this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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AI-generated child sexual abuse images could flood the internet. A watchdog is calling for action (apnews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] artaxadepressedhorse@lemmyngs.social 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I am sort of curious, bc I don't know: of all the types of sexual abuse that happens to children, ie being molested by family or acquaintances, being kidnapped by the creep in the van, being trafficked for prostitution, abuse in church, etc etc... in comparison to these cases, how many cases deal exclusively with producing imagery?

Next thing I'm curious about: if the internet becomes flooded with AI generated CP images, could that potentially reduce the demand for RL imagery? Wouldn't the demand-side be met? Is the concern normalization and inducing demand? Do we know there's any significant correlation between more people looking and more people actually abusing kids?

Which leads to the next part: I play violent video games and listen to violent aggressive music and have for many years now and I enjoy it a lot, and I've never done violence to anybody before, nor would I want to. Is persecuting someone for imagining/mentally roleplaying something that's cruel actually a form of social abuse in itself?

Props to anybody who asks hard questions btw, bc guaranteed there will be a lot of bullying on this topic. I'm not saying "I'm right and they're wrong", but there's a lot of nuance here and people here seem pretty quick to hand govt and police incredible powers for.. I dunno.. how much gain really? You'll never get rights back that you throw away. Never. They don't make 'em anymore these days.

[–] ConsciousCode@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

I respect your boldness to ask these questions, but I don't feel like I can adequately answer them. I wrote a 6 paragraph essay but using GPT-4 as a sensitivity reader, I don't think I can post it without some kind of miscommunication or unintentional hurt. Instead, I'll answer the questions directly by presenting non-authoritative alternate viewpoints.

  1. No idea, maybe someone else knows
  2. That makes sense to me; I would think there would be a strong pressure to present fake content as real to avoid getting caught but they're already in deep legal trouble anyway and I'm sure they get off to it too. It's hard to know for sure because it's so stigmatized that the data are both biased and sparse. Good luck getting anyone to volunteer that information
  3. I consider pedophilia (ie the attraction) to be amoral but acting on it to be "evil", ala noncon, gore, necrophilia, etc. That's just from consistent application of my principles though, as I haven't humanized them enough to care that pedophilia itself is illegal. I don't think violent video games are quite comparable because humans normally abhor violence, so there's a degree of separation, whereas CP is inherently attractive to them. More research is needed, if we as a society care enough to research it.
  4. I don't quite agree, rights are hard-won and easy-lost but we seem to gain them over time. Take trans rights to healthcare for example - first it wasn't available to anyone, then it was available to everyone (trans or not), now we have reactionary denials of those rights, and soon we'll get those rights for real, like what happened with gay rights. Also, I don't see what rights are lost in arguing for the status quo that pedophilia remain criminalized? If MAPs are any indication, I'm not sure we're ready for that tightrope, and there are at least a dozen marginalized groups I'd rather see get rights first. Unlike gay people for instance, being "in the closet" is a net societal good because there's no valid way to present that publicly without harming children or eroding their protections.
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[–] jsdz@lemmy.ml 47 points 1 year ago (5 children)

vastly expands the pool of potential victims

I'm not brave enough at the moment to say it isn't some kind of crime, but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn't seem to be a crime that involves any victims.

[–] SmoochyPit@beehaw.org 53 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts (sexualization of children). That’s also why I dislike loli/shota media, despite it being fictional.

That said, I still think it’s a much better alternative to CSAM and especially to actually harming a child for those who have those desires due to trauma or mental illness. Though I’m not sure if easy, open access is entirely safe, either.

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts

The same concern has been behind attempts to restrict/ban violent video games, and films before that, and books before that. Despite generations of trying, I don't think a causal link has ever been established.

[–] SmoochyPit@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

On the flip side, studies haven’t come to a single consensus of viewing cp leading to reduced violence by individuals either.

While a full-ban infringes upon individual rights of expression and speech, and may impede in previous victims viewing it as an alternative, I’m not sure if a laissez faire approach is the best option, either.

Especially for material that A) depicts abuse and B) is harder to distinguish between fiction and reality (AI generated content), the risk of psychological harm to individuals without existing trauma or fetishes is very real. I stand by this fact for violent/unethical media as well.

[–] elfpie@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's the same concern. It's not that people will become pedophiles or act on it more because of the normalization and exposure. It's people will see less of a problem with the sexualization of children. The parallel being the amount of violence we are OK being depicted. The difference being we can only emulate in a personal level the sexual side.

Maybe there's the argument that violence is escapist, sexual desire is ever present and porn is addictive.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In that regard, with books, games, movies, and drawings it's easy to discern fantasy from reality. With an AI generated photograph that becomes increasingly difficult to do.

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

with books, games, movies, and drawings it’s easy to discern fantasy from reality

I don't think it is easy with movies or books, unless you are certain of the source.

Either way, we don't have a causal link.

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

That's not entirely true. Some studies have shown that stuff we watch influences our decisions and behaviour.

