A new report warns that the proliferation of child sexual abuse images on the internet could become much worse if something is not done to put controls on artificial intelligence tools that generate deepfake photos.
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
Images, yes, but mixing concepts is a mixed bag. Just because the model can draw, say, human faces and dog faces doesn't mean it has the understanding necessary to blend those concepts. Without employing specialised models (and yes of course the furries have been busy) the best you'll get is facepaint. The pope at a beach bar doesn't even come close to exercising that kind of capability: The pope is still the pope and the beach bar is still the beach bar, and a person is still sitting there slurping a caipirinha.
I mean if you train a model on porn with adult actors and on regular photos with children, it shouldn't be hard to generate the combination.
You probably wouldn't even need any fancy training data but if you really wanted you could pick adult actors that look young or in other ways similar to the children to help the process.
Knowing what a nude adult looks like doesn't mean that the model knows what a nude child looks like. I'm quite sure it's easy to generate disturbing images like that, but actual paedophiles I think won't be satisfied with child faces on small adult bodies.
Ordinary deepfakes actually have a very similar problem: Sure you can take a picture of a celebrity and tell the AI to undress them – but it won't be their actual body. The AI is going to be able to approximate their overall build but it's going to be a generic adult body, not the celebrity's body. Or, differently put, AI models aren't any better at undressing people with their eyes than teenagers.
I see where you're coming from but that's a technical issue that will probably be solved in time.
It's also really not a black and white; sure maybe you can see it isn't perfect but you'd still prefer it to content where you know no one was actually harmed.
Despite what reputation people like that have (due to the simple fact of how reporting works), most are harmless like me and you and don't actually want to see innocent people suffer and would never act on their desires. So having a safe and harmless outlet might help.
I see where you’re coming from but that’s a technical issue that will probably be solved in time.
You cannot create information from nothing.
So having a safe and harmless outlet might help.
Psychologists/Psychiatrists are still on the fence on that one, I wouldn't be surprised if it depends on the person. And yes the external harm produced by AI images is definitely lower than that produced from actual CSAM, doubly so newly produced CSAM, but that doesn't mean that therapy, even in its current early stages, couldn't do even better.
Differently put: We may be again falling into the trap of trying to find technological solutions to societal problems (well, this is /c/technology…). Which isn't to say that we shouldn't care at all about models trained on CSAM, but that's addressing symptoms, not causes. Ultimately addressing root causes is more important: The vast majority of paedophiles are not exclusive paedophiles, often they're not even really attracted to kids at all beyond having developed a fetish, they're rapists focussing on the most vulnerable, often due to having been victims of sexual abuse themselves.
Arguably that's exactly what generative AIs do. Which is not what you meant, but yeah. I was going more for like "given current progress and advancements in how we curate datasets and whatnot, there is no reason to believe that we won't have 100% undistinguishable AI-generated pictures eventually".
We already know that you don't need to have stuff in the training dataset to have it show up meaningfully in the output.
Psychologists/Psychiatrists are still on the fence on that one, I wouldn’t be surprised if it depends on the person. And yes the external harm produced by AI images is definitely lower than that produced from actual CSAM, doubly so newly produced CSAM, but that doesn’t mean that therapy, even in its current early stages, couldn’t do even better.
100% agree there. What I would like to see is more research, but that's currently kinda impossible with CSAM being as criminalized as it is. Which is kinda sad.
Therapy seems to work on most help-seeking people (and there are studies proving that), so this should be a last ditch effort.
The rest of your post I don't agree with. It isn't really (definitely not exclusively) a societal problem - some people's brains are simply wired in a way that's just bad and there isn't much you can do with it, and either these people suffer by living with it, or they cause harm to others because of it. Both is bad.
The vast majority of paedophiles are not exclusive paedophiles, often they’re not even really attracted to kids at all beyond having developed a fetish, they’re rapists focussing on the most vulnerable, often due to having been victims of sexual abuse themselves.
