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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 c

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?
basisword 2y ago
>> no real, live child was harmed in its creation That’s a big claim. If the model was trained on CSAM then I would argue that any image generation that comes from it is harmful to the original children. In the same way copies of already existing content continue to harm the victim.
- like_any_other 2y ago
  > If the model was trained on CSAM And if the used car I buy was stolen, I have contributed to car theft. That's not an argument against used car sales, especially from salesmen that try to make sure their inventory is legitimate: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/nonprofit-scrubs-illegal-content-from-controversial-ai-training-dataset/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/nonprofit-scrubs...
  - chongli 2y ago
    Sure, though if you buy a stolen car in a private sale you have no recourse when the police show up to return it to the original owner. If you bought it from a registered dealership then you can be compensated for it.
- newAccount2025 2y ago
  How does it harm the children whose images it was trained on? Maybe if it substantially recreates the input images it is equivalent to plain copying and redistribution. Maybe it creates an economic incentive to abuse more children to create more training data?
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  You're right, but your "if" is doing some heavy lifting. A result being able to be generated does not imply that a dataset contained content that resembled the result. These models are wildly intuitive and can assemble impossible ideas, even when datasets are purged of certain tags. I discovered this early on when I couldn't diagnose why most subjects came out as weirdly child-like elderly people. It turns out "mature" is not synonymous with "nsfw" when negative prompting, and a person absent of maturity, while not explicitly a child, doesn't quite look like a normal adult human, either. I don't think the model was trained on a large corpus of very old babies, yet it was able to imagine them. As long as a model knows what the pieces are or are not, it can be prompted assemble them.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
English can be parsed multiple ways, and CSAM can just as validly refer to a depiction or topic or subject, like "flying alien dogs material" as some actual act. Unless there is some legal definition on the books that does explicitly make that distinction.
anigbrowl 2y ago
This seems like pointless hair splitting. AI-generated images could certainly depict child sexual abuse. I opted to stick with the headline as written rather than recast it to 'child porn', because I felt the phrase 'AI-generated' provided sufficient context for people to understand what the article was about.
- danaris 2y ago
  It is far from pointless. Let's put it in a very HN-centric way—and please try to suppress your inherent disgust reaction: There is a certain amount of demand for images of children in sexual positions. In the past, the only way to satisfy this demand was to put actual children in sexual positions, or to draw such images. Now, there may be a way to satisfy this demand with highly-realistic images without harming any real children at all. If we can reduce or eliminate the demand for actual children to be abused, that seems to me like an unequivocal good in the world. So long as no actual living children are involved, some people getting off to images that look like they're of children, in the privacy of their own homes, all alone, doesn't harm me or anyone else.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    None of this is responsive to what I wrote. Please read the bits where I talked about how the term could equally well apply to an artificial depiction, and how there was additional specific context in the headline. You brought this up as a semantic thing (talking about how words have particular meanings) and I gave you reply in that semantic context. Now you've switched to talking about it as a policy issue, explaining it as if the concept wasn't immediately obvious to everyone else. If that's what you wanted to talk about you should have said so in the first place.

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?

basisword 2y ago

>> no real, live child was harmed in its creation That’s a big claim. If the model was trained on CSAM then I would argue that any image generation that comes from it is harmful to the original children. In the same way copies of already existing content continue to harm the victim.

like_any_other 2y ago
> If the model was trained on CSAM And if the used car I buy was stolen, I have contributed to car theft. That's not an argument against used car sales, especially from salesmen that try to make sure their inventory is legitimate: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/nonprofit-scrubs-illegal-content-from-controversial-ai-training-dataset/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/nonprofit-scrubs...
- chongli 2y ago
  Sure, though if you buy a stolen car in a private sale you have no recourse when the police show up to return it to the original owner. If you bought it from a registered dealership then you can be compensated for it.
newAccount2025 2y ago
How does it harm the children whose images it was trained on? Maybe if it substantially recreates the input images it is equivalent to plain copying and redistribution. Maybe it creates an economic incentive to abuse more children to create more training data?
washadjeffmad 2y ago
You're right, but your "if" is doing some heavy lifting. A result being able to be generated does not imply that a dataset contained content that resembled the result. These models are wildly intuitive and can assemble impossible ideas, even when datasets are purged of certain tags. I discovered this early on when I couldn't diagnose why most subjects came out as weirdly child-like elderly people. It turns out "mature" is not synonymous with "nsfw" when negative prompting, and a person absent of maturity, while not explicitly a child, doesn't quite look like a normal adult human, either. I don't think the model was trained on a large corpus of very old babies, yet it was able to imagine them. As long as a model knows what the pieces are or are not, it can be prompted assemble them.

Brian_K_White 2y ago

English can be parsed multiple ways, and CSAM can just as validly refer to a depiction or topic or subject, like "flying alien dogs material" as some actual act. Unless there is some legal definition on the books that does explicitly make that distinction.

anigbrowl 2y ago

This seems like pointless hair splitting. AI-generated images could certainly depict child sexual abuse. I opted to stick with the headline as written rather than recast it to 'child porn', because I felt the phrase 'AI-generated' provided sufficient context for people to understand what the article was about.

danaris 2y ago
It is far from pointless. Let's put it in a very HN-centric way—and please try to suppress your inherent disgust reaction: There is a certain amount of demand for images of children in sexual positions. In the past, the only way to satisfy this demand was to put actual children in sexual positions, or to draw such images. Now, there may be a way to satisfy this demand with highly-realistic images without harming any real children at all. If we can reduce or eliminate the demand for actual children to be abused, that seems to me like an unequivocal good in the world. So long as no actual living children are involved, some people getting off to images that look like they're of children, in the privacy of their own homes, all alone, doesn't harm me or anyone else.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  None of this is responsive to what I wrote. Please read the bits where I talked about how the term could equally well apply to an artificial depiction, and how there was additional specific context in the headline. You brought this up as a semantic thing (talking about how words have particular meanings) and I gave you reply in that semantic context. Now you've switched to talking about it as a policy issue, explaining it as if the concept wasn't immediately obvious to everyone else. If that's what you wanted to talk about you should have said so in the first place.