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It's interesting your bring this up. Not long ago I was having basically this exact same discussion with my brother. Baring you second point, I honestly don't know how I feel.
On the one hand - if it's strictly images for himself and it DOES dissuade seeking out real CSAM (I'm not convinced of this) then I don't really see the issue.
On the other hand - I feel like it could be a gateway to something more (your second point). Kinda like a drug, right? You need a heavier and heavier hit to keep the same high. Seems like it wouldn't be a stretch to go from AI generated imagery to actual CSAM.
But yeah, I don't know. We live in an odd time for sure.
You mean like marijuana and violent video games?
Except in the case of pornography, it's an open question if viewing it has a net increase or decrease in sexual desire.
With legal pornography, it's typically correlated with higher sexual desire. This tracks intuitively, since the existence of pornography does not typically seem to line up with a drop in people looking for romantic partners.
There's little reason to believe it works the other way around for people attracted to children.
What's unknown is if that desire is enough to outweigh the legal consequences they're aware of, or any social or ethical boundaries present.
Studies have been done, but finding people outside of the legal system who abuse children is exceptionally difficult, even before the ethical obligation to report them to the police would trash the study.
So the studies end up focusing either on people actively seeking treatment for unwanted impulses (less likely to show a correlation), or people engaged with the legal system in some capacity (more likely to show correlation).
Holy strawman, Batman! Just because someone uses the term "gateway" doesn't mean they think that games and weed are going to turn all people and frogs gay and violent.
First off, this is obviously a sticky topic. Every conversation is controversial and speculative.
Second, I don't really see a lot of legitimacy to the "gateway" concept. The vast majority of people use some variety of drug (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine), and that doesn't really reliably predict "harder" drug use. Lots of people use marijuana and that doesn't reliably predict hard drug use. Obviously, the people who use heroin and meth have probably used cocaine and ketamine, and weed before that, and alcohol/caffeine/nicotine before that, but that's not really a "gateway" pipeline so much as paying through finer and finer filters. As far as I know, the concept has fallen pretty heavily out of favor with serious researchers.
In light of that perspective, I think you have to consider the goal. Is your goal to punish people, or to reduce the number and severity of victims? Mine is the latter. Personally, I think this sort of thing peels off many more low-level offenders to low-effort outlets than it emboldens to higher-severity outlets. I think this is ultimately a mental-health problem, and zero-tolerance mandatory reporting (while well-meaning) does more harm than good.
I'd rather that those with these kinds of mental issues have 1. the tools to take the edge off in victimless ways 2. safe spaces to discuss these inclinations without fear of incarceration. I think blockading those avenues yields a net increase the number and severity of victims.
This seems like a net benefit, reducing the overall number and severity of actual victims.
Thanks for being honest and well-meaning. Sorry you're getting downvoted, we both said pretty much exactly the same thing! A difficult subject, but important to get right...