Writing down 1’s and 0’s in certain permutations, is ‘evil’ and ‘should be illegal’?

There’s also a limit to going too far in connecting abstractions.

> Writing down 1’s and 0’s in certain permutations, is ‘evil’ and ‘should be illegal?

I think the parent was making the point that creating and distributing simulated child pornography should be. The medium that is used to reproduce the image is irrelevant. Real digital images are also made of 1s and 0s.

True, but ‘creating and distributing’ some physical paper or pdf filled with 1 and 0, is the actual action. Just blank white rectangles with lots of lines and ovals on it, being shuffled around.

Even in the extreme case, where it really does contain images in binary format, there is only the latent potential of that being transformed into something objectionable, several steps removed.

If this was the accepted norm everywhere, then practically every adult in the US would be guilty of some latent potential crime, after several degrees of separation.

e.g. even though lunatics use knives in mass stabbing sprees, we don’t assign blame to those selling knives or knife making equipment in stores where the lunatic happened to have gone shopping.

I don't follow the point you're trying to make. We are talking about the output of an image generation model, right?

If we are talking about a physical book containing 1s and 0s that represent CSAM, I'd ask how you encoded the image to get the binary representation...

That is the point, once it’s been transformed into 1’s and 0’s and distributed for the first time, it’s all random intermediaries handling it.

Intermediaries who likely cannot recognize it and won’t think twice about reproducing it, even if later on it does get transformed back.

What the original impetus for creating and distributing it is irrelevant to anyone subsequently encountering it.

To continue the knife analogy, even if the knife factory was also in fact owned by some maniac, the salespersons in the retail stores still not assigned blame even if they promote the knives.

The salespersons are just random middle men who couldn’t possibly have been expected to personally investigate the actual background or provenance behind what they’re handling.

Sorry, you lost me. If the knives were illegal, the salespeople would held responsible. We aren't going to agree, no matter how clever the analogy, so I'll leave you here.

Huh? Some types of knives are illegal in certain jurisdictions… and I haven’t heard of anyone blaming them for not opening and verifying every knife box that passes through.

As much as i'm leery of connecting abstractions for the sake of bad laws, your example is a bit reductionist. After all, the people who created things like Stuxnet (ironically, a government-created worm) were really just assembling code characters in a certain interesting way.

You could even stretch the idea further to say that someone making a bomb is merely mixing certain perfectly legal chemicals just so...

When you're talking about "evil" and percentages of life spent in jail, I'm going to ask for a more direct causal link to harm than just "demonstration is trivial and left to the reader".

1s and 0s can be sending bitcoin to a hit man to kill your wife. In this case, link to harm is indeed obvious, and evil and years in jail are justified. Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?

> When you're talking about "evil" and percentages of life spent in jail, I'm going to ask for a more direct causal link to harm than just "demonstration is trivial and left to the reader.

I don't know if theres a correlation between evil and jailtime. The debate around the severity of punishment is different than the debate about whether or not something should be illegal. I do think my (US) justice system is very flawed, especially around sentencing.

> Can you argue for something similar for generated CP? And also discount the ick factor?

I can take a stab at it. Simulated CSAM :

* if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.

* has the potential to normalize the distribution of CSAM due to #1

* has the potential to normalize the consumption of CSAM.

To address the comments being birthed around unproven causal relationships- yeah I know. The parent asked for arguments. Besides, a study into this doesn't seem very ethical or possible.

I am not able to discount the "ick factor", but I'll try to make a counterpoint.

All of the arguments I can think of to the contrary center around free speech, false positives and weaponization. That's where I think the challenges are and where subjectivity can cause issues. Without a real person, it's difficult to assign a simulated age unless a prompt is captured or other context. Otherwise it becomes the job of a person or other 'AI' to guess the simulated age of the image.

> if realistic, can make identifying real CSAM and the associated victims more difficult. This could redirect resources dedicated to stopping harm against victims.

Yes, but at the same time it'll greatly devaluate the real CSAM. It'll be like flooding the black market of perfect copies of rhinoceros horns. People won't have any economic incentive to create real CSAM.

Perhaps. I can't speak to the motivation of these folks, but I suspect it's more than just sending the pictures for them. Also, even if the market is flooded, I imagine we'd still want people looking for victims so it doesn't really help.

In the case of diffusion models? Yes - they would necessarily need abuse images to train and that causes real harm to kids.

Stop being such a coomer dildo

We've banned this account. Whatever you're arguing for or against (and I'm not tracking it), you can't attack another user this way on this site.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Child porn consumption is a product of an unhealthy addiction. Addicts tend to need more and more extreme fixes to feed upon. In the case of drugs, that generally leads to self harm. In the case of child porn, a child ever more likely is to be harmed.

Something can only be evil when it harms or is going to harm somebody.

No matter how abhorrent a picture is it can not harm anybody by merely existing. Harm can (or may not) only be inflicted to others during its production or with its demonstration.

Banning possession of pictures produced without participation of any living person other than the viewer makes no sense.

Banning possession of child abuse pictures used to make sense because possessing implied buying and buying incentivized production which depended on actual child abuse. Nowadays nobody has to be abused and I'm totally fine with weirdos using whatever pictures their sick imagination may want as long as this keeps them satisfied enough to be able to keep their wicked desires secret from every living person. I don't want the police to bust such people as long as they don't actually harm anybody and don't pay anybody to do the harm. No crime without an actual victim is worth ruining anybody's life, whatever kind of freak they are.

Child porn is a unique case. Its presence normalizes child sex in the mind of its consumers, and feeds an addiction that greatly increases the likelihood of an actual action taken against a child.

It's the same logic most countries use to ban possession of firearms. Their presence greatly increases the risk of lethal violence and suicide, despite being harmless to people when used correctly at the range or for hunting. The lack of need for firearms weighed against the harm they cause to others makes it a hard sell for remaining legal.

Firearms may get a pass because they have real utility in self defense, but there are no positive benefits to having an endless stream of fake child abuse.

I get your point and won't hurry to object. You maybe right. But I wouldn't hurry to agree either. You may be wrong as well. This is questionable. For example many people enjoy bloody violent games and movies (I specifically did during my teen years, when I actually wasn't formally allowed by the ESRB ratings) but absolutely don't want and never wanted anything like that to happen in the real life. Perhaps a middle way should be chosen - still ban all, incl. AI generated child abuse content - don't really normalize it, but don't put anybody in prison for having artificial pictures on their PCs.

Probably in the exact same capacity as violent media normalises murder, or rough porn normalises sexual assault. Or drug use in media normalises… drug use.