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colingauvin 6 hours ago [-]
There's a few comments (boldly) criticizing the ruling for being technically incorrect. If no child was abused, how can it be a child abuse crime?
I would counter with this: If it is technically impossible to tell the difference between AI generated images, and real ones, how could anyone ever be prosecuted for having presumptive real ones in their possession ever again? Everyone tried would simply say "AI" and that'd be that, unless there was a victim to testify, or it was a case on generation of it etc.
So AI images of this nature do have victims, just slightly less directly.
Another adjacent question: How would you feel if it was an AI generated image of a specific child. What is the precise threshold of victimhood that is necessary?
zaik 4 hours ago [-]
This argument seems to boil down to "If we cannot tell the difference between an innocent and a guilty person, we must find everybody guilty".
retromagik 4 hours ago [-]
I disagree. If it's impossible to tell the difference, people WILL start distributing collections of real and artificial child pornography combined while labeling it as 100% artificial. Most public websites will make both against the terms of service, but it makes it much harder for victims to get support from law enforcement to take down genuine CSAM.
Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
shlant 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder how people (like yourself) would would feel about "un-watermarked AI-generated CSAM is illegal, but watermarked is not". Or is is your first argument irrelevant and the second one is what actually matters to you?
> Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
I'm not sure. Is the intuition that it will lead to more? because I think there are data-based arguments to the contrary.
retromagik 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not convinced you can stop someone from taking real CSAM, and recreating it with AI to get a copy with a watermark.
Also, assuming your correct and someday we have some watermarked attested "victimless" child pornography. I'd love to hear your best "data-based" argument that shows that predators will be satiated by pictures they have no doubt about being fake. It's laughable.
Should we allow victims of child pornography to endorse the distribution of images of themselves as a child once they are an adult too since at that point, each additional viewer doesn't generate an additional victim?
atoav 4 hours ago [-]
No. What it means is different. Let's use fire as an example. There is good reason for the fire brigade to come with full force every time a significant amount of smoke emerges from a high rise building. Meaning banning people from simulating a fire with the use of fog grenades and smoke machines without having clear agreement with the fire brigade is totally reasonable. It is in all our interest that the fire brigade comes when smoke is seen.
Every convincingly real CSAM encountered online has to be treated as potentially being the real thing. Even material with clear AI markers needs to be treated as such since that could be an attempt to obfuscate real material. Allowing AI generated CSAM while banning real material seems to be impossible to enforce and would only further a normalization of encountering CSAM and pedophilia.
If you catch a pedophile and they have actual CSAM on their machines, you also do not have to litigate which ones are real and which ones are fake. If fake ones are legal the burden of proof is now shifted as the pedophile can easily argue that pic that contains documented abuse of your daughter is in fact just AI generated.
Society is always about weighing rights against each other. And while "protect the children" has become the hypocritical rallying cry of politicians that want to introduce a surveillance state, in this case I would happily argue for keeping a strong stance e en as someone who has repeatedly argued against surveillance. Pedophilia is shunned in most societies for a reason and in my opinion it should remain so. If people have that unfortunate sexual urge, society does not profit from safely enabling it while producing many potential risks for actual victims and a lot of work for those policing it.
Now it is known that many pedophiles never touch a child. Normalizing pedophilia as a society would likely change that. Allowing CSAM if it is AI generated (from real training material btw.!) may change that. And this is not a thing we need.
Instead society should normalize it for non-acting pedophiles to seek therapeutic treatment.
johnnienaked 3 hours ago [-]
You're just making more criminals this way. It's the same as saying air rifles that are indistinguishable from fully automatic weapons should be treated as fully automatic weapons.
No they shouldn't?
retromagik 3 hours ago [-]
I hate to extend a bad analogy, but If you rob a convenience store with an airsoft rifle that is visually indistinguishable from a real gun, you will be charged with armed robbery.
People are already using AI to generate porn of real minors, so you don't have to get hypothetical to see how the technology is used to abuse children. If it's easy for any predator to do this, then it's not hard to imagine that they will blackmail minors by threatening to release AI nudes to their friends and family unless they send them real CSAM.
johnnienaked 20 seconds ago [-]
You've combined two crimes into one. Robbing a bank with anything is armed robbery. My analogy is apt.
If I get pulled over with an airsoft identical to an AK47 and charged with trafficking illegal firearms, I think you will agree that I shouldn't be. It's not an AK47, it's an airsoft.
Similarly, calling AI generated imagery CSAM might be a pure category error. There is no C being SA, so it's not CSAM by definition.
