4 ms·

Appeals court rules that Constitution protects possession of AI-generated CSAM

49 points by anigbrowl 2y ago

sparky_ 2y ago
Not a lawyer, but this sure seems to open a legal and ethical can of worms. Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing, the possession of which is inarguably illegal and immoral. So how could the model be legally or ethically trained? And if they _cannot_ be legally or ethically trained, then how can the _use_ of those models be okay? What will be the implications of this in cases where _real_ CSAM was produced or possessed? Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses. After all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not, unless the chain of production is verified? From the article: > ...If purely private possession of AI-CSAM is constitutionally protected under current caselaw but production is not, then using AI models (even locally-hosted ones) to generate child obscenity in one’s own home is not wholly insulated from criminal prosecution. Subsequently transmitting it to someone else, especially someone underage, is also grounds for liability... Can of worms, ye be released!
- braiamp 2y ago
  This is a common misunderstanding. The thing knows how a naked woman looks, also knows how a child looks, it puts two and two together and voila. It doesn't need to be trained on the real thing to be able to generate it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - delecti 2y ago
    Does that necessarily follow? Wouldn't that be prone to outputting small naked adult women, and/or naked children with boobs?
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Why not? I am pretty sure there is no training data of “whales playing the guitar”, but if you ask a model to draw one, it will do a respectable job of imagining that scenario.
      - userbinator 2y ago
        Another somewhat famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astronaut_Riding_a_Horse_(SD3.5).webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astronaut_Riding_a_Horse_...
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      If it is trained on well-tagged images of adult men and women both clothed and unclothed, and clothed children (not that all pictures of unclothed children are CSAM to start with), understanding the relation of clothed to unclothed appearance could allow a model to reasonably generalize unclothed child bodies. Further, models that are otherwise well trained with a mix of photographic and drawn content can often generalize specific concepts for which their training only includes examples from drawn content to photorealistic imagery involving that concept.
  - LinuxBender 2y ago
    I don't believe that is true. A woman and a child have distinct characteristics that are not interchangeable. A child for example can be detected by the shape of the nose and nostrils as just one data point. There are many more data-points that psycho-analysts use to determine if a person is attracted to children. AI would have to understand quite a bit of biology and understand how humans develop to get this right.
    - charcircuit 2y ago
      You can have artist draw art with the differences. And then you can get it via style transfer. But there are already many images of children with noses.
    - Sharlin 2y ago
      Image generation models are perfectly capable of mixing different concepts to create images of things they're incredibly unlikely to have seen during training.
      - LinuxBender 2y ago
        That sounds like a hit-or-miss concept to me. Without logic that teaches the AI why a child and an adult look the way they do it would maybe sometimes get it right by chance and other times not. I do not see how one could guarantee an outcome with the logic of the generation models unless it understands biology or was trained on real people which advertisements have no shortage of. Advertisements lack nudity and would leave out details like a hymen.
    - jliptzin 2y ago
      This is not a matter of opinion. Go to any AI image generator and tell it to generate whatever you want
      - LinuxBender 2y ago
        Opinions aside the question is how it learned to draw details about a child that do not exist on an adult and vice versa.
  - wavemode 2y ago
    Well, maybe. Maybe not. See "Why can't ChatGPT draw a full glass of wine?" https://youtu.be/160F8F8mXlo https://youtu.be/160F8F8mXlo Diffusion models do posses some capability to synthesize ideas, but that capability does not necessarily generalize to every possible use case. So it's impossible to say for certain that that is what is happening.
    - Calavar 2y ago
      That video makes some good observatons, but it's also hilarious that he tried to "retrain" ChatGPT by asking it in the chat to remove some items from its dataset.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      We can get more certainty by testing combinations of those concepts with a whole bunch of other ones. Naked skateboarder. Child construction worker. It has a lot more variety for both of those concepts than with wine glasses. We can also check models that have very highly vetted input sets.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Statistically, you'd expect this to result in depictions of children with public hair - some adults opt to get rid of theirs, but most have it. Are you sure you're not projecting your prior knowledge about human biology onto an image transformer model?
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing, I doubt that is so. In practice they might be trained on the real thing, but models generalise pretty well. It is going to be technically possible to train a model on other material (children, nudity and non-CSAM abuse scenes or maybe not even that) and have it generate CSAM. But even if it was true, that would only make training the model illegal and ethically dubious. We use a tonne of technologies where the creator was legally and morally dubious. It's never been an ongoing issue before. So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created.
  - davisp 2y ago
