This is a very difficult topic to engage with rationally. But put the emotions aside and try.
We generally don’t ban things just because they’re gross. We ban child porn because children were hurt in the making of it. Without real kids involved, what’s the justification to ban it, other than we just find it horrible? Again, we generally do not ban porn simply because it makes people uncomfortable. There’s a lot of porn of adults I would never want to see. Hell, I don’t even like porn of any kind. I’m more a romance novel type myself.
But really, as gross as it is, from a purely legal perspective, if there are no kids involved in the creation of something, how is banning simulated child porn any different than homophobes wanting to ban porn because they think gay people are gross? Again, we don’t ban porn simply because we find it gross.
I could see an argument that maybe having virtual child porn out there could make pedophiles more likely to offend. But that seems like a very shaky assumption. The opposite case could just as easily be true. Virtual child porn could very well lower the rates of assault against minors. By banning it, we could very well be harming real children in the name of protecting virtual ones.
Did I say it was? Did the comment I was replying to say anything about America? Is this an America specific Lemmy instance? Is the op’s post even in English?
I was replying with a comment about a legal case relevant to the conversation. Sorry if your world view is limited to America, but not all of us have pedos for president. Not everything revolves around America, and I’m sick of Americans thinking it’s all about them. Get over yourself. The world is a lot bigger than you seem to think, and the bullshit billionaires pull has ramifications globally.
Na you’re just a self centred dumbass, and obtusely ignoring everything I just said, including my last sentence. And even if this post was specifically only about America my comment is still relevant. If only to prove that not everywhere in the works is run by pedo cunts. By all means though, keep voting Republican and ignoring the rest of the world. It’s not like we have a high opinion of you cunts anymore anyways.
Question, has watching legal porn, ever made you less likely to want sex?
What I’m trying to get at here… is if bulk material can be generated to arouse those people legally… I personally don’t see how that would translate into less offending
After all, in the last 30 years, we’ve had an absolute explosion in the availability of freely available adult pornography. If more porn access meant more rape and sexual assault, the rates of these should have skyrocketed over the last 30 years. Instead they’ve gone down. I wouldn’t automatically conclude a causal relationship there. But if availability of porn causes rapes and assaults, then we would know that by now.
I’m blocked from seeing your link for some reason. I wasn’t referencing sexual assault of adults for which I gather there’s a significant percentage that would consent… but that’s a fair statement that I’m sure there are plenty of adults who have potentially increased their pornography viewing and not had a consenting adult they then went on to SA
That’s not necessarily true. You could have all sorts of training models that didn’t rely on any real children at all. You’re just assuming it was trained on actual child porn. Other ways it could be trained:
Trained on images of adults that look younger than 18. You could commission a bunch of pornography by people with whatever medical condition this guy has and use that as your training data.
Trained on pornographic images of adults and regular images of kids. (This one is questionable legally, even though again, no kids were harmed in the making of it.)
Trained on entirely on images of adults, reviewers are tasked with trying to identify the age of the person in the image generated, and using that as training data.
If someone was deliberately trying to create a legal child porn engine (what a horrible phrase to type), they would be sure to do it without using any actual child porn as the training data. There would be little point otherwise.
In this thread we’re not talking about grok. We’re talking about whether simulated child porn itself is automatically illegal. And my point is that no, it need not be. I would agree that anything made using actual child porn images should be illegal. But if no actual children are involved at any point in the process? Changing the interpretation of the Constitution to allow making such a thing illegal would do more harm than you can possibly imagine.
What? No, that’s wrong. They can, for example, create a picture of a monkey made of yarn. Does that mean they were trained on pictures of ‘yarn monkeys’?
No, they had pictures of monkeys and pictures of things made of yarn; therefore, they can create pictures of ‘yarn monkeys’.
If you want to learn more about that, the specific term is ‘latent space’.
If AIs could only reproduce their training data they would be completely useless.
What? No, that’s wrong. Latent space is a way to reduce dimensionality in the dataset, but it still originates from the underlying data.
Of course a model can predict what a yarn monkey should look like if it knows what yarn is and it knows what monkeys are. It is still only combining things it knows, But in the context of this thread, the model has to be trained directly on children or told what children look like in these contexts, both of which raise serious ethical concerns to me.
If AIs could only reproduce their training data they would be completely useless.
And yeah, I think that pretty much sums up the AI bubble.
That’s assuming it was trained on images of child pornography. There are plenty of ways someone could train such an engine without using any pornographic images of actual children. And if someone was going to go to the trouble of deliberately creating a child porn generator with the specific intention of using it openly and legally? There would be no point in doing so if you had to use illegal images to do it.
and given what we know about how all the mainstream LLMs blatantly disregarded all IP laws and privacy laws to get as much training material as possible, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt.
No, realistically they wouldn’t. If the entire point is to have some site that can legally and openly generate legal child porn, they would go to the trouble of developing a model without using real child porn images. There would be no point otherwise.
that’s not the whole point, the whole point is to get as much data as possible to train their LLMs, and they’ve shown blatant disregard for laws and morality up to this point, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt.
You cant have a legal website do this. It breaks the law of transmitting the content which is still against the law.
If this model truly was free of CSAM then a site could host the model for you to download, but you’d still have to make it locally. (Edit and never share / transmit it)
Couple things. Firstly just yesterday there was a headline I saw on Lemmy that said Elon Musk’s Grok was found to have some absurdly high number of child porn images it was trained from. So, yes that absolutely is what would happen, because it just did happen.
Secondly, The concept of child porn is what I always thought was banned. The core concept of it at all. That’s what I thought was illegal. So that would cover things like hand drawn fiction. Things like AI content. Things like audio files of simulated or actual child sex. Anything at all promoting the concept of child sexual abuse. Of any kind.
I will put it to you like this. I have a fetish that’s rather newish when you consider how long it’s been around compared to other fetishes. It’s absolutely nothing to do with children, or anything illegal. The important thing about my fetish is that it’s rather new. And back in the year 2000 this fetish got a website which was kind of the unofficial official home of our fetish. In those days the message board had roughly 10,000 registered members. The last time I checked in the year 2008 it had something like 8 million members. This message board was essentially just a centralized place to share content of our fetish. Stories, fictional or real. Images. The internet was too early to share video, but it kind of did anyways. You just had to wait a while, since it was 56k days. And because of all this exposure and new content, the fetish spread. Now on Fetlife, it’s not all that hard to find people with this fetish. We’re kind of everywhere. It’s a harmless fetish that most people laugh at, but it’s still gaining traction.
Now lets apply that same concept to child porn. By allowing the creation and distribution of fictional child porn you grow the genre. My fetish started out with 10k members, and grew to millions. We outgrew the original centralized message board because it was too popular that it just spread everywhere else, and suddenly we didn’t need a centralized sharing ground because now it was hosted on every porn site. Today I can’t picture a major general purpose porn site without my fetish. Now imagine a world where that were also true of child porn. Even fictional. Even drawn or AI. It spreads. Then as they become more normalized, they’ll feel more comfortable coming out without being shamed for it. I want every possible avenue of shaming them. I want to shame them out of existence. Not normalize it.
material that, in a way likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, describes or depicts a person, or a representation of a person, who is (or apparently is) a child under 16 years:
in a sexual context (e.g. engaging in a sexual activity)
in an offensive or demeaning context
being subjected to abuse, cruelty or torture.
Edit: this is a quote of the law, not sure why downvoted
Again, how do you determine that? Sometimes it’s obvious, sure, but sometimes it’s not. Who decides the age of a fictional character?
One of the biggest and oldest furry art sites recently went through quite a kerfluffle recently because they tried to strictly implement such a ban … resulting in mass outrage among users as moderators went around arbitrarily and rather capriciously deciding which characters did and didn’t look like they were under 18. Lots of artists had their – purely well-intentioned – art deleted and were outraged at being accused of producing “child porn” when they had never intended to. Any characters with small breasts or short height (even if they were otherwise clearly adult) were likely to be targeted, drawing further criticism from body positivity advocates, who pointed out that moderators were de-facto identifying certain body types (which some real people have) as ‘not adult’ and ‘not a real woman’. Artists who did fan art of the Pokemon franchise were particularly hard hit, because at least some of the moderators seemed to be of the opinion that pretty much all pokemon were always underage, and therefore always “child porn”. And artists with a more ‘cartoony’ style tended to get hit a lot harder as well, since moderators appeared to believe that simplified characters with less detail meant they were younger. And then there was the diaper fetish crowd, who lost all their stuff, because moderators decided that any depiction of any character (regardless of any other age indicators) was definitely a child if they were in a diaper.
Thankfully, that ended, and decisively so. The site was reorganized, the policy was heavily rewritten (with user input this time), and the worst offenders among the site staff were all fired. Sexual depictions of minors is still against the rules there, but they instituted much clearer, more specific, and more objective guidelines for determining whether a character is or isn’t underage.
And that’s just an online art site, where the worst thing that could happen is that your art gets deleted and you get banned! I can’t imagine risking prison time based on what some prude with a chip on their shoulder decides about the apparent age of a fictional character.
I expected that drawn child porn was illegal. I wasn’t aware it was legal.
Now there are TWO things I am angry about.
This is a very difficult topic to engage with rationally. But put the emotions aside and try.
We generally don’t ban things just because they’re gross. We ban child porn because children were hurt in the making of it. Without real kids involved, what’s the justification to ban it, other than we just find it horrible? Again, we generally do not ban porn simply because it makes people uncomfortable. There’s a lot of porn of adults I would never want to see. Hell, I don’t even like porn of any kind. I’m more a romance novel type myself.
But really, as gross as it is, from a purely legal perspective, if there are no kids involved in the creation of something, how is banning simulated child porn any different than homophobes wanting to ban porn because they think gay people are gross? Again, we don’t ban porn simply because we find it gross.
I could see an argument that maybe having virtual child porn out there could make pedophiles more likely to offend. But that seems like a very shaky assumption. The opposite case could just as easily be true. Virtual child porn could very well lower the rates of assault against minors. By banning it, we could very well be harming real children in the name of protecting virtual ones.
it involves children as the model, is, infact trained on REAL photos of children
An Australian guy was arrested for possession of CP in 2008 for Simpsons rule34.
But was he convicted for it?
Yes
Is Australia part of the US now or something?
Did I say it was? Did the comment I was replying to say anything about America? Is this an America specific Lemmy instance? Is the op’s post even in English?
I was replying with a comment about a legal case relevant to the conversation. Sorry if your world view is limited to America, but not all of us have pedos for president. Not everything revolves around America, and I’m sick of Americans thinking it’s all about them. Get over yourself. The world is a lot bigger than you seem to think, and the bullshit billionaires pull has ramifications globally.
This is a definitely a bot that’s lost the context. This post is about US law. Also yes ops post is in English WTF are you even talking about lmao
Na you’re just a self centred dumbass, and obtusely ignoring everything I just said, including my last sentence. And even if this post was specifically only about America my comment is still relevant. If only to prove that not everywhere in the works is run by pedo cunts. By all means though, keep voting Republican and ignoring the rest of the world. It’s not like we have a high opinion of you cunts anymore anyways.
Question, has watching legal porn, ever made you less likely to want sex? What I’m trying to get at here… is if bulk material can be generated to arouse those people legally… I personally don’t see how that would translate into less offending
The evidence we have points to the opposite conclusion.
After all, in the last 30 years, we’ve had an absolute explosion in the availability of freely available adult pornography. If more porn access meant more rape and sexual assault, the rates of these should have skyrocketed over the last 30 years. Instead they’ve gone down. I wouldn’t automatically conclude a causal relationship there. But if availability of porn causes rapes and assaults, then we would know that by now.
I’m blocked from seeing your link for some reason. I wasn’t referencing sexual assault of adults for which I gather there’s a significant percentage that would consent… but that’s a fair statement that I’m sure there are plenty of adults who have potentially increased their pornography viewing and not had a consenting adult they then went on to SA
AI models only know what they are trained on. Inherently, that means real children are harmed in the production of AI-generated CSAM.
That’s not necessarily true. You could have all sorts of training models that didn’t rely on any real children at all. You’re just assuming it was trained on actual child porn. Other ways it could be trained:
Trained on images of adults that look younger than 18. You could commission a bunch of pornography by people with whatever medical condition this guy has and use that as your training data.
Trained on pornographic images of adults and regular images of kids. (This one is questionable legally, even though again, no kids were harmed in the making of it.)
Trained on entirely on images of adults, reviewers are tasked with trying to identify the age of the person in the image generated, and using that as training data.
If someone was deliberately trying to create a legal child porn engine (what a horrible phrase to type), they would be sure to do it without using any actual child porn as the training data. There would be little point otherwise.
I mean, they could, but they didn’t. There’s already slop machines out there churning out AI-generated CSAM.
Would they, really…? That’s giving the sort of guys actually responsible for doing this stuff an un-earned benefit of the doubt.
https://cyberscoop.com/xai-grok-csam-class-action-lawsuit/
In this thread we’re not talking about grok. We’re talking about whether simulated child porn itself is automatically illegal. And my point is that no, it need not be. I would agree that anything made using actual child porn images should be illegal. But if no actual children are involved at any point in the process? Changing the interpretation of the Constitution to allow making such a thing illegal would do more harm than you can possibly imagine.
What? No, that’s wrong. They can, for example, create a picture of a monkey made of yarn. Does that mean they were trained on pictures of ‘yarn monkeys’?
No, they had pictures of monkeys and pictures of things made of yarn; therefore, they can create pictures of ‘yarn monkeys’.
If you want to learn more about that, the specific term is ‘latent space’.
If AIs could only reproduce their training data they would be completely useless.
What? No, that’s wrong. Latent space is a way to reduce dimensionality in the dataset, but it still originates from the underlying data.
Of course a model can predict what a yarn monkey should look like if it knows what yarn is and it knows what monkeys are. It is still only combining things it knows, But in the context of this thread, the model has to be trained directly on children or told what children look like in these contexts, both of which raise serious ethical concerns to me.
And yeah, I think that pretty much sums up the AI bubble.
This is completely wrong. I have no idea how you can say this when it is plainly obvious that ai can create things it never saw.
The AI isn’t generating child sex abuse material from thin air. It’s generating it from all of the child sex abuse material it was trained on.
Do you not see the problem?
That’s assuming it was trained on images of child pornography. There are plenty of ways someone could train such an engine without using any pornographic images of actual children. And if someone was going to go to the trouble of deliberately creating a child porn generator with the specific intention of using it openly and legally? There would be no point in doing so if you had to use illegal images to do it.
Grok is accused of being trained on real CSAM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-used-child-porn-to-train-grok-models-lawsuit-says/
and given what we know about how all the mainstream LLMs blatantly disregarded all IP laws and privacy laws to get as much training material as possible, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt.
That link 404s for me
Your fanfiction is hypothetically possible.
Realistically, they’ll just train it on child sex abuse material.
No, realistically they wouldn’t. If the entire point is to have some site that can legally and openly generate legal child porn, they would go to the trouble of developing a model without using real child porn images. There would be no point otherwise.
that’s not the whole point, the whole point is to get as much data as possible to train their LLMs, and they’ve shown blatant disregard for laws and morality up to this point, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of doubt.
You cant have a legal website do this. It breaks the law of transmitting the content which is still against the law.
If this model truly was free of CSAM then a site could host the model for you to download, but you’d still have to make it locally. (Edit and never share / transmit it)
Couple things. Firstly just yesterday there was a headline I saw on Lemmy that said Elon Musk’s Grok was found to have some absurdly high number of child porn images it was trained from. So, yes that absolutely is what would happen, because it just did happen.
Secondly, The concept of child porn is what I always thought was banned. The core concept of it at all. That’s what I thought was illegal. So that would cover things like hand drawn fiction. Things like AI content. Things like audio files of simulated or actual child sex. Anything at all promoting the concept of child sexual abuse. Of any kind.
I will put it to you like this. I have a fetish that’s rather newish when you consider how long it’s been around compared to other fetishes. It’s absolutely nothing to do with children, or anything illegal. The important thing about my fetish is that it’s rather new. And back in the year 2000 this fetish got a website which was kind of the unofficial official home of our fetish. In those days the message board had roughly 10,000 registered members. The last time I checked in the year 2008 it had something like 8 million members. This message board was essentially just a centralized place to share content of our fetish. Stories, fictional or real. Images. The internet was too early to share video, but it kind of did anyways. You just had to wait a while, since it was 56k days. And because of all this exposure and new content, the fetish spread. Now on Fetlife, it’s not all that hard to find people with this fetish. We’re kind of everywhere. It’s a harmless fetish that most people laugh at, but it’s still gaining traction.
Now lets apply that same concept to child porn. By allowing the creation and distribution of fictional child porn you grow the genre. My fetish started out with 10k members, and grew to millions. We outgrew the original centralized message board because it was too popular that it just spread everywhere else, and suddenly we didn’t need a centralized sharing ground because now it was hosted on every porn site. Today I can’t picture a major general purpose porn site without my fetish. Now imagine a world where that were also true of child porn. Even fictional. Even drawn or AI. It spreads. Then as they become more normalized, they’ll feel more comfortable coming out without being shamed for it. I want every possible avenue of shaming them. I want to shame them out of existence. Not normalize it.
Prohibition doesn’t work, I thought we all knew this here on Lemmy
You mixed up Distribution vs possession
You got a lot of words that to me just sound like you’re for thought crimes.
How do you verify the age of a fictional character?
In Australia:
Edit: this is a quote of the law, not sure why downvoted
Again, how do you determine that? Sometimes it’s obvious, sure, but sometimes it’s not. Who decides the age of a fictional character?
One of the biggest and oldest furry art sites recently went through quite a kerfluffle recently because they tried to strictly implement such a ban … resulting in mass outrage among users as moderators went around arbitrarily and rather capriciously deciding which characters did and didn’t look like they were under 18. Lots of artists had their – purely well-intentioned – art deleted and were outraged at being accused of producing “child porn” when they had never intended to. Any characters with small breasts or short height (even if they were otherwise clearly adult) were likely to be targeted, drawing further criticism from body positivity advocates, who pointed out that moderators were de-facto identifying certain body types (which some real people have) as ‘not adult’ and ‘not a real woman’. Artists who did fan art of the Pokemon franchise were particularly hard hit, because at least some of the moderators seemed to be of the opinion that pretty much all pokemon were always underage, and therefore always “child porn”. And artists with a more ‘cartoony’ style tended to get hit a lot harder as well, since moderators appeared to believe that simplified characters with less detail meant they were younger. And then there was the diaper fetish crowd, who lost all their stuff, because moderators decided that any depiction of any character (regardless of any other age indicators) was definitely a child if they were in a diaper.
Thankfully, that ended, and decisively so. The site was reorganized, the policy was heavily rewritten (with user input this time), and the worst offenders among the site staff were all fired. Sexual depictions of minors is still against the rules there, but they instituted much clearer, more specific, and more objective guidelines for determining whether a character is or isn’t underage.
And that’s just an online art site, where the worst thing that could happen is that your art gets deleted and you get banned! I can’t imagine risking prison time based on what some prude with a chip on their shoulder decides about the apparent age of a fictional character.
In Japan they just made it illegal.