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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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First off, I am sex positive, pro porn, pro sex work, and don't believe sex work should be shameful, and that there is nothing wrong about buying intimacy from a willing seller.
That said. The current state of the industry and the conditions for many professionals raises serious ethical issues. Coercion being the biggest issue.
I am torn about AI porn. On one hand it can produce porn without suffering, on the other hand it might be trained on other peoples work and take peoples jobs.
I think another major point to consider going forward is if it is problematic if people can generate all sorts of illegal stuff. If it is AI generated it is a victimless crime, so should it be illegal? I personally feel uncomfortable with the thought of several things being legal, but I can't logically argue for it being illegal without a victim.
i have no problem with ai porn assuming it's not based on any real identities, i think that should be considered identity theft or impersonation or something.
Outside of that, it's more complicated, but i don't think it's a net negative, people will still thrive in the porn industry, it's been around since it's been possible, i don't see why it wouldn't continue.
Identity theft only makes sense for businesses. I can sketch naked Johny Depp in my sketchbook and do whatever I want with it and no one can stop me. Why should an AI tool be any different if distribution is not involved?
revenge porn, simple as. Creating fake revenge porn of real people is still to some degree revenge porn, and i would argue stealing someones identity/impersonation.
To be clear, you're example is a sketch of johnny depp, i'm talking about a video of a person that resembles the likeness of another person, where the entire video is manufactured. Those are fundamentally, two different things.
Again you're talking about distribution
sort of. There are arguments that private ownership of these videos is also weird and shitty, however i think impersonation and identity theft are going to the two most broadly applicable instances of relevant law here. Otherwise i can see issues cropping up.
Other people do not have any inherent rights to your likeness, you should not simply be able to pretend to be someone else. That's considered identity theft/fraud when we do it with legally identifying papers, it's a similar case here i think.
But the thing is it's not a relevant law here at all as nothing is being distributed and no one is being harmed. Would you say the same thing if AI is not involved? Sure it can be creepy and weird and whatnot but it's not inhertly harmful or at least it's not obvious how it would be.
I've been thinking about this recently too, and I have similar feelings.
I'm just gonna come out and say it without beating around the bush: what is the law's position on AI-generated child porn?
More importantly, what should it be?
It goes without saying that the training data absolutely should not contain CP, for reasons that should be obvious to anybody. But what if it wasn't?
If we're basing the law on pragmatism rather than emotional reaction, I guess it comes down to whether creating this material would embolden paedophiles and lead to more predatory behaviour (i.e. increasing demand), or whether it would satisfy their desires enough to cause a substantial drop in predatory behaviour (I.e. lowering demand).
And to know that, we'd need extensive and extremely controversial studies. Beyond that, even in the event allowing this stuff to be generated is an overall positive (and I don't know whether it would or won't), will many politicians actually call for this stuff to be allowed? Seems like the kind of thing that could ruin a political career. Nobody's touching that with a ten foot pole.
Already illegal here in the UK https://metro.co.uk/2025/02/02/makers-ai-child-abuse-images-jailed-uk-introduces-world-first-law-22481459/
the simplest possible explanation here, is that any porn created based on images of children, is de facto illegal. If it's trained on adults explicitly, and you prompt it for child porn, that's a grey area, probably going to follow precedent for drawn art, rather than real content.
It’s so much simpler than that—it can be created now, so it will be. They will use narrative twists to post it on the clearnet, just like they do with anime (she’s really a 1000 year old vampire, etc.). Creating laws to allow it are simply setting the rules of the phenomenon that is already going to be happening.
The only question is whether or not politicians will stop mud slinging long enough to have an adult conversation, or will we just shove everything into the more obscure parts of the internet and let it police itself.
Let's play devils advocate. You find Bob the pedophile with pictures depicting horrible things. 2 things are true.
Although you can't necessarily help Bob you can lock him up preventing him from doing harm and permanently brand him as a dangerous person making it less likely for actual children to be harmed.
Bob can't claim actual depictions of abuse are AI generated and force you to find the unknown victim before you can lock him and his confederates up. If the law doesn't distinguish between simulated and actual abuse then in both cases Bob just goes to jail.
A third factor is that this technology and the inherent lack of privacy on the internet could potentially pinpoint numerous unknown pedophiles who can even if they haven't done any harm yet be profitably persecuted to societies ultimate profit so long as you value innocent kids more than perverts.
Am I reading this right? You're for prosecuting people who have broken no laws?
I'll add this; I have sexual fantasies (not involving children) that would be repugnant to me IRL. Should I be in jail for having those fantasies, even though I would never act on them?
