitation. He believes he was born a paedophile, and that his attraction to children is unchangeable. “I did NOT wake up one morning and decide my sexual preference. I am sexually attracted to little girls and have absolutely no interest in sex with adults. I’ve only ever done stuff with adults in order to fit in with what’s ‘normal’.” For Collis, therefore, it became a question of how to control this desire and render himself incapable of reoffending.
[...]
Many experts support Aaron Collis’s self-assessment, that paedophilia is an unchangeable sexual preference. In a 2012 paper, Seto examined three criteria – age of onset, sexual and romantic behaviour, and stability over time. In a number of studies, a significant proportion of paedophiles admitted to first experiencing attraction towards children before they had reached adulthood themselves. Many described their feelings for children as being driven by emotional need as well as sexual desire. As for stability over time, most clinicians agreed that paedophilia had “a lifelong course”: a true paedophile will always be attracted to children. “I am certainly of the view,” Seto told me, “that paedophilia can be thought of as a sexual orientation.”
Brain-imaging studies have supported this idea. James Cantor, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, has examined hundreds of MRI scans of the brains of paedophiles, and found that they are statistically more likely to be left-handed, shorter than average, and have a significantly lower density of white matter, the brain’s connective tissue. “The point that’s important for society is that paedophilia is in the brain at all, and that the person didn’t choose it,” Cantor told me. “As far as we can tell, they were born with it.” (Not that this, he emphasised, should excuse their crimes.)
[...]
Clinical reality is a little more complicated. “There’s no pretence that the treatment is somehow going to cure them of paedophilia,” Grubin told me. “I think there is an acceptance now that you are not going to be able to change very easily the direction of someone’s arousal.” Grubin estimates that medication is only suitable for about 5% of sex offenders – those who are sexually preoccupied to the extent that they cannot think about anything else, and are not able to control their sexual urges. As Sarah Skett from the NHS put it: “The meds only take you so far. The evidence is clear that the best treatment for sex offending is psychologically based. What the medication does is help people have a little bit of control, which then allows them to access that treatment.”
Some research on success rates:
Prematurely terminating treatment was a strong indicator of committing a new sexual offense. Of interest was the general improvement of success rates over each successive 5-year period for many types of offenders. Unfortunately, failure rates remained comparatively high for rapists (20%) and homosexual pedophiles (16%), regardless of when they were treated over the 25-year period. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11961909/]
Within the observation period, the general recidivism and sexual recidivism rates were 33.1% and 16.5%, respectively, and the sexual contact recidivism rate was 4.7%. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306624X231165416 - this paper says that suppressing the sex drive with medication was the most successful treatment]
Men with deviant sexual behavior, or paraphilia, are usually treated with psychotherapy, antidepressant drugs, progestins, and antiandrogens, but these treatments are often ineffective. Selective inhibition of pituitary–gonadal function with a long-acting agonist analogue of gonadotropin-releasing hormone may abolish the deviant sexual behavior by reducing testosterone secretion. [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199802123380702 - this paper supports that lowering testosterone works best]
Thank you for such a well laid out response and the research to back it up. I rarely see people approaching the subjects of pedophilia, and how best to treat pedophiles, rationally and analytically.
It's understandable considering the harm they can cause to society that most can only ever view them as nothing more or less than monsters, and indeed, those that are incapable of comprehending the harm they cause and empathizing with those they could potentially cause or have caused harm to, are IMHO some of the more loathsome individuals.
That said, I think too often people are willing to paint others whose proclivities are so alien and antithetical to our own as not only monsters, but monsters that aren't worth understanding with any degree of nuance, that we ultimately do ourselves and future generations a disservice by not at least attempting to address the issue at hand in the hopes that the most harmful parts of our collective psyche are treated palliatively to the best of our ability.
Your annotated sources indicate that there is not nearly as clear a path forward as detractors to the "pedophiles are simply monsters and there's no reason to look into their motives further" would like to believe, while also, by the nature of the existence of the attempted treatments themselves, points out that there is more work to be done to hopefully find a more lasting and successful rate of treatment.
Like many of the psychological ailments plagueing societies today, you cannot simply kill and imprison the problem away. That is always a short term (albeit at times temporarily effective) solution. The solution to the problem of how to greatly reduce the occurrence of pedophilia will ultimately require more of this kind of research and will require more analysis and study towards achieving such ends.
Again, I thank you for your nuanced post, and commend you for taking your nuanced stance as well.
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