    I’m gonna give this a very charitable read by saying that while I find the ways that the treatment of burn victims was advanced by abhorrent means, we as a society have still benefited from those means. > So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created. I am trying to be very specific here. I assume no untoward motivations from the parent commenter. I am not intending to cast aspersions. Whoever wrote this, I feel no ill will for you and this is not meant as a personal slight. And I will be very clear, this statement as written could probably be defended because of the “by how it was created” clause. However, “So once the model is created there isn’t a good reason to encumber it” is so… fucking I don’t even know, because what the actual fuck? I apologize for the profanity, I really do. But, really? Are you fucking kidding me? These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail. I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. That’s all I think happened here. But holy fuck, please pause and consider things a bit.
    - throwaway7313 2y ago
      Outlawing the use of existing material is vital market protection for producers. Denouncing these models may not actually be a good way to reduce harm.
    - throwaway749372 2y ago
      > These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail. If it's possible to produce CSAM that doesn't involve actual children and have a measurable impact in profitablity and demand of the real thing, leading to a net reduction in the harm done to children wouldn't you be on the wrong side of the argument you think you're making? > I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. I would argue it's a rational take. Can we agree the goal to reduce harm of children is good? Or only if the solution is comfortable to you?
- RajT88 2y ago
  > Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses You are probably right, given what we saw with all the porn popup adware back in the 90's and 2000's. A friend of mine was a malware analyst for the FBI for a while. All CSAM possession cases she heard about, the defense was "malware did it". Nearly all cases the jury convicted them. 100% of her cases for sure. At some point using the defense everyone else uses and fails with is probably going to become a liability. Shit I am sure people are already trying to use this defense and failing!
  - grepfru_it 2y ago
    It only went to court because they had enough evidence to prove it is not malware. You have excluded all of the possible cases that used the malware defense and plea’d out or never went to trial. Similarly, I think using the AI art excuse may be an uphill battle but not one that is impossible to defend
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      This isn't how the legal system works. Most CP cases get prosecuted because the defendant solicits or shares CP with a minor of some other CP collectors, but let's imagine a situation where someone gets busted from something else and then investigators discover they have CP (real-world non-AI CP in this example). Having it at all is a strict liability crime. If the defendant says malware put it on their computer and they don't know how or when it got there, that's called an affirmative defense - it's admissible as a claim, but the burden of proof for the claim is on the defendant. Otherwise you could just claim it was planted on your computer by ghosts or demons or space aliens. If the machine was infested with malware to the point of the browser being nearly inoperable and all sort so fother junk being present, a jury might buy it. But the defendant has to make some sort of showing to back up the claim. The whole thing about 'reasonable doubt' in criminal cases is not that something sounds possible or even plausible, but that you can support the claim with some mix of logic and empirical evidence like any other reasoned argument. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_defense https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_defense
  - 2y ago
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing This is absolutely not true. Generalization is a key capability of image generation models. > Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses. The worst justification for a criminal prohibition that I can think of is that it is provides a convenient out for the difficulty of proving another, more clearly warranted, crime. > After all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not, unless the chain of production is verified? "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is not, and never had been, "definite".
milesrout 2y ago
Misleading headline. This appears to be a district court decision, not an appeal court decision. The first four words are "A US district court" and the very end is about leave to appeal being granted by an appellate court - but the appeal hasn't been heard yet.
- treetalker 2y ago
  Came here to say this. The article refers to a decision from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (of all places). HN post title should be changed.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    Yes, that's a transcription mistake on my part. Unfortunately the edit window has closed already. Sorry for the confusion.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  Another important thing is that the guy was charged with production, possession, and distribution... and the court only dismissed the possession charge. That fundamentally leaves the material illegal, since you couldn't possess it without either producing it, or having somebody distribute it to you.
danaris 2y ago
If it is AI-generated, it may be "child porn", but it is, by definition, not "CSAM"—Child Sexual Abuse Materials—because no real, live child was harmed in its creation. Words have meaning, and while language does drift over time, it's important to maintain the meanings of certain kinds of words and phrases that draw important distinctions.
- RajT88 2y ago
  In the US at least. Last I heard in the UK you could still get sent to prison for Mangas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
  - _--__--__ 2y ago
    Not the whole US, the Texas state government just passed a ban on virtual and non-photorealistic 'obscene' depictions of minors
    - oyashirochama 2y ago
      It likely doesn't pass the constitution or will have to be subject to the Miller's test. Hence it doesn't really change much that the federal law already did.
      - Henchman21 2y ago
        Yet Texas will enforce it regardless
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Yes, but not for CSAM, rather they have a different obscenity law for that. It is kind of in the article. > Anderegg moved to dismiss each of the four counts. In an opinion last month, the court largely rejected the motions. However, the court did dismiss the possession charge, holding that Section 1466A is unconstitutional as applied to Anderegg’s private possession of obscene “virtual” CSAM. > The Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the right to possess obscene material in one’s own home, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), so long as it’s not actual CSAM, Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103 (1990). Probably they can still charge him with distribution (to the teenage boy), but not possession. Probably production is also not dropped?