Now if that imagery came about because real CSAM material was in the training data, that's a different story. You now have a derivative work based on a real crime with real victims. But we'd also have some very real and important questions to be asking the model trainers.
wvbdmp 11 minutes ago [-]
A more correct analogy would be robbing a store IRL vs. in a video game. Or murdering someone vs. directing a movie about a murder.
If you generate defamatory AI pics of actual people, there are already laws against that, and the CSAM aspect can be exacerbating.
Otherwise, you should be free to jerk it to whatever your heart desires, which seems to be the real crux of the matter.
johnnienaked 3 hours ago [-]
That's quite a mental pretzel you've worked your way into. While we're at it let's just assume everyone is guilty that way we catch all the criminals
regenschutz 6 hours ago [-]
I'm seeing some other comments talking about how no one is harmed by AI CSAM. Fundamentally, I reckon AI CSAM is the same as Lolicon, which is illegal here in Sweden. I believe the same applies to Denmark, though I am by no means knowledged about Danish law.
AI is not something new in this space, it just means that a lot more grotesque fictional CSAM can be produced. It has been possible to create realistic-looking-but-fictional CSAM since Photoshop came out (and then some).
shlant 3 hours ago [-]
when I read your first sentence, I was expecting what followed it to refute that argument but it didn't. Or are you saying lolicon does harm someone?
belviewreview 4 hours ago [-]
Outlawing AI CSAM is basically outlawing people from having certain types of sexual thoughts and feeling. In the case of materials that produce pedophilic sexual thoughts and feelings, I think it is legitimate to outlaw them.
johnnienaked 3 hours ago [-]
Materials don't "produce" sexual thoughts and feelings, people experience those things. Sexual thoughts and feelings are also not a crime (yet).
belviewreview 2 hours ago [-]
Certain materials are designed to produce sexual feelings. And I am not saying that having the thoughts is or should be a crime, though I think that having them is morally wrong.
Outlawing materials that are designed to produce pedophilic thoughts and consistently do so for some people is a way for society to say that such thoughts are wrong. I think part of being a responsible human being is controlling ones own thoughts to some ways.
johnnienaked 5 minutes ago [-]
Some materials aren't designed thus yet produce sexual feelings anyway. Some materials produced to generate sexual feelings produce disgust instead. This reasoning is why we have always seriously questioned the banning of anything.
DiabloD3 7 hours ago [-]
I, too, have an issue with this ruling.
CSAM laws exist to punish abusers, and seek justice for the abused. Not one or the other, but both. The law cannot function without the victims, else you're just attacking people for what amounts to thought crimes.
I find CSAM and pedophiles disgusting, and I imagine 100% of HN users agree with me on this, but this just opens the door for world governments to a) claim LLM output is real and factual (!), but b) minimizes the danger to victims and equates victimhood to being a fictional character.
I'm not Danish and I'm hoping this is just some Dane-specific weird quirk of their law, but from what I can see, this is a politically-biased ruling to "think of the children".
retromagik 2 hours ago [-]
Should we allow victims of child pornography to endorse the distribution of images of themselves as a child once they are an adult too since at that point, each additional viewer doesn't generate an additional victim? No, because it encouraged future abuse.
DiabloD3 27 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately that gets into a weird spot. I, too, believe that it should be disallowed for that reason, but the opposite end of that is prosecuting teenagers for distributing photos of themselves to other teenagers (their same-age peers)... which has unfortunately occurred due to improper application of the law.
The law must recognize the right to self-determinism and bodily autonomy, and you can't inherently be both the victim and the abuser. There is no one size fits all law, and many governments are trying to act like they have one.
thegCanary 7 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "Dutch"? Do you mean "Danish" as in "Denmark"?
tick_tock_tick 8 hours ago [-]
Shit like this is why I can't take any of the "freedom indexes" seriously. Europe is constantly ranked highly but then you get shit like oh you're fake picture looks a little too real jail.
gelly321 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe you're just not considering the nuance of the situation. You don't have to take them seriously, but you also don't have to minimize it by misrepresenting words no one said.
Yeah those guys are so not free because they ban CP, a thing you think should be allowed as long as it's not real. Do you see how easy it is to make a bad argument?
tick_tock_tick 2 hours ago [-]
> Do you see how easy it is to make a bad argument?
Nope, I just see someone making bullshit excuses.
delusional 14 hours ago [-]
The court was asked to annul the previous judgment since the defendant did not think that the pictures in question were CSAM, since the children depicted were fictional. The court found the pictures similar to photography and therefore rejected the appeal.