This sounds like some Minority Report hellscape society.
Correct. This quickly approaches thought crime.
What about an AI gen of a violent rape and murder. Shouldn't that also be illegal.
But we have movies that have protected that sort of thing for years; graphically. Do those the become illegal after the fact?
And we also have movies of children being victimized so do these likewise become illegal?
We already have studies that show watching violence does not make one violent and while some refuse to accept that, it is well established science.
There is no reason to believe the same isn't true for watching sexual assault. There are been many many movies that contain such scenes.
But ultimately the issue will become that there is no way to prevent it. The hardware to generate this stuff is already in our pockets. It may not be efficient but it's possible and efficiency will increase.
The prompts to generate this stuff are easily shared and there is no way to stop that without monitoring all communication and even then I'm sure work around would occur.
Prohibition requires society sacrifice freedoms and we have to decide what weee willing to sacrifice here because as we've seen with or prohibitions, once we unleash the law on one, it can be impossible to undo.
Ok watch adult porn then watch a movie in which women or children are abused. Note how the abuse is in no way sexualized exactly opposite of porn. It often likely takes place off screen and when rape in general appears on screen between zero and no nudity co-occurs. For children it basically always happens off screen.
Simulated child abuse has been federally illegal for ~20 years in the US and we appear to have very little trouble telling the difference between prosecuting pedos and cinema even whilst we have struggled enough with sexuality in general.
This argument works well enough for actual child porn. We certainly don't catch it all but every prosecution takes one more pedo off the streets. The net effect is positive. We don't catch most car thieves either and nobody suggests we legalize car theft.
No I'm for making it against the law to simulate pedophile shit as the net effect is fewer abused kids than if such images were to be legal. Notably you are free to fantasize about whatever you like its the actual creation and sharing of images that would be illegal. Far from being a minority report hellscape its literally the present way things already are many places.
Lol, how can you say that do confidently? How would you know that with fewer AI CP you get less abused kids? And what is the logic behind it?
Demand doesn’t really drop if something is illegal (same goes for drugs). The only thing you reduce is offering, which just resulting in making the thing that got illegal more valuable (this wakes attention of shady money grabbers that hate regulation / give a shit about law enforcement and therefore do illegal stuff to get money) and that you have to pay a shitton of government money maintaining all the prisons.
Good arguments. I think I am convinced that both cases should be illegal.
If the pictures are real they probably increase demand, which is harmful. If the person knew, then the action therefore should result in jail and forced therapy.
If the pictures are not, forced therapy is probably the best option.
So I guess it being illegal in most cases simply to force therapy is the way to go. Even if it in one case is "victimless". If they don't manage to plausibly seem rehabilitated by professionals, then jail time for them.
I would assume (but don't really know) most pedophiles don't truly want to act on it, and don't want to have those urges. And would voluntarily go to therapy.
Which is why I am convinced prevention is the way to go. Not sacrificing privacy. In Norway we have anonymous ways for pedophiles to seek help. There have been posters and ads for it a lot of places a year back or something. I have not researched how it works in practice though.
It was trained on something.
It can generate combinations of things that it is not trained on, so not necessarily a victim. But of course there might be something in there, I won't deny that.
However the act of generating something does not create a new victim unless there is someones likeness and it is shared? Or is there something ethical here, that I am missing?
(Yes, all current AI is basically collective piracy of everyones IP, but besides that)
the downlow of it is quite simple, if the content is public, available for anybody to consume, and copyright permits it (i don't see why it shouldn't in most cases, although if you make porn for money, you probably hold exclusive rights to it, and you probably have a decent position to begin from, though a lengthy uphill battle nonetheless.) there's not really an argument against that. The biggest problem is identity theft and impersonation, more so than stealing work.
Watching videos of rape doesn't create a new victim. But we consider it additional abuse of an existing victim.
So take that video and modify it a bit. Color correct or something. That's still abuse, right?
So the question is, at what point in modifying the video does it become not abuse? When you can't recognize the person? But I think simply blurring the face wouldn't suffice. So when?
That's the gray area. AI is trained on images of abuse (we know it's in there somewhere). So at what point can we say the modified images are okay because the abused person has been removed enough from the data?
I can't make that call. And because I can't make that call, I can't support the concept.
With this logic, any output of any pic gen AI is abuse.. I mean, we can 100% be sure that there are CP in training data (it would be a very bug surprise if not) and all output is result of all training data as far as I understand the statistical behaviour of photo gen AI.
I mean, there’s another side to this.
