Source: washingtonpost.com 6/19/23
The revolution in artificial intelligence has sparked an explosion of disturbingly lifelike images showing child sexual exploitation, fueling concerns among child-safety investigators that they will undermine efforts to find victims and combat real-world abuse.
Generative-AI tools have set off what one analyst called a “predatory arms race” on pedophile forums because they can create within seconds realistic images of children performing sex acts, commonly known as child pornography.
Thousands of AI-generated child-sex images have been found on forums across the dark web, a layer of the internet visible only with special browsers, with some participants sharing detailed guides for how other pedophiles can make their own creations.
“Children’s images, including the content of known victims, are being repurposed for this really evil output,” said Rebecca Portnoff, the director of data science at Thorn, a nonprofit child-safety group that has seen month-over-month growth of the images’ prevalence since last fall.
“Victim identification is already a needle-in-a-haystack problem, where law enforcement is trying to find a child in harm’s way,” she said. “The ease of using these tools is a significant shift, as well as the realism. It just makes everything more of a challenge.”
That goes too far in my mind. It restricts artistic freedom. The content itself harms no one, and it doesn’t seem to me like there’s even a realistic way to enforce such a law.
I believe the goal of preventing actual sexual child abuse is worth the time and effort of law enforcement, but trying to find a real child in the world based off a picture online is not the way to do it. I think it’s going to take on the ground efforts to educate children and give them safe avenues for reporting abuse. The only thing standing in the way of this now is the prevailing methodologies that promote using the criminal justice system to solve the problem, which it won’t in most cases. For extra-familial cases, it is definitely appropriate, however, in cases where the abuse takes place within the family unit, it will drive some victims to never report, and others who do will face the destruction of their families. It’s a lose-lose situation for the victims, and that seems to still escape those who claim to be experts in this area. If intrafamilial abuse cases were diverted away from the criminal justice system and into family court where counseling, accountability, and reconciliation efforts were promoted, we would see a lot more self-disclosure and healing for victims and a lot less abuse taking place.
LE will just continue wasting valuable time and resources going after people possessing cp, and now this AI cp, as if that will stop or prevent child abuse (or crime in general) in any way. The only way to stop abuse is to stop the abusers. The internet is rampant with awful cp and sexual violence and LE can never seem to stop it at the source – how will they stop this AI production?. All they can do is a catch a few in possession, but there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) on these dark web sites seeking it out. With more and more young people with porn addictions and mental health issues, our fine registry will continue to grow.
What do these monkeys plan on doing next? Passing laws against people in possession of AI tools? Felonies? Mandatory minimums? Or will it be similar to laws against cooking up meth or crack in your kitchen. You can own the tools, but not the stuff you create. But I’m sure the law will still allow a computer geek to create an image of a child being beaten, tortured and raked through coals.😨
And what’s this obsession with NCMEC having to find the child in these cp photos out on the web? Some of those pics are 70s and 80s. The crime has already been done. In fact, if you go far back enough, it wasn’t even a crime when those pics were taken. Sometimes it’s best not to dig up dead bodies and let it be. I sure wouldn’t want these law enforcement 👮🏻♀️monkeys coming around my house telling me they found a photo on the web of my naked self 🫢as a toddler in the late 60s.
The concept of machine intelligence is hardly new. Isaac Asimov
was the first to count the term robotics. Robots are controlled by programs contained in a database. This requires human input.
Artificial Intelligence was first coined by John McCarthy (see LISP) and also requires human input. The question is should the human input to create AI be free? I’d be very curious if the current speaker of the U.S. House has a position on that point.
Obviously for John McCarthy LISP was a labor of love, thus he followed his own volition and ambition. The same can be said for those currently engaged in AI development, who in some ways have aided by SMITH V DOE03(What you, the people, can do with a database) historical precedent. AI is firmly in the realm unfettered application. So was Smith V Doe factually about the violent man? OR was it about the interests of the purveyors database driven infrastructure? ( Greatest thing since sliced bread.)
I propose this, if you can enslave a man to it without due process not much liberty at all is in the hands of the people themselves.
Old Isaac was right, humanity needs to abide by his Rules for Robots. Rule 1. Human value outweighs machine value. HV>MV~Null/. The Rehnquist Court had the opportunity to truncate the purveyors intentions but opted to abandon constitutional discipline for very presumptive societal reasons.
The images created by AI are artificial by definition.
Looks like law enforcement has a lot of work cut out for them in the future. This remains me of that guy from Orange County California they were making a big uproar about because he was getting let out of the mental institution and nobody wanted him in their city’s or in their neighborhoods,They eventually locked him back up for something stupid, But the crazy part was he never even had any real victims I guess his wife found some material in the attic of fantasies he wrote about children and images he drew by hand I never could understand how he was placed on the registry and in a mental hospital for drawing and writing out his fantasies.