In my mind, this is pretty substantial technology news, at least in Denmark, since it rejects the notion that AI generated pictures are substantially different from other pictures, and therefore has to abide by the same laws.
I will be interested in seeing if anybody charges the big AI providers for producing these photos.
andsoitis 13 hours ago [-]
A fictional, generated image seems quite different to me than a photo of a real thing that exists.
So I think one has to find other logic to contain this crap.
delusional 13 hours ago [-]
I might to you. They are not different as they relate to CSAM as a matter of Danish law.
andsoitis 13 hours ago [-]
I recognize that. I think my point is one about internal consistency of a legal framework.
For instance, what if we're NOT talking about CSAM, are generated images ALSO considered equivalent to photos of real things in other domains? Or is CSAM a special carve out and based on what principles? Legal frameworks are stronger when they limit arbitrary rules.
(to be clear, there might be a good logic argument, e.g. it isn't about protecting children, it is about protecting adults - so it doesn't matter how the image came into being).
altairprime 9 hours ago [-]
The generalization proposed is invalid. Most other photographic domains do not rise to the level of censure levied at CSAM, for social and cultural reasons. Generalizing a CSAM-context outcome to non-CSAM contexts would be inappropriate, as there is no causal relationship between outcomes on either side of that chasm. One must instead judge if actions taken to prevent CSAM will present undue harms in non-CSAM contexts. This is the ‘carve-out’ you consider the existence of, and its boundaries are as much defined by each culture as they are by each legal system.
So, then: What specific and immediate — not potential, but actual — harms does this CSAM-context decision impose on non-CSAM contexts?
At a glance, I don’t see any such harms imposed. One could perhaps argue that AI must take more care now, and that this is a harm; plausible enough, but is that an undue harm? Not likely: the cultural and legal hostility to crossing from non-CSAM contexts into CSAM-context has no reason to yield to the AI operations difficulties imposed by restricting generation of CSAM-context materials.
NetMageSCW 7 hours ago [-]
What if I generated a picture of you strangling your mysteriously missing mother-in-law?
altairprime 5 hours ago [-]
> What if I generated a picture of you strangling your mysteriously missing mother-in-law?
That’s neither a CSAM-context nor a CSAM-adjacent question as presented, and so is ineligible for the CSAM-context “carve-out” discussions of this post and thread.
However, your question is a boringly incompetent attempt to inflame my emotions in order to trigger illogical responses meant to weaken the impact of my dissection and analysis of this discussion — a particularly ineffective strategy against this high-functioning sociopath. Please don’t use conversational warfare tactics on HN.
johnnienaked 3 hours ago [-]
It's actually a good point though. If CSAM generated AI images are a crime even when there is no victim, then so are AI generated murder images.
altairprime 2 hours ago [-]
No: CSAM and murder are not genericizable equivalents in both directions across the chasm of contexts. An outcome for non-CSAM law is assumed applicable to CSAM law; an outcome for CSAM law is not assumed applicable to non-CSAM law. Yes, some decisions can cross from CSAM to non-CSAM, but the process is much more fraught, uncertain, and subjective: which is to say, ‘uncodable’ in engineering terms, rather than simply being a matter of having a footnote citation of existing ‘case law’ as it is when applying non-CSAM law to CSAM contexts. Generally modern societies consider this discontinuity to be ‘fair’ as they tend to view the population of children as deserving of unusual, context-specific protections — though co sidering how regressive the marriage and child labor laws of the southeastern United States are, I can certainly understand that this may come as a surprise to some! — and they tend to reach that judgment in this modern era regardless of well-constructed logical arguments claiming equivalence only once the social and cultural CSAM context is disregarded in their framing.
The argument that ‘the illegality of AI-generated CSAM would therefore apply to all AI-generated illegality and thus is undue harm upon non-CSAM contexts’ is constructed on the basis that ‘A therefore B’ implies ‘B therefore A’, which is untrue here as detailed above. If you have a better argument in defense of the right to generate CSAM, I recommend a refresher on obscenity laws, how they vary per country, and why they cannot be reduced so simply to ‘CSAM, therefore non-CSAM’ before presenting it; that’s not how it works, no matter how unpalatable or displeasing the one-way discontinuities of CSAM law may be. It’s also worth considering why Apple would both support individual freedoms and privacies while also refusing to deliver the overreach of privacy-destroying CSAM scanning that they at one point had announced last year; that is a very concrete example of undue harm to non-CSAM contexts, and the quality of this discussion would greatly benefit from familiarity in depth with the topic.
asgeesg 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cloudie78 7 hours ago [-]
Spoken like a true engineer. Law is very inconsistent and illogical. Otherwise we’d have “Law Engineers” instead of Lawyers.
