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

I think people make this stuff illegal because a lot of people really hate pedophiles and anything associated with them, and logical thinking ("Does this policy actually increase or decrease the number of children abused?") and other considerations ("Will this policy be abused to suppress legitimate speech? Can you get a website you hate taken down by uploading CSAM and reporting it? Will teenagers get arrested for sexting each other? Will parents who send a photo of their child's genitals to a doctor, to diagnose a medical problem, get into trouble?") go out the window. Anyone who expresses opposition to these policies can expect to get some of that hatred directed at them, and lots of people simply don't want to deal with that, so the policies stand.

> I don't like this logic for the legality of AI images because we wouldn't allow it with non-AI images.

We absolutely would, and, in fact, this rule articulated in this ruling does.

> For example, should CSAM be legal if the person in the image and all their family is dead?

That's still actual CSAM and not obscenity that is unconnected to any actual abuse, and so the rule that already makes actual CSAM outside of the coverage of the prohibition the Supreme Court has found on criminalization of mere possession of obscene material continues to apply to it under this ruling. Non-AI imagery that would be legally situated similar to AI imagery here is, e.g., drawn imagery.

> But we don't make this stuff illegal just because of the people harmed in creation. We make it illegal because most of us don't want to live in a society that tolerates it.

That's true of most of the things that would be banned but for the protections of the First Amendment, and is not, itself, a good argument against First Amendment protection.

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??

CSAM is illegal because it creates a market for/related to human trafficking no matter how far after the fact.

Not the whole US, the Texas state government just passed a ban on virtual and non-photorealistic 'obscene' depictions of minors

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?

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.

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?

> 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...

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.

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-sk...

Yes, that's a transcription mistake on my part. Unfortunately the edit window has closed already. Sorry for the confusion.

Well, maybe. Maybe not. See "Why can't ChatGPT draw a full glass of wine?"

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.

Does that necessarily follow? Wouldn't that be prone to outputting small naked adult women, and/or naked children with boobs?

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.

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?

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.

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

While disgusting, I'm thinking that if the courts insist on allowing this, I can try and comfort myself with this thought: I don't doubt that if you find one "AI CSAM" image on someone's drive, keep digging — you'll find illegal stuff too.

Sick people will still go to jail.