3827HJahg 2y ago
The AI submissiveness of courts is concerning. $500 billion promised investments are hard to argue against. Is this the new killer app for the broligarchs? Disgusting.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I don't think this has that much to do with AI interests outside of determining that AI generated images fall closer to "animated" laws than "real subject" ones.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  I don't know about that. The legal questions here are similar to those presented by human drawings/paintings, ie are such materials contraband even if they are fictional rather than documentary in nature. Of course, AI makes it vastly easier to produce because it requires little time or talent to operate, but you can imagine a similar case involving a finely-rendered pencil drawing.
decremental 2y ago
[dead]
metalman 2y ago
the whole sordid thing is an intilectual exercise that is questionable in and of itself. but in the interest of moving forward, I would suggest, that sure ok, BUT, with a provisio: a law requiring the summary execution of anyone who having child abuse images also causes ANY real harm to a child, or expresses the intent to harm a child, or had previously harmed a child. A girlfiend who had been abused, when asked what would be the perfect punishment for abusers, suggested "the pit from hell", a vast excavation with towering smooth vertical walls, and an impossible to climb, slide they are thrown down. One way, no appeals, no doors, no cameras, no nothing, except for whatever redemption is availible in hell.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  I propose that you continue to apply the legal rules that forbid summary executions (which are part of the US Constitution, but are older than the US itself). Except that you should add an exception allowing the summary execution of anybody who calls for summary execution for anything else. Such people are obviously opposed to the goals of the government and legal system, dangerous to the rule of law, and unfit to exist in society.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
In the sense that no real subject is being harmed, this makes sense. Same reason why animated depictions of such content is protected in the US. Seems like a microscopically thin line, though. If an LLM gets too close to recreating a recognizable subject, it's all hell from there on where to draw he line.
- slg 2y ago
  >In the sense that no real subject is being harmed, this makes sense. I don't like this logic for the legality of AI images because we wouldn't allow it with non-AI images. For example, should CSAM be legal if the person in the image and all their family is dead? There is "no real subject" around to be harmed anymore, so by this logic it should be legal. But we don't make this stuff illegal just because of the people harmed in creation or distribution. We make it illegal because most of us don't want to live in a society that tolerates it.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    CSAM is illegal because it creates a market for/related to human trafficking no matter how far after the fact.
    - stogot 2y ago
      It’s illegal for more than that
    - newAccount2025 2y ago
      This is a very interesting point. In the era of AI, does it begin to break down? Like, if the AI systems can eventually generate piles of these materials without human victims, will it actually reduce the incentive for “real” CSAM?
  - rockemsockem 2y ago
    I feel like a closer comparison would be a very talented artist drawing their own obscene content and keeping it to themselves. This seems like it should obviously be legal, gross as it is. In your example I would think that harm being rendered against the now dead is still harm that occurred against a person who was living at the time??
userbinator 2y ago
AFAIK, the possession of AI-generated (and non-AI-generated) content depicting various other illegal things is legal, so this doesn't seem too surprising. After all, mass media constantly contains fictional murder, drug use, etc.
- synapsomorphy 2y ago
  There's a pretty big difference, a picture of a murder might be used as evidence but itself is not illegal.
david38 2y ago
This is bad. The Mere-Exposure Effect can increase the number of victims as AI CSAM can act as a gateway drug so to speak. This is the justification for keeping the ban on legally culled elephants. Yes, a percentage of elephants are legally hunted to control population and fund national parks, but you cannot import that ivory because the thinking is it will create a market and that market will quickly turn to pouching.
- hahajk 2y ago
  You described two different things: a psychological effect first, and then a market. The elephant example isn't mere-exposure. Also, I'm not an expert on this but do we see more sensless killing by kids playing violent video games? This is usually the counter example to the exposure argument and I haven't seen it properly argued against.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    In the US there's also been an interesting rise in sexlessness and male virginity recently [0] which is a fun one to compare with exposure to pornography. There is evidence that real-world conditions have a lot more to do with real-world action than pictures on the internet. [0] https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/young-adult-sexlessness-skyrocketed-in-the-last-decade-while-male-virginity-doubled-study https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/young-adult-sexlessness-sk...
- throwaway749372 2y ago
  The anology here would be, that poaching is a thing even though it's illegal, so say we found a way to create ivory that is indistinguishable from the real thing, without any harm to animals. You can flood the market with it curbing the demand, and still continue to hunt down poachers. There's an argument to be made that they might have an easier time claiming their ivory is actually fake but the real strategy is to make poaching just not worth the risk by inpacting the reward.
- charcircuit 2y ago
  >This is bad It's a trade off choosing to favor free speech because that is something American society values even if it may come with downsides.

