A Florida man is facing 20 counts of obscenity for allegedly creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography, highlighting the danger and ubiquity of generative AI being used for nefarious reasons.
Phillip Michael McCorkle was arrested last week while he was working at a movie theater in Vero Beach, Florida, according to TV station CBS 12 News. A crew from the TV station captured the arrest, which made for dramatic video footage due to law enforcement leading away the uniform-wearing McCorkle from the theater in handcuffs.
Pretty sure the training data sets are CSAM
I would imagine that AI having been trained on both pictures of kids and on adult sexual content would be somewhat enough to mix the two. Even if the output might end up uncanny.
That’s the most likely case, now my question is was he using somebody else’s generator or did he train this one himself
They mentioned it looks to be a local model he trained.
If that’s the basis for making it illegal, then all AI is illegal.
Which…eh maybe that’s not such a bad idea
One doesn’t need to browse AI generated images for longer than 5 seconds to realize it can generate a ton of stuff that you for absolute certainty can know wasn’t on the training data. I don’t get why people insist on the narrative that it can only output copies of what it has already seen. What’s generative about that?
If you took a minute to read the article:
A 2023 study from Stanford University also revealed that hundreds of child sex abuse images were found in widely-used generative AI image data sets.
“The content that we’ve seen, we believe is actually being generated using open source software, which has been downloaded and run locally on people’s computers and then modified,” Internet Watch Foundation chief technology officer Dan Sexton told The Guardian last year. “And that is a much harder problem to fix.”
So not only do the online models have CSAM, but people are downloading open source software and I’d be very surprised if they weren’t feeding it CSAM
That doesn’t dispute my argument; generative AI can create images that are not in the training data. It doesn’t need to know what something looks like as long as the person using it does and can write the correct prompt for it. The corn dog I posted below is a good example. You can be sure that wasn’t in the training data yet it was still able to generate it.
Do we know that AI child porn is bad? I could believe it would get them in the mood for the real thing and make them do it more, and I could believe it would make them go “ok, itch scratched”, and tank the demand for the real stuff.
Depending on which way it goes, it could be massively helpful for protecting kids. I just don’t have a sense for what the effect would be, and I’ve never seen any experts weigh in.
In Canada even animated cp is treated as the real deal
In Norway, imagining or describing acts with a 16-year old is CP, but having sex with a 16-year old is perfectly legal
Lol damn it Norway
In Australia cartoon child porn is enforced in the same way as actual child porn. Not that it answers your question but it’s interesting.
I’d imagine for your question “it depends”, some people who would have acted on their urges may get their jollies from AI child porn, others who have never considered being pedophiles might find the AI child porn (assuming legal) and realise it’s something they were into.
I guess it may lower the production of real child porn which feels like a good thing. I’d hazard a guess that there are way more child porn viewers than child abusers.
In Australia a 30 year old woman cannot be in the porn industry if she has small breasts. That, and the cartoon ban both seem like overcompensating.
Nothing says “we’re protecting children” like regulating what adult women can do with their bodies.
Conservatives are morons, every time.
They’re not morons.
Any time anyone ever says they want to do anything “to protect the children” you should assume it’s about control. No one actually gives a shit about children.
Real question: “do we care if AI child porn is bad?” Based on most countries’ laws