Do you have any statistics proving this? It's exactly the bias that already makes non-acting pedophiles unlikely to seek help. Obviously these kinds of people are the ones you hear most about, but I wouldn't be so sure that they're the majority (even if they're most of the problem).
My point is that if you take it as people who need help and actually manage to provide it, you should be able to get the number of abuse down overall except for the people who truly can't be helped. And it really doesn't matter much how you provide that help, even if it's morally questionable like using artificially generated CSAM.
A whole lot of weird stuff can be created by bashing things together with AI. The beauty of AI is after all that you can "edit" with high level concepts, not just raw pixels.
That's not concept mixing, also, it's not proper origami (paper doesn't fold like that). The AI knows "realistic swan" and "origami swan", meaning it has a gradient from "realistic" to "origami", crucially: Not changing the subject, only the style. It also knows "realistic human", now follow the gradient down to "origami human" and there you are. It's the same capability that lets it draw a realistic mickey mouse.
It having understanding of two different subjects, say, "swan" and "human", however, doesn't mean that it has a gradient between the two, much less a usable one. It might be able to match up the legs and blend that a bit because the anatomy somehow matches, and well a beak is a protrusion and it might try to match it with the nose. Wings and arms? Well it has probably seen pictures of angels, and now we're nowhere close to a proper chimera. There's a model specialised on chimeras (gods is that ponycat cute) but when you flick through the examples you'll see that it's quite limited if you don't happen to get lucky: You often get properties of both chimera ingredients but they're not connected in any reasonable way. Which is different from the behaviour of base sdxl, which is way more prone to bail out and put the ingredients next to each other. If you want it to blend things reliably you'll have to train a specialised model using appropriate input data, like e.g. this one.
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.
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.
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.
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?
You are already making assumptions about whether or not producing artificial CP is harmful. But in truth nobody knows. And studies have shown that media indeed does influence us. It's quite naive to assume that somehow just porn doesn't.
Artificial or not, this isn't really a new idea. A similar argument can be made for existing CSAM and providing it under controlled conditions.
And yeah, "nobody knows", in huge part because doing such a study would be highly illegal under current CSAM laws in most parts of the world. So, paradoxically, you can't even legally study how to help those people, even if they actively want to be helped and want to help you do research on it.
Edit: Also, I'm not really making any assumptions; I literally said "there is an argument to be made". I'm not making that argument because I don't actually know enough. Just saying that it's an option that should be explored.
existing CSAM and providing it under controlled conditions
This would go directly against the needs of the victims.
I was able to find an organisation which helps pedophiles and also conducts anonymous surveys. The pedophiles themselves reported they feel addicted to CSAM, most have come first in contact when they were minors themselves and nearly half want to seek contact to children after watching CSAM.
The model being able to generate something convincingly means it has seen equivalent examples, at least of parts of it in large enough quantity. That in itself means the model can't exist in an ethical way.
I'm not sure that has to be true. Like you can ask an AI to give you a picture of a sailboat on the moon, while it has not ever seen a sailboat on the moon.
It could be trained on photos that are not pornografic containing kids and images that are pornografic containing adults.
you can ask an AI to give you a picture of a sailboat on the moon
Yes, correct. I'll try to explain why that comparison isn't entirely correct in this case and why my point stands: If you ask the model to draw an image of a sailboat on the moon it will take its context definition of "on the moon" and will likely end up selecting imagery of moon landscapes and will then put a sailboat in there. That sailboat will likely be assembled from frontal or sideviews of sailboats it has seen and will contain typical elements like a small bow pointing up and a keel line down the middle and some planks or a fibreglass-like structure to fill the are in between, depending on the style of things it has seen in the context of "lots of sailboat in this training picture".