49 points by anigbrowl 2y ago

Not a lawyer, but this sure seems to open a legal and ethical can of worms. Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing, the possession of which is inarguably illegal and immoral. So how could the model be legally or ethically trained? And if they _cannot_ be legally or ethically trained, then how can the _use_ of those models be okay? What will be the implications of this in cases where _real_ CSAM was produced or possessed? Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses. After all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not, unless the chain of production is verified? From the article: > ...If purely private possession of AI-CSAM is constitutionally protected under current caselaw but production is not, then using AI models (even locally-hosted ones) to generate child obscenity in one’s own home is not wholly insulated from criminal prosecution. Subsequently transmitting it to someone else, especially someone underage, is also grounds for liability... Can of worms, ye be released!

braiamp 2y ago
This is a common misunderstanding. The thing knows how a naked woman looks, also knows how a child looks, it puts two and two together and voila. It doesn't need to be trained on the real thing to be able to generate it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- delecti 2y ago
  Does that necessarily follow? Wouldn't that be prone to outputting small naked adult women, and/or naked children with boobs?
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Why not? I am pretty sure there is no training data of “whales playing the guitar”, but if you ask a model to draw one, it will do a respectable job of imagining that scenario.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      Another somewhat famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astronaut_Riding_a_Horse_(SD3.5).webp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astronaut_Riding_a_Horse_...
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    If it is trained on well-tagged images of adult men and women both clothed and unclothed, and clothed children (not that all pictures of unclothed children are CSAM to start with), understanding the relation of clothed to unclothed appearance could allow a model to reasonably generalize unclothed child bodies. Further, models that are otherwise well trained with a mix of photographic and drawn content can often generalize specific concepts for which their training only includes examples from drawn content to photorealistic imagery involving that concept.
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  I don't believe that is true. A woman and a child have distinct characteristics that are not interchangeable. A child for example can be detected by the shape of the nose and nostrils as just one data point. There are many more data-points that psycho-analysts use to determine if a person is attracted to children. AI would have to understand quite a bit of biology and understand how humans develop to get this right.
  - charcircuit 2y ago
    You can have artist draw art with the differences. And then you can get it via style transfer. But there are already many images of children with noses.
  - Sharlin 2y ago
    Image generation models are perfectly capable of mixing different concepts to create images of things they're incredibly unlikely to have seen during training.
    - LinuxBender 2y ago
      That sounds like a hit-or-miss concept to me. Without logic that teaches the AI why a child and an adult look the way they do it would maybe sometimes get it right by chance and other times not. I do not see how one could guarantee an outcome with the logic of the generation models unless it understands biology or was trained on real people which advertisements have no shortage of. Advertisements lack nudity and would leave out details like a hymen.
  - jliptzin 2y ago
    This is not a matter of opinion. Go to any AI image generator and tell it to generate whatever you want
    - LinuxBender 2y ago
      Opinions aside the question is how it learned to draw details about a child that do not exist on an adult and vice versa.
- wavemode 2y ago
  Well, maybe. Maybe not. See "Why can't ChatGPT draw a full glass of wine?" https://youtu.be/160F8F8mXlo https://youtu.be/160F8F8mXlo Diffusion models do posses some capability to synthesize ideas, but that capability does not necessarily generalize to every possible use case. So it's impossible to say for certain that that is what is happening.
  - Calavar 2y ago
    That video makes some good observatons, but it's also hilarious that he tried to "retrain" ChatGPT by asking it in the chat to remove some items from its dataset.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    We can get more certainty by testing combinations of those concepts with a whole bunch of other ones. Naked skateboarder. Child construction worker. It has a lot more variety for both of those concepts than with wine glasses. We can also check models that have very highly vetted input sets.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Statistically, you'd expect this to result in depictions of children with public hair - some adults opt to get rid of theirs, but most have it. Are you sure you're not projecting your prior knowledge about human biology onto an image transformer model?
roenxi 2y ago
> Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing, I doubt that is so. In practice they might be trained on the real thing, but models generalise pretty well. It is going to be technically possible to train a model on other material (children, nudity and non-CSAM abuse scenes or maybe not even that) and have it generate CSAM. But even if it was true, that would only make training the model illegal and ethically dubious. We use a tonne of technologies where the creator was legally and morally dubious. It's never been an ongoing issue before. So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created.
- davisp 2y ago
  I’m gonna give this a very charitable read by saying that while I find the ways that the treatment of burn victims was advanced by abhorrent means, we as a society have still benefited from those means. > So once the model is created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was created. I am trying to be very specific here. I assume no untoward motivations from the parent commenter. I am not intending to cast aspersions. Whoever wrote this, I feel no ill will for you and this is not meant as a personal slight. And I will be very clear, this statement as written could probably be defended because of the “by how it was created” clause. However, “So once the model is created there isn’t a good reason to encumber it” is so… fucking I don’t even know, because what the actual fuck? I apologize for the profanity, I really do. But, really? Are you fucking kidding me? These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail. I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. That’s all I think happened here. But holy fuck, please pause and consider things a bit.
  - throwaway7313 2y ago
    Outlawing the use of existing material is vital market protection for producers. Denouncing these models may not actually be a good way to reduce harm.
  - throwaway749372 2y ago
    > These models should not exist. Ever. By any means. Do not pass Go. Go directly to jail. If it's possible to produce CSAM that doesn't involve actual children and have a measurable impact in profitablity and demand of the real thing, leading to a net reduction in the harm done to children wouldn't you be on the wrong side of the argument you think you're making? > I understand the engineering brain enough to contemplate abstract concepts with detachment. I would argue it's a rational take. Can we agree the goal to reduce harm of children is good? Or only if the solution is comfortable to you?
RajT88 2y ago
> Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses You are probably right, given what we saw with all the porn popup adware back in the 90's and 2000's. A friend of mine was a malware analyst for the FBI for a while. All CSAM possession cases she heard about, the defense was "malware did it". Nearly all cases the jury convicted them. 100% of her cases for sure. At some point using the defense everyone else uses and fails with is probably going to become a liability. Shit I am sure people are already trying to use this defense and failing!
- grepfru_it 2y ago
  It only went to court because they had enough evidence to prove it is not malware. You have excluded all of the possible cases that used the malware defense and plea’d out or never went to trial. Similarly, I think using the AI art excuse may be an uphill battle but not one that is impossible to defend
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    This isn't how the legal system works. Most CP cases get prosecuted because the defendant solicits or shares CP with a minor of some other CP collectors, but let's imagine a situation where someone gets busted from something else and then investigators discover they have CP (real-world non-AI CP in this example). Having it at all is a strict liability crime. If the defendant says malware put it on their computer and they don't know how or when it got there, that's called an affirmative defense - it's admissible as a claim, but the burden of proof for the claim is on the defendant. Otherwise you could just claim it was planted on your computer by ghosts or demons or space aliens. If the machine was infested with malware to the point of the browser being nearly inoperable and all sort so fother junk being present, a jury might buy it. But the defendant has to make some sort of showing to back up the claim. The whole thing about 'reasonable doubt' in criminal cases is not that something sounds possible or even plausible, but that you can support the claim with some mix of logic and empirical evidence like any other reasoned argument. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_defense https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_defense
- 2y ago
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Image generation models capable of generating this type of content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing This is absolutely not true. Generalization is a key capability of image generation models. > Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses. The worst justification for a criminal prohibition that I can think of is that it is provides a convenient out for the difficulty of proving another, more clearly warranted, crime. > After all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not, unless the chain of production is verified? "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is not, and never had been, "definite".