This article gives an overview over some of the more accepted research done in the area:

Pornography Use and Psychological Science: A Call for Consideration

[–] PM_ME_FAT_ENBIES@lib.lgbt 7 points 1 year ago

A teenager who plays a violent video game is not engaging in an act of violence as recognised by his brain. He is not going into a fight or flight response and getting trauma from the experience as he would in a real fight. His brain doesn't think he's in a fight.

When you masturbate, your body goes through the same chemical and neurological processes as if you were really having sex.

[–] Treczoks@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For "normalisation of sexualisation of children" go ask the people organizing child beauty pageants.

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[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 38 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I'm brave enough to say what I am sure some people are thinking.

If a pedophile can have access to a machine that generates endless child porn for them, completely cutting off the market for the "real thing", then maybe that's a step in a positive direction. Very far from perfect but better than the status quo.

The ideal ultimate solution is to develop a treatment that pedophiles can use to just stop being pedophiles entirely. I bet most pedophiles would jump on such a thing. But until that magical day maybe let's explore options that reduce the harm done to actually real children in the immediate term.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some psychologists agree with you. Others say it would only make the problem worse, making them want to escalate. Definitely one that I'm letting the professionals debate on and I'll go with their opinion

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[–] frog@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but creating such images (as opposed to spamming them everywhere, using them for blackmail, or whatever) doesn’t seem to be a crime that involves any victims.

Well, there's all the children whose photos were used for the training data. I'd consider them victims, since AIs can't produce truly new images, so real human victims were needed in order to make AI images possible. And it's been established that AIs need to be trained on new human-made content in order to develop, as the images become distorted when trained on AI-generated content, so unless the paedophiles can be convinced to be satisfied with the AIs as they currently are instead of wanting better/more varied child abuse images next year, a whole lot more real children will need to be abused and photographed in order to improve the AI.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a lot of misconceptions about AI image generators in here.

They can indeed generate "truly new images", ask an image generator for an image of something that definitely doesn't exist in its training set and it'll likely be able to come up with something like that for you. Most importantly for purposes of this discussion, you don't actually need to have any images specifically of child abuse in a model's training set in order to train it well enough to produce images of child abuse. Train a model with a bunch of regular porn and a bunch of ordinary images of children and I expect it'll figure out how to make images of children in sexual situations if you ask it to.

This has been known for years. These AIs are capable of "understanding" the things they're trained on and creating novel interpretations of those things.

There was an article recently that showed if you trained many generations of AIs on just the outputs of previous generations you got degraded performance over time, but that's a pretty specific scenario that doesn't match what's being done in real life. In real life synthetic training data (ie, AI-generated training data) can be very useful for expanding the capabilities of AI as long as it's well-curated (humans need to select good outputs and ensure they're described correctly) and ideally has some of the earlier training set's original data included as well.

[–] frog@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So basically, in order to have AIs that make better child porn, there needs to be humans willing to go through vast quantities of AI generated child porn in order to properly curate the content for the AI. Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries, being paid slave wages, I think it would be fair to add them to the list of potential victims of the creation of child porn AIs.

[–] Onihikage@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries

You don't quite seem to understand how easy it is to train these AI models, and because of that, you're missing a critical point - with open-source technologies like Stable Diffusion, which has models that can be refined and run on a consumer-grade graphics card, the people using models to generate images and the people creating and refining those models are the same people. People who want to generate brand new pokemon sprites can train a model on all the pokemon sprites until it looks good. A few absolute galaxy-brain nerds who want to generate MIDI spectrograms from a text description and convert the output into audio... can apparently do that. And of course, people who want to generate lots of hentai or photorealistic porn can create and fine-tune a model, or multiple models, all by themselves (I won't link any of these, but hundreds are readily available, and thousands exist in total)

In other words, people who already consume CSAM are the people working on models for generating CP, and a subset of those have definitely been trying to make it work with only legal images so that the model itself can be distributed and used without breaking any laws, maybe even hiding in plain sight pretending it's not for making CP. Someone else out there with a different set of fucked-up desires has probably trained a model on gore and snuff images and then used it to create "photos" of people they hate as mutilated messes. There's sick people of all kinds all over the place, and the jury's unfortunately still out on whether this new tool actually causes harm when used in such a manner, or if it's just the newest way they can express their deviance. We don't know yet.

But this genie is already out of the bottle. Banning the use of this technology for specific, narrow use cases just isn't going to be effective without banning AI image generation entirely, and we're past the point where that's feasible. Image generation is a powerful tool that's not going away; it's on us now to figure out what we really believe about harm, health, and personal freedom, and what we want a society with this tool to look like.

Personally, I'm of a mind that if all the data going into the model is legally obtained, anything generated should be considered artistic expression. A person had a thought, then put their thoughts into a tool, which made a picture of those thoughts. No matter how repulsive those thoughts were, I think throwing people in prison for that kind of expression is thought-crime. There's public obscenity at play, of course, but only once they take the step of showing it to other people. If it's just for themselves, and nobody else sees it, who is harmed? Even if it does turn out that it harms the person generating the images (which wouldn't surprise me), that makes it a health issue, like drugs or other addictions, not something to criminalize.