dgently7 2 hours ago [-]
funny, i always thought of lawyers very much like engineers.
just their "source code" is legaleese.
lots of overlapping concepts even... most contracts have a section where they define all the terms, like defining variables/types. there are clauses and such that guard against specific outcomes, like uhh guard clauses i guess....
even numbered sections like functions to reuse langage.
imean... they even call laws "codes" in places
the one thing that makes it very different is just that they are all stuck with a codebase that has been worked on for 500+ years and its very very hard to actually refactor anything.
also sometimes you dont know if the code will work or what it actually does until its run through the compiler to be executed (courts)
so yea engineers but for a different kind of system.
delusional 8 hours ago [-]
The relevant danish law and procedural texts state an intention to align with the UNCRC (Rights of the child), danish law therefore doesn't contain a substantive claim for why fictive (and therefore also generated) images of CSAM should be equated to non-fictive CSAM.
The answer to if it generalizes is, as with all new law, that we just don't know. In this case, the procedural for the passing of the last amendment to the relevant section includes the specific point that fictive CSAM should be included. It seems doubtful that other such procedurals would contain the same language. That doesn't rule out that this case is used as a basis for claiming that AI generated images should be treated similarly to real photographs when the two are indistinguishable.
crassglassass 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
DiabloD3 7 hours ago [-]
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Also your account is 10 hours old, hows the Russian datacenters this time of year?
I would counter with this: If it is technically impossible to tell the difference between AI generated images, and real ones, how could anyone ever be prosecuted for having presumptive real ones in their possession ever again? Everyone tried would simply say "AI" and that'd be that, unless there was a victim to testify, or it was a case on generation of it etc.
So AI images of this nature do have victims, just slightly less directly.
Another adjacent question: How would you feel if it was an AI generated image of a specific child. What is the precise threshold of victimhood that is necessary?
Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
> Also, now that it's legal to own and consume content featuring realistic depictions of sexualized children, do you think that will lead to fewer or more children getting abused?
I'm not sure. Is the intuition that it will lead to more? because I think there are data-based arguments to the contrary.
Should we allow victims of child pornography to endorse the distribution of images of themselves as a child once they are an adult too since at that point, each additional viewer doesn't generate an additional victim?
Every convincingly real CSAM encountered online has to be treated as potentially being the real thing. Even material with clear AI markers needs to be treated as such since that could be an attempt to obfuscate real material. Allowing AI generated CSAM while banning real material seems to be impossible to enforce and would only further a normalization of encountering CSAM and pedophilia.
If you catch a pedophile and they have actual CSAM on their machines, you also do not have to litigate which ones are real and which ones are fake. If fake ones are legal the burden of proof is now shifted as the pedophile can easily argue that pic that contains documented abuse of your daughter is in fact just AI generated.
Society is always about weighing rights against each other. And while "protect the children" has become the hypocritical rallying cry of politicians that want to introduce a surveillance state, in this case I would happily argue for keeping a strong stance e en as someone who has repeatedly argued against surveillance. Pedophilia is shunned in most societies for a reason and in my opinion it should remain so. If people have that unfortunate sexual urge, society does not profit from safely enabling it while producing many potential risks for actual victims and a lot of work for those policing it.
Now it is known that many pedophiles never touch a child. Normalizing pedophilia as a society would likely change that. Allowing CSAM if it is AI generated (from real training material btw.!) may change that. And this is not a thing we need.
Instead society should normalize it for non-acting pedophiles to seek therapeutic treatment.
No they shouldn't?
People are already using AI to generate porn of real minors, so you don't have to get hypothetical to see how the technology is used to abuse children. If it's easy for any predator to do this, then it's not hard to imagine that they will blackmail minors by threatening to release AI nudes to their friends and family unless they send them real CSAM.
If I get pulled over with an airsoft identical to an AK47 and charged with trafficking illegal firearms, I think you will agree that I shouldn't be. It's not an AK47, it's an airsoft.
Similarly, calling AI generated imagery CSAM might be a pure category error. There is no C being SA, so it's not CSAM by definition.
Now if that imagery came about because real CSAM material was in the training data, that's a different story. You now have a derivative work based on a real crime with real victims. But we'd also have some very real and important questions to be asking the model trainers.
If you generate defamatory AI pics of actual people, there are already laws against that, and the CSAM aspect can be exacerbating.
Otherwise, you should be free to jerk it to whatever your heart desires, which seems to be the real crux of the matter.
AI is not something new in this space, it just means that a lot more grotesque fictional CSAM can be produced. It has been possible to create realistic-looking-but-fictional CSAM since Photoshop came out (and then some).
Outlawing materials that are designed to produce pedophilic thoughts and consistently do so for some people is a way for society to say that such thoughts are wrong. I think part of being a responsible human being is controlling ones own thoughts to some ways.
CSAM laws exist to punish abusers, and seek justice for the abused. Not one or the other, but both. The law cannot function without the victims, else you're just attacking people for what amounts to thought crimes.
I find CSAM and pedophiles disgusting, and I imagine 100% of HN users agree with me on this, but this just opens the door for world governments to a) claim LLM output is real and factual (!), but b) minimizes the danger to victims and equates victimhood to being a fictional character.
I'm not Danish and I'm hoping this is just some Dane-specific weird quirk of their law, but from what I can see, this is a politically-biased ruling to "think of the children".
The law must recognize the right to self-determinism and bodily autonomy, and you can't inherently be both the victim and the abuser. There is no one size fits all law, and many governments are trying to act like they have one.
Yeah those guys are so not free because they ban CP, a thing you think should be allowed as long as it's not real. Do you see how easy it is to make a bad argument?
Nope, I just see someone making bullshit excuses.
In my mind, this is pretty substantial technology news, at least in Denmark, since it rejects the notion that AI generated pictures are substantially different from other pictures, and therefore has to abide by the same laws.
I will be interested in seeing if anybody charges the big AI providers for producing these photos.
So I think one has to find other logic to contain this crap.
For instance, what if we're NOT talking about CSAM, are generated images ALSO considered equivalent to photos of real things in other domains? Or is CSAM a special carve out and based on what principles? Legal frameworks are stronger when they limit arbitrary rules.
(to be clear, there might be a good logic argument, e.g. it isn't about protecting children, it is about protecting adults - so it doesn't matter how the image came into being).
So, then: What specific and immediate — not potential, but actual — harms does this CSAM-context decision impose on non-CSAM contexts?
At a glance, I don’t see any such harms imposed. One could perhaps argue that AI must take more care now, and that this is a harm; plausible enough, but is that an undue harm? Not likely: the cultural and legal hostility to crossing from non-CSAM contexts into CSAM-context has no reason to yield to the AI operations difficulties imposed by restricting generation of CSAM-context materials.
That’s neither a CSAM-context nor a CSAM-adjacent question as presented, and so is ineligible for the CSAM-context “carve-out” discussions of this post and thread.
However, your question is a boringly incompetent attempt to inflame my emotions in order to trigger illogical responses meant to weaken the impact of my dissection and analysis of this discussion — a particularly ineffective strategy against this high-functioning sociopath. Please don’t use conversational warfare tactics on HN.
The argument that ‘the illegality of AI-generated CSAM would therefore apply to all AI-generated illegality and thus is undue harm upon non-CSAM contexts’ is constructed on the basis that ‘A therefore B’ implies ‘B therefore A’, which is untrue here as detailed above. If you have a better argument in defense of the right to generate CSAM, I recommend a refresher on obscenity laws, how they vary per country, and why they cannot be reduced so simply to ‘CSAM, therefore non-CSAM’ before presenting it; that’s not how it works, no matter how unpalatable or displeasing the one-way discontinuities of CSAM law may be. It’s also worth considering why Apple would both support individual freedoms and privacies while also refusing to deliver the overreach of privacy-destroying CSAM scanning that they at one point had announced last year; that is a very concrete example of undue harm to non-CSAM contexts, and the quality of this discussion would greatly benefit from familiarity in depth with the topic.
just their "source code" is legaleese.
lots of overlapping concepts even... most contracts have a section where they define all the terms, like defining variables/types. there are clauses and such that guard against specific outcomes, like uhh guard clauses i guess....
even numbered sections like functions to reuse langage.
imean... they even call laws "codes" in places
the one thing that makes it very different is just that they are all stuck with a codebase that has been worked on for 500+ years and its very very hard to actually refactor anything.
also sometimes you dont know if the code will work or what it actually does until its run through the compiler to be executed (courts)
so yea engineers but for a different kind of system.
The answer to if it generalizes is, as with all new law, that we just don't know. In this case, the procedural for the passing of the last amendment to the relevant section includes the specific point that fictive CSAM should be included. It seems doubtful that other such procedurals would contain the same language. That doesn't rule out that this case is used as a basis for claiming that AI generated images should be treated similarly to real photographs when the two are indistinguishable.
Also your account is 10 hours old, hows the Russian datacenters this time of year?