milesrout 2y ago

Misleading headline. This appears to be a district court decision, not an appeal court decision. The first four words are "A US district court" and the very end is about leave to appeal being granted by an appellate court - but the appeal hasn't been heard yet.

treetalker 2y ago
Came here to say this. The article refers to a decision from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (of all places). HN post title should be changed.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  Yes, that's a transcription mistake on my part. Unfortunately the edit window has closed already. Sorry for the confusion.
Hizonner 2y ago
Another important thing is that the guy was charged with production, possession, and distribution... and the court only dismissed the possession charge. That fundamentally leaves the material illegal, since you couldn't possess it without either producing it, or having somebody distribute it to you.

danaris 2y ago

If it is AI-generated, it may be "child porn", but it is, by definition, not "CSAM"—Child Sexual Abuse Materials—because no real, live child was harmed in its creation. Words have meaning, and while language does drift over time, it's important to maintain the meanings of certain kinds of words and phrases that draw important distinctions.

RajT88 2y ago
In the US at least. Last I heard in the UK you could still get sent to prison for Mangas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
- _--__--__ 2y ago
  Not the whole US, the Texas state government just passed a ban on virtual and non-photorealistic 'obscene' depictions of minors
  - oyashirochama 2y ago
    It likely doesn't pass the constitution or will have to be subject to the Miller's test. Hence it doesn't really change much that the federal law already did.
    - Henchman21 2y ago
      Yet Texas will enforce it regardless
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Yes, but not for CSAM, rather they have a different obscenity law for that. It is kind of in the article. > Anderegg moved to dismiss each of the four counts. In an opinion last month, the court largely rejected the motions. However, the court did dismiss the possession charge, holding that Section 1466A is unconstitutional as applied to Anderegg’s private possession of obscene “virtual” CSAM. > The Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment protects the right to possess obscene material in one’s own home, Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969), so long as it’s not actual CSAM, Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103 (1990). Probably they can still charge him with distribution (to the teenage boy), but not possession. Probably production is also not dropped?

3827HJahg 2y ago

The AI submissiveness of courts is concerning. $500 billion promised investments are hard to argue against. Is this the new killer app for the broligarchs? Disgusting.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
I don't think this has that much to do with AI interests outside of determining that AI generated images fall closer to "animated" laws than "real subject" ones.
anigbrowl 2y ago
I don't know about that. The legal questions here are similar to those presented by human drawings/paintings, ie are such materials contraband even if they are fictional rather than documentary in nature. Of course, AI makes it vastly easier to produce because it requires little time or talent to operate, but you can imagine a similar case involving a finely-rendered pencil drawing.

decremental 2y ago

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metalman 2y ago

the whole sordid thing is an intilectual exercise that is questionable in and of itself. but in the interest of moving forward, I would suggest, that sure ok, BUT, with a provisio: a law requiring the summary execution of anyone who having child abuse images also causes ANY real harm to a child, or expresses the intent to harm a child, or had previously harmed a child. A girlfiend who had been abused, when asked what would be the perfect punishment for abusers, suggested "the pit from hell", a vast excavation with towering smooth vertical walls, and an impossible to climb, slide they are thrown down. One way, no appeals, no doors, no cameras, no nothing, except for whatever redemption is availible in hell.