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[–] darkfiremp3@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Another worry could be: how do you know if it’s a real victim who needs help, or an AI generated image.

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[–] zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Many "AI generated" images are actually very close to individual images from their training data so it's debatable how much difference there is between looking at a generated image and just looking at an image from its training data in some cases at least.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

That's a symptom of overfitting, which requires the image to be repeated in the training hundreds or even thousands of times. That generally only happened in earlier image generation models, more "modern" ones ("modern" in this case being measured in months because this is such a fast-developing technology) have much better curation of their training sets to avoid exactly that sort of thing. Nobody wants AI image generators that replicate images from their training sets, what would be the point?

So if you want to find an image model that gives you a close duplicate of an existing image of child abuse, you'll need to find one that was sloppily trained with a training set that included hundreds of duplicates of child abuse imagery. I kind of doubt you'll be able to find one of those.

[–] Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Isnt it better the are AI generated than real? Pedophiles exist and wont go away and no one can control it. So best they watch AI images than real ones or worse

[–] python@programming.dev 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI needs training data.

[–] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (14 children)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

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[–] coffeejunky@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Yeah exactly, I don't want to see it but the same goes for a lot of weird fetishes.

As long as no one is getting hurt I don't really see the problem.

[–] BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.

It'd be hard to actually meet that premise, though. People are getting hurt.

Child abuse imagery is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims. Extending that financial/economic analogy, seeding that economy with liquidity, in a financial sense, might or might not incentivize the creation of new authentic child abuse imagery (that requires a child victim to create). That's not as clear, but what is clear is that it would reduce the transaction costs of distributing existing child abuse imagery, which is a form of re-victimizing those who have already been abused.

Child abuse imagery is also used as a grooming technique. Normalization of child sexual activity is how a lot of abusers persuade children to engage in sexual acts. Providing victimless "seed" material might still result in actual abuse happening down the line.

If the creation of AI-generated child abuse imagery begins to give actual abusers and users of real child abuse imagery cover, to where it becomes more difficult to investigate the crime or secure convictions against child rapists, then the proliferation of this technology would make it easier to victimize additional children without consequences.

I'm not sure what the latest research is on the extent to which viewing and consuming child porn would lead to harmful behavior down the line (on the one hand, maybe it's a less harmless outlet for unhealthy urges, but on the other hand, it may feed an addictive cycle that results in net additional harm to society).

I'm sure there are a lot of other considerations and social forces at play, too.

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean you could also go with a more sane model that still represses the idea while allowing some controlled environment for people whom it can really help.

You could start by not prosecuting posession, only distribution. So it would still be effectively "blocked" everywhere like it's (attempted to be) now, but distributing models for generation would be fine.

Or you could create "known safe" (AI generated) 'datasets' to distribute to people, while knowing it was ethically created.

is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims

A huge part of the idea is that if you create a surplus of supply it cannot work as a currency and actual abuse material will be drowned out and not wort it to create for the vast majority of people - too risky and irrelevant if you have a good enough alternative.

You're definitely right though that there would have to be more considerations.

[–] ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to think it's some kind of human right and people are entitled to have fapping material provided for them. No one is hurt if people don't have fapping material.

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

There is an argument to be made that allowing people with unhealthy desires a safe and harmless outlet, they will be less compelled to go with the harmful option.

And, actually, I kinda want to disagree with the premise too. Even if it was provably true that noone gets hurt if there wasn't porn, you can flip the question; why should it be banned if it doesn't hurt anyone? Do you want to live in a world where anything that's perceived as bad is just outright banned without much thought?

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[–] tesseract@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago

Now that CSAM content is generated by bigcos with deep pockets, politicians don't want to scan their servers or take any other action. These are the same demagogues who wanted to kill end-to-end encryption and scan ordinary people's devices in the name of CSAM. Greedy and hypocritical vermin.

[–] Zagaroth@beehaw.org 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Normally I err on the side of 'art' being separated from actual pictures/recordings of abuse. It falls under the "I don't like what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it" idea.

Photorealistic images of CP? I think that crosses the line, and needs to be treated as if it was actual CP as it essentially enables real CP to proliferate.

[–] artaxadepressedhorse@lemmyngs.social 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I keep seeing people post this same idea, and I see no proof that it would actually happen.

Why would you need "real" CP if there's like-for-like-quality AI CP out there?

Also, aside from going out of our way to wreck the lives of individuals who look at the stuff, is there any actual concrete stats that say we're preventing any sort of significant number of RL child abuse by giving up rights to privacy or paying FBI agents to post CP online and entrap people? I Don't get behind the "if it theoretically helped one single child, I'd genocide a nation.." bs. I want to see what we've gained so far by these policies before I agree to giving govt more power by expanding them.

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[–] khalic@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good thing it’s already outlawed by most places

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[–] NatoBoram@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's already happening on Pixiv...

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