Assume you have exacting control of training data. You give it consensual sexual play, including rough play, bdsm play, and cnc play. We are 100% certain the content is consensual in this hypothetical.
Is the output a grey area, even if it seems like real rape?
Now another hypothetical. A person closes their eyes and imagines raping someone. “Real” rape. Is that a grey area?
Let’s build on that. Let’s say this person is a talented artist, and they draw out their imagined rape scene, which we are 100% certain is a non-consensual scene imagined by the artist. Is this a grey area?
We can build on that further. What if they take the time to animate this scene? Is that a grey area?
When does the above cross into a problem? Is it the AI making something that seems like rape but is built on consensual content? The thought of a person imagining a real rape? The putting of that thought onto a still image? The animating?
Or is it none of them?
on a base semantic and mechanic level, no, not at all. They aren't real people, there aren't any victims involved, and there aren't any perpetrators. You might even be able to argue the opposite, that this is actually a net positive, because it prevents people from consuming real abuse.
until you can either publicly display yours, or someone else process of thought, or read peoples minds, definitionally, this is an impossible question to answer. So the default is no, because it's not possible to be based in any frame of reality.
assuming it depicts no real persons or identities, no, there is nothing necessarily wrong about this, in fact i would defer back to the first answer for this one.
this is the same as the previous question, media format makes no difference, it's telling the same story.
most people would argue, and i think precedent would probably agree, that this would start to be a problem when explicit external influences are a part of the motivation, rather than an explicitly internally motivated process. There is necessarily a morality line that must be crossed to become a more negative thing, than it is a positive thing. The question is how to define that line in regards to AI.
We already allow simulated rape in tv and movies. AI simply allows a more graphical portrayal.
It's not just AI that can create content like that though. 3d artists have been making victimless rape slop of your vidya waifu for well over a decade now.
I see the issue with how much of a crime is enough for it to be okay, and the gray area. I can't make that call either, but I kinda disagree with the black and white conclusion. I don't need something to be perfectly ethical, few things are. I do however want to act in a ethical manner, and strive to be better.
Where do you draw the line? It sounds like you mean no AI can be used in any cases, unless all the material has been carefully vetted?
I highly doubt there isn't illegal content in most AI models of any size by big tech.
I am not sure where I draw the line, but I do want to use AI services, but not for porn though.
is this a legal thing? I'm not familiar with the laws surrounding sexual abuse, on account of the fact that i don't frequently sexually abuse people, but if this is an established legal precedent that's definitely a good argument to use.
However, on a mechanical level. A recounting of an instance isn't necessarily a 1:1 retelling of that instance. A video of rape for example, isn't abuse anymore so than the act of rape within it, and of course the nonconsensual recording and sharing of it (because it's rape) distribution of that could necessarily be considered a crime of it's own, same with possession, however interacting with the video i'm not sure is necessarily abuse in it's own right, based on semantics. The video most certainly contains abuse, the watcher of the video may or may not like that, i'm not sure whether or that should influence that, because that's an external value. Something like "X person thought about raping Y person, and got off to it" would also be abuse under the same pretense at a certain point. There is certainly some interesting nuance here.
If i watch someone murder someone else, at what point do i become an accomplice to murder, rather than an additional victim in the chain. That's the sort of litmus test this is going to require.
to be clear, this would be a statistically minimal amount of abuse, the vast majority of adult content is going to be legally produced and sanctioned, made public by the creators of those videos for the purposes of generating revenue. I guess the real question here, is what percent of X is still considered to be "original" enough to count as the same thing.
Like we're talking probably less than 1% of all public porn, but a significant margin, is non consensual (we will use this as the base) and the AI is trained on this set, to produce a minimally alike, or entirely distinct image from the feature set provided. So you could theoretically create a formula to determine how far removed you are from the original content in 1% of cases. I would imagine this is going to be a lot closer to 0 than it is to any significant number, unless you start including external factors, like intentionally deepfaking someone into it for example. That would be my primary concern.
another important concept here is human behavior as it's conceptually similar in concept to the AI in question, there are clear strict laws regarding most of these things in real life, but we aren't talking about real life. What if i had someone in my family, who got raped at some point in their life, and this has happened to several other members of my family, or friends of mine, and i decide to write a book, loosely based on the experiences of these individuals (this isn't necessarily going to be based on those instances for example, however it will most certainly be influenced by them)
There's a hugely complex hugely messy set of questions, and answers that need to be given about this. A lot of people are operating on a set of principles much too simple to be able to make any conclusive judgement about this sort of thing. Which is why this kind of discussion is ultimately important.
yeah bro wait until you discover where neural networks got that idea from