Hizonner 2y ago
I propose that you continue to apply the legal rules that forbid summary executions (which are part of the US Constitution, but are older than the US itself). Except that you should add an exception allowing the summary execution of anybody who calls for summary execution for anything else. Such people are obviously opposed to the goals of the government and legal system, dangerous to the rule of law, and unfit to exist in society.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

In the sense that no real subject is being harmed, this makes sense. Same reason why animated depictions of such content is protected in the US. Seems like a microscopically thin line, though. If an LLM gets too close to recreating a recognizable subject, it's all hell from there on where to draw he line.

slg 2y ago
>In the sense that no real subject is being harmed, this makes sense. I don't like this logic for the legality of AI images because we wouldn't allow it with non-AI images. For example, should CSAM be legal if the person in the image and all their family is dead? There is "no real subject" around to be harmed anymore, so by this logic it should be legal. But we don't make this stuff illegal just because of the people harmed in creation or distribution. We make it illegal because most of us don't want to live in a society that tolerates it.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  CSAM is illegal because it creates a market for/related to human trafficking no matter how far after the fact.
  - stogot 2y ago
    It’s illegal for more than that
  - newAccount2025 2y ago
    This is a very interesting point. In the era of AI, does it begin to break down? Like, if the AI systems can eventually generate piles of these materials without human victims, will it actually reduce the incentive for “real” CSAM?
- rockemsockem 2y ago
  I feel like a closer comparison would be a very talented artist drawing their own obscene content and keeping it to themselves. This seems like it should obviously be legal, gross as it is. In your example I would think that harm being rendered against the now dead is still harm that occurred against a person who was living at the time??

userbinator 2y ago

AFAIK, the possession of AI-generated (and non-AI-generated) content depicting various other illegal things is legal, so this doesn't seem too surprising. After all, mass media constantly contains fictional murder, drug use, etc.

synapsomorphy 2y ago
There's a pretty big difference, a picture of a murder might be used as evidence but itself is not illegal.

david38 2y ago

This is bad. The Mere-Exposure Effect can increase the number of victims as AI CSAM can act as a gateway drug so to speak. This is the justification for keeping the ban on legally culled elephants. Yes, a percentage of elephants are legally hunted to control population and fund national parks, but you cannot import that ivory because the thinking is it will create a market and that market will quickly turn to pouching.

hahajk 2y ago
You described two different things: a psychological effect first, and then a market. The elephant example isn't mere-exposure. Also, I'm not an expert on this but do we see more sensless killing by kids playing violent video games? This is usually the counter example to the exposure argument and I haven't seen it properly argued against.
- roenxi 2y ago
  In the US there's also been an interesting rise in sexlessness and male virginity recently [0] which is a fun one to compare with exposure to pornography. There is evidence that real-world conditions have a lot more to do with real-world action than pictures on the internet. [0] https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/young-adult-sexlessness-skyrocketed-in-the-last-decade-while-male-virginity-doubled-study https://ifstudies.org/in-the-news/young-adult-sexlessness-sk...
throwaway749372 2y ago
The anology here would be, that poaching is a thing even though it's illegal, so say we found a way to create ivory that is indistinguishable from the real thing, without any harm to animals. You can flood the market with it curbing the demand, and still continue to hunt down poachers. There's an argument to be made that they might have an easier time claiming their ivory is actually fake but the real strategy is to make poaching just not worth the risk by inpacting the reward.
charcircuit 2y ago
>This is bad It's a trade off choosing to favor free speech because that is something American society values even if it may come with downsides.