If the model has never seen the underside of a sailboat it will likely reduce to "boat" and start to put a freightship or containership-type of bow and keel there, it probably has seen imagery of those in drydocks - the output wouldn't look convincing to you as a viewer. In order to create a convincing sailboat in your example, the model needs a good idea what a sailboat looks like under the waterline. Which means, it has seen enough of that. Whithout further elaborating, I am sure you can understand how this implies massive ethical problems with generating a model for content that contains exploitative and abusive elements.
Do you think people that are gay are mentally ill? Do you think those people choose specifically to be attracted to people from the same sex? A lot of the same things can de said about people that are attracted to kids.
I'm not trying to say we should in any shape or form tolerate child abuse. But it's important that we recognize that there are people like this and they didn't choose to be that way. People have no problem to talk about punishment, but don't like to also accept that they are also victims in a way.
Perhaps the most serious accusation against pornography is that it incites sexual aggression. But not only do rape statistics suggest otherwise, some experts believe the consumption of pornography may actually reduce the desire to rape by offering a safe, private outlet for deviant sexual desires.
“Rates of rapes and sexual assault in the U.S. are at their lowest levels since the 1960s,” says Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The same goes for other countries: as access to pornography grew in once restrictive Japan, China and Denmark in the past 40 years, rape statistics plummeted. Within the U.S., the states with the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and therefore the least access to Internet pornography—experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the states with the most access experienced a 27 percent drop in the number of reported rapes, according to a paper published in 2006 by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University.
Not saying it is impossible, but the simple fact that internet exists or not is absolutely not indicative of porn having a positive or negative effect. It is a pretty weak article to use as evidence against what I am saying when it states clearly that these are only associations and correlations and essentially guesswork.
A "weird fetish" is, quite literally a paraphilia, just like pedophilia. We only care about the latter because it has the potential to hurt people if acted upon. There's no difference, medically speaking.
A lot of the comments in here seem a little bit too sympathetic.
When you want to solve an issue you need to understand the people having it and have some compassion, which tends to include stuff like defending people who didn't actually do anything harmful from being grouped with the kind who do act on their urges.
Humans also tend to possess an abusive tendency, where, once they can justify labeling somebody as "bad" they can justify being cruel to them. I see people doing it all the time.
I guess it depends on what pedophilia is in the end of how it's developed.
If it's more like a sexual preference then it's probably there already when someone is born and not changeable, but if it's more like a fetish then those are (afaik) related to experiences and exposures while growing up and actually can change and develop over time - and in that case it could be really dangerous to have that kind of material floating around freely.
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
AI needs training data.
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Images, yes, but mixing concepts is a mixed bag. Just because the model can draw, say, human faces and dog faces doesn't mean it has the understanding necessary to blend those concepts. Without employing specialised models (and yes of course the furries have been busy) the best you'll get is facepaint. The pope at a beach bar doesn't even come close to exercising that kind of capability: The pope is still the pope and the beach bar is still the beach bar, and a person is still sitting there slurping a caipirinha.
I mean if you train a model on porn with adult actors and on regular photos with children, it shouldn't be hard to generate the combination.
You probably wouldn't even need any fancy training data but if you really wanted you could pick adult actors that look young or in other ways similar to the children to help the process.
Knowing what a nude adult looks like doesn't mean that the model knows what a nude child looks like. I'm quite sure it's easy to generate disturbing images like that, but actual paedophiles I think won't be satisfied with child faces on small adult bodies.
Ordinary deepfakes actually have a very similar problem: Sure you can take a picture of a celebrity and tell the AI to undress them – but it won't be their actual body. The AI is going to be able to approximate their overall build but it's going to be a generic adult body, not the celebrity's body. Or, differently put, AI models aren't any better at undressing people with their eyes than teenagers.
I see where you're coming from but that's a technical issue that will probably be solved in time.
It's also really not a black and white; sure maybe you can see it isn't perfect but you'd still prefer it to content where you know no one was actually harmed.
