this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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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?
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.
True, but by their very nature their generations tend to create anonymous identities, and the sheer amount of them would make it harder for investigators to detect pictures of real, human victims (which can also include indicators of crime location.
Basically if I want to create ... (I'll use a different example for obvious reasons, but I'm sure you could apply it to the topic)
... "an image of a miniature denium airjet with Taylor Swift's face on the side of it", the AI generators can despite no such thing existing in the training data. It may take multiple attempts and effort with the text prompt to get exactly what you're looking for, but you could eventually get a convincing image.
AI takes loads of preexisting data on airplanes, T.Swift, and denium to combine it all into something new.
Well that, and the idea of cathartic relief is increasingly being dispelled. Behaviour once thought to act as a pressure relief for harmful impulsive behaviour is more than likely just a pattern of escalation.
Source? From what I’ve heard, recent studies are showing the opposite.
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.
Is this proven or a common sense claim you’re making?
The far right in France normalized its discourses and they are now at the top of the votes.
Also in France, people talked about pedophilia at the TV in the 70s, 80s and at the beginning of the 90s. It was not just once in a while. It was frequent and open without any trouble. Writers would casually speak about sexual relationships with minors.
The normalization will blur the limits between AI and reality for the worse. It will also make it more popular.
The other point is also that people will always ends with the original. Again, politic is a good example. Conservatives try to mimic the far right to gain votes but at the end people vote for the far right...
And, someone has a daughter. A pedophile takes a picture of her without asking and ask an AI to produce CP based on her. I don't want to see things like this.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a mixture of the two. It's kind of like if you surround yourself with criminals regularly, you're more likely to become one yourself. Not to say it's a 100% given, just more probable.
So... its just a claim they're making and you're hoping it has actual backing.
I'm not hoping anything, haha wtf? The comment above me asked if it was a proven statement or common sense and I said I wouldn't be surprised if it's both. I felt confident that if I googled it, there would more than likely be studies backing up a common sense statement like that, as I've read in the past how sending innocent people or people who committed minor misdemeanors to prison has influenced them negatively to commit crimes they might not have otherwise.
And look at that, there are academic articles that do back it up:
https://www.waldenu.edu/online-bachelors-programs/bs-in-criminal-justice/resource/what-influences-criminal-behavior
https://www.law.ac.uk/resources/blog/is-prison-effective/
Etc, etc.
Turns out that your dominant social group and environment influences your behavior, what a shocking statement.
But you didn't say you had proof with your comment, you said it was probable. Basically saying its common sense that its proven.
Why are you getting aggressive about actually having to provide proof about something when saying its obvious?
Also, that seems to imply that locking up people for AI offenses would then encourage truly reprehensible behavior by linking them with those who already engage in it.
Almost like lumping people together as one big group, instead of having levels of grey area, means people are more likely to just go all in instead of sticking to something more morally defensible.
Because it's a casual discussion, I think it's obnoxious when people constantly demand sources to be cited in online comments section when they could easily look it up themselves. This isn't some academic or formal setting.
And I disagree, only the second source mentioned prisons explicitly. The first source mentions social environments as well. So it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Additionally, even if you consider the second source, that source mentions punishment reforms to prevent that undesirable side effect from occuring.
I find it ironic that you criticized me for not citing sources and then didn't read the sources. But, whatever. Typical social media comments section moment.
People request sources because people state their opinions as fact. If that’s how it’s presented then asking for a source is ok. Its either ask for a source or completely dismiss the comment.
Again, in casual conversation where no one was really debating, it's obnoxious. When you're talking to friends in real life and they say something, do you request sources from them? No, because it'd be rude and annoying. If you were debating them in earnest and you both disagreed on something, sure, that would be expected.
But that wasn't the case here, the initial statement was common sense: If pedophiles are allowed to meet up and trade AI generated child sex abuse material, would that cause some of them to be more likely to commit crimes against real kids? And I think the answer is pretty obvious. The more you hang around people who agree with you, the more an echo chamber is cultivated. It's like an alcoholic going into a bar without anyone there to support them in staying sober.
Anyway, it's your opinion to think asking for sources from strangers in casual conversation is okay, and it's mine to say it can be annoying in a lot of circumstances. We all have the Internet at our fingertips, look it up in the future if you're unsure of someone's assertion.
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 (regular) 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.
It should be different because people can not have it. It is disgusting, makes them feel icky and thats just why it has to be bad. Conventional wisdom sometimes really is just convential idiocracy.
Did we memory hole the whole ‘known CSAM in training data’ thing that happened a while back? When you’re vacuuming up the internet you’re going to wind up with the nasty stuff, too. Even if it’s not a pixel by pixel match of the photo it was trained on, there’s a non-zero chance that what it’s generating is based off actual CSAM. Which is really just laundering CSAM.
IIRC it was something like a fraction of a fraction of 1% that was CSAM, with the researchers identifying the images through their hashes but they weren't actually available in the dataset because they had already been removed from the internet.
Still, you could make AI CSAM even if you were 100% sure that none of the training images included it since that's what these models are made for - being able to combine concepts without needing to have seen them before. If you hold the AI's hand enough with prompt engineering, textual inversion and img2img you can get it to generate pretty much anything. That's the power and danger of these things.
I didn't know that, my bad.
Fair but depressing, it seems like it barely registered in the news cycle.
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.
You know whats better? Having none of this shit
Did you just fix menal health?
Yeah as I also said.
Nirvana fallacy
Yeah would be nice. Unfortunelately it isn't so and it's never going to. Chasing after people generating distasteful AI pictures is not making the world a better place.
Apparently he sent some to an actual minor.
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.
Everything is 99% grey area. If someone tells you something is completely black and white you should be suspicious of their motives.
Better only means less worse in this case, I guess
Yes, but the perp showed the images to a minor.