Also, who in their right mind would build, QA, or market such a soul crushing product.
Some Taboos will remain Taboos despite “hurting no one”.
I wouldn't be surprised if you knew a lot of pedophiles personally, you just don't know they are pedophiles because they never told you, don't engage in illegal activity, and are otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of society.
I think your parent is asking the question: why is it repugnant?
Is it repugnant because children were harmed in the manufacture of the images, or is it repugnant ipso facto?
And if it is repugnant ipso facto, is that worth having a strict liability crime on the books, when no people are actually being harmed (in the case of fake child porn)?
In other words, why should it be illegal to have fake porn of children, but not illegal to keep spiders as pets?
The case against filmed CP is straightforward: minors are harmed in the process. But what is being harmed in generated imagery? If nothing is harmed, what is the basis for it being immoral?
Once Pandora's Box of deep fakes is open, are we going to permit racists to generate genocidal imagery to slake their hatred for $ETHNICITY ?
I mean, as long as only fake Elbonians are dying unspeakably, it's OK, no?
Because the same people who just gotta have that stuff would never want to operationalize that ickniness, would they?
How about just "no"?
I could be mistaken but I’m pretty sure this Is currently perfectly legal in the United States.
I'm saying this sounds like folly.
Umm... yes?
Repugnant or not, it’s a lot less repugnant than the underground crime circles that exploit and traffic real live human children. The demand is there regardless of how they get it, so it’s worth at least discussing if synthetic images would result in a reduction of real live children being involved in pornography and/or being trafficked.
Lets try to put a number on it. How many children would you allow to be raped, to prevent someone from making or viewing fake child porn? Ten? A hundred? More?
A commenter linked https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h..., in case you think this scenario is unlikely.
Most every study we have shows a decrease in real sexual activity linked to an increase in available pornography. We have no reason to believe child pornography would be any different. This was of course irrelevant as we had a duty to protect real people.
Now we are in a strange situation where effectively; 'virtue signaling' maybe causing child abuse.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130111326.h...
As such, this paper does dispute the argument that porn leads to higher rates of sexual assault. It does not provide evidence for porn being an outlet that prevents crimes. The distinction is important.
You can have schizophrenia that is well controlled and work a job - or be on disability, for example.
You can have thoughts and not act on them, though. If someone realizes that their attraction is to children, yet understands that it is something that hurts them and therefore, doesn't act on it and doesn't view child porn because people are hurt in it... I'm not entirely sure they are doing anything wrong. Not only that, but I don't think we help this category of folks either.
It isn't that I agree at all, but not everyone with ill thoughts act on them. I'm not entirely convinced that fake porn is going to hurt anything. Sure, I find it absolutely disgusting, but no one asked me.
If you are going to dig into this, though, I fully suggest you go off on "barely legal teen" porn, a good amount of manga, and every image that makes young folks into sexual beings, though you are going to have issues around puberty since folks are becoming sexual beings themselves and it is generally good to have trial periods on things like clothing and makeup and hairstyles.
Some people have an OCD which makes them obsess over children but they're not interested in them per say.
Some people insert themselves as children. This could happen due to abuse and neglect in their childhood or other factors. Some people are into certain aesthetics and media like cartoons and are not so interested in actual children.
There are two proper types. Exclusive and non-exclusive.
One is the exclusive who are alien in thinking. Instead of thinking of adults as romantic or sexual partners, they're wired to think of children. Without adequate socialization, they may even think of it as harmless to do. Education is vital.
They will be very lonely and depressed throughout their lives as it is impossible for anyone to allow them to do such a thing. I can't imagine someone going their entire life without ever fantasizing or looking at some sort of porn. Even as an escape. It isn't healthy not to do so either. It would only serve to make them more frustrated and to adopt an antagonistic relationship with society.
The non-exclusive aren't just attracted to children.
Alternatively, how many layers down do you have to go of NNs training other NNs before it's ethically okay? If your answer is "infinite" then that is the ethical equivalent of homeopathy where a solution of a bunch of random chemicals is diluted to the point that there is 0% of the original left in the sold product. Interesting question.
It's all fruit of a poisoned tree.
It's an difficult ethical dilemma. How are we categorizing the harm done to victims of child pornography? Is it based on how many different people see the same image or just the number of times the images was viewed in general? Obviously the victim isn't getting some sort of electric shock every time somebody sees the image.
Do we include it additional harm if the identifying features of the child in question are unavailable? What if the victim doesn't know they were part of the training model or that there are even images of them on the Internet? Would it be ethical if training data from children in non-pornographic situations was used? What if somebody had child pornography made of them but allow their image to be used (donated?) after they were 18?
I'm not claiming to know the answers.