Despite what reputation people like that have (due to the simple fact of how reporting works), most are harmless like me and you and don't actually want to see innocent people suffer and would never act on their desires. So having a safe and harmless outlet might help.
You cannot create information from nothing.
Psychologists/Psychiatrists are still on the fence on that one, I wouldn't be surprised if it depends on the person. And yes the external harm produced by AI images is definitely lower than that produced from actual CSAM, doubly so newly produced CSAM, but that doesn't mean that therapy, even in its current early stages, couldn't do even better.
Differently put: We may be again falling into the trap of trying to find technological solutions to societal problems (well, this is /c/technology…). Which isn't to say that we shouldn't care at all about models trained on CSAM, but that's addressing symptoms, not causes. Ultimately addressing root causes is more important: The vast majority of paedophiles are not exclusive paedophiles, often they're not even really attracted to kids at all beyond having developed a fetish, they're rapists focussing on the most vulnerable, often due to having been victims of sexual abuse themselves.
Arguably that's exactly what generative AIs do. Which is not what you meant, but yeah. I was going more for like "given current progress and advancements in how we curate datasets and whatnot, there is no reason to believe that we won't have 100% undistinguishable AI-generated pictures eventually".
We already know that you don't need to have stuff in the training dataset to have it show up meaningfully in the output.
100% agree there. What I would like to see is more research, but that's currently kinda impossible with CSAM being as criminalized as it is. Which is kinda sad.
Therapy seems to work on most help-seeking people (and there are studies proving that), so this should be a last ditch effort.
The rest of your post I don't agree with. It isn't really (definitely not exclusively) a societal problem - some people's brains are simply wired in a way that's just bad and there isn't much you can do with it, and either these people suffer by living with it, or they cause harm to others because of it. Both is bad.
Do you have any statistics proving this? It's exactly the bias that already makes non-acting pedophiles unlikely to seek help. Obviously these kinds of people are the ones you hear most about, but I wouldn't be so sure that they're the majority (even if they're most of the problem).
My point is that if you take it as people who need help and actually manage to provide it, you should be able to get the number of abuse down overall except for the people who truly can't be helped. And it really doesn't matter much how you provide that help, even if it's morally questionable like using artificially generated CSAM.
I dunno, you seen the stats on popularity of shemale porn? Pretty sure the human brain isn't that picky. It goes: "boobs check. Cock insertion check."
That's a bisexual/bicurious double-whammy, not really comparable.
I don't find men attractive at all and yet shemale porn gives me teh chubs
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I just leave this link here as counter point (somewhat NSFW):
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11un888/flamboyant_origami_fgures/
A whole lot of weird stuff can be created by bashing things together with AI. The beauty of AI is after all that you can "edit" with high level concepts, not just raw pixels.
And as for humans and dogs: https://imgur.com/a/TdXO7tz
That's not concept mixing, also, it's not proper origami (paper doesn't fold like that). The AI knows "realistic swan" and "origami swan", meaning it has a gradient from "realistic" to "origami", crucially: Not changing the subject, only the style. It also knows "realistic human", now follow the gradient down to "origami human" and there you are. It's the same capability that lets it draw a realistic mickey mouse.
It having understanding of two different subjects, say, "swan" and "human", however, doesn't mean that it has a gradient between the two, much less a usable one. It might be able to match up the legs and blend that a bit because the anatomy somehow matches, and well a beak is a protrusion and it might try to match it with the nose. Wings and arms? Well it has probably seen pictures of angels, and now we're nowhere close to a proper chimera. There's a model specialised on chimeras (gods is that ponycat cute) but when you flick through the examples you'll see that it's quite limited if you don't happen to get lucky: You often get properties of both chimera ingredients but they're not connected in any reasonable way. Which is different from the behaviour of base sdxl, which is way more prone to bail out and put the ingredients next to each other. If you want it to blend things reliably you'll have to train a specialised model using appropriate input data, like e.g. this one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
You are already making assumptions about whether or not producing artificial CP is harmful. But in truth nobody knows. And studies have shown that media indeed does influence us. It's quite naive to assume that somehow just porn doesn't.
Artificial or not, this isn't really a new idea. A similar argument can be made for existing CSAM and providing it under controlled conditions.
And yeah, "nobody knows", in huge part because doing such a study would be highly illegal under current CSAM laws in most parts of the world. So, paradoxically, you can't even legally study how to help those people, even if they actively want to be helped and want to help you do research on it.
Edit: Also, I'm not really making any assumptions; I literally said "there is an argument to be made". I'm not making that argument because I don't actually know enough. Just saying that it's an option that should be explored.
This would go directly against the needs of the victims.
I was able to find an organisation which helps pedophiles and also conducts anonymous surveys. The pedophiles themselves reported they feel addicted to CSAM, most have come first in contact when they were minors themselves and nearly half want to seek contact to children after watching CSAM.
Survey of German pedophiles
Survey of Russian pedophiles
Research about the surveys
The model being able to generate something convincingly means it has seen equivalent examples, at least of parts of it in large enough quantity. That in itself means the model can't exist in an ethical way.
I'm not sure that has to be true. Like you can ask an AI to give you a picture of a sailboat on the moon, while it has not ever seen a sailboat on the moon.
It could be trained on photos that are not pornografic containing kids and images that are pornografic containing adults.
Yes, correct. I'll try to explain why that comparison isn't entirely correct in this case and why my point stands: If you ask the model to draw an image of a sailboat on the moon it will take its context definition of "on the moon" and will likely end up selecting imagery of moon landscapes and will then put a sailboat in there. That sailboat will likely be assembled from frontal or sideviews of sailboats it has seen and will contain typical elements like a small bow pointing up and a keel line down the middle and some planks or a fibreglass-like structure to fill the are in between, depending on the style of things it has seen in the context of "lots of sailboat in this training picture".
If the model has never seen the underside of a sailboat it will likely reduce to "boat" and start to put a freightship or containership-type of bow and keel there, it probably has seen imagery of those in drydocks - the output wouldn't look convincing to you as a viewer. In order to create a convincing sailboat in your example, the model needs a good idea what a sailboat looks like under the waterline. Which means, it has seen enough of that. Whithout further elaborating, I am sure you can understand how this implies massive ethical problems with generating a model for content that contains exploitative and abusive elements.
Eh… I'm skeptical.
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It is a mental illness. If fake images result in less real-world abuse then that's a good thing.
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Do you think people that are gay are mentally ill? Do you think those people choose specifically to be attracted to people from the same sex? A lot of the same things can de said about people that are attracted to kids.
I'm not trying to say we should in any shape or form tolerate child abuse. But it's important that we recognize that there are people like this and they didn't choose to be that way. People have no problem to talk about punishment, but don't like to also accept that they are also victims in a way.
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This took me 2 seconds to google.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunny-side-of-smut/#:~:text=Perhaps the most serious accusation,outlet for deviant sexual desires.
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It's more than you've provided.
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A "weird fetish" is, quite literally a paraphilia, just like pedophilia. We only care about the latter because it has the potential to hurt people if acted upon. There's no difference, medically speaking.
When you want to solve an issue you need to understand the people having it and have some compassion, which tends to include stuff like defending people who didn't actually do anything harmful from being grouped with the kind who do act on their urges.
Humans also tend to possess an abusive tendency, where, once they can justify labeling somebody as "bad" they can justify being cruel to them. I see people doing it all the time.
It doesn't seem right to me to prosecute someone for computer generated images.
We absolutely can make pedos go away.
I guess it depends on what pedophilia is in the end of how it's developed.
If it's more like a sexual preference then it's probably there already when someone is born and not changeable, but if it's more like a fetish then those are (afaik) related to experiences and exposures while growing up and actually can change and develop over time - and in that case it could be really dangerous to have that kind of material floating around freely.