The incident with YouTube was a sign that some people are a little disconnected from society. They went around random videos uploaded by children posting flirtatious comments and highlighting timestamps of them in compromising positions.
You could argue them viewing the videos alone was immoral. But their conduct was just atrocious. I don't know how it got into their heads that something like that is acceptable. I really hope we could teach them a thing or two about common sense, regardless of whether viewing images is moral or immoral.
Training models is complicated. Whoever it is is going to want to have the rights to their likeness. This would be after they are of age. In theory, you may be able to teach an AI with many images how to produce a generic person.
They will never find out is a bad mindset. It is true in many cases they won't find out and they may be better off not knowing what someone is doing. But when and if they find out, it will happen in the worst possible way at the worst possible time and it will blow up really badly.
In the extreme, to produce better models, your business would eventually be incentivized to create new data... but if you limit yourself to the usage of data collected as a byproduct of stopping criminal activities, it's not clear to me what the morality case should be.
A historical example might be the nazi human experiments -- the experiments themselves were horrendous, but now that they've been done and we have the results, is it unethical to use that as the basis for further, ethical, research? That is, would it be unethical for me to read the outcomes?
It's a very complex issue. My read of the linked article is that, at a minimum, the victims whose likeness is used should consent to its use. Even given that, I'm not sure that our society would tolerate such an endeavor.
Assuming this is a course people would agree to take, would it faster to convince society to adopt a new mindset or would it be faster to create ethical alternatives?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_pornography_laws_in_Ca...
Many filters censor all of it, regardless of legality and boast 99% abuse detection rates with a low false positive rate. Some filters only the more realistic content.
Realistic content does admittedly have a problem where it may become difficult for a human to differentiate it from unlawful content. Although in that particular case, it is hoped it would end up competing with unlawful content and drive demand for it down.
People with some degree of awareness to the children harmed to produce the content will not want to contribute to it when there are other avenues which are virtually indistinguishable. It may be possible to do outreach in legal outlets to raise awareness of harms or provide resources to prevent them from committing serious crime.
Relevant:
I suppose law enforcement could use it in sting operations. but if it proliferates wouldn't it still be illegal otherwise? seems legally and morally fishy to me.
And people who play Grand Theft Auto inevitably go out and run over hookers with their car or seek out videos where such things happen in real life. Oh wait...
So it's nothing at all like playing GTA.
I've also seen studies trying to show the opposite, or trying to show that there is no causation either way, so I don't think there is anything resembling a consensus on this issue at all.
Sure. If you take a sample of people with absolutely no interest and a sample with people who do have interest you would find the sample with interest would be more likely to attack someone.
Does the consumption of CP drive the desire or does the desire lead to the consumption and subsequent unwanted behavior in some people? Is punishing people for their desires and driving them underground really helpful? All to sate our sense of disgust? Is this even compatible with due process?
Ideally, you would advance technology such as to make artificial alternatives indistinguishable from reality and produce robots. Or whatever it takes. Disgusting? Sure. But, it is better than the alternative and it preserves the high standards we set for our liberal democracy.
You keep out of other people's business and they keep out of yours. No one tells you how to live your life, so long as you don't bother them.
It probably is at least somewhat. Violent video games have also been shown to increase feelings of aggression in lab settings and in some cases even foster sexist attitudes. I mentioned this to you in another comment, but Gary Young's The Gamer's Dilemma book is a very good book-length treatment on the issue of virtual violence vs "virtual pedophilia".
Forgive me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, but are you really saying that you'd vote for a law (which, usually means prison time) for people who 'exploit' non-real children? You need to go into more detail as to your definition of exploitation, or clarify what you mean by 'real or otherwise'.
Not in the US it isn't.
It would not. Sexual crimes are not (only) about sex, they are about exercising power over a victim. Downloading real images of abuse is driven by exercising that power vicariously. If anything images like those you suggest would only fuel demand for the "real thing".
depends on the jurisdiction. at least in the us they're not illegal per se.
> U.S. law distinguishes between pornographic images of an actual minor, realistic images that are not of an actual minor, and non-realistic images such as drawings. The latter two categories are legally protected unless found to be obscene, whereas the first does not require a finding of obscenity.
States have obscenity laws that restrict sale and advertisement of this content, but possession cannot be banned by obscenity laws. Think about the mess that would be enforcing this law. You can't objectively determine the age of a fake character, unlike a real person.
It is certainly a mess, but that doesn't stop jurisdictions outside the United States from prosecuting it.
I wonder, with the rise of deep fakes and CGI, why a company hasn't come up with a business model offering professional rendered synthetic child pornography. It seems to me that there would be demand for it, and if an ethically un-encumbered product is indistinguishable from the real thing, much of the demand of child sexual abuse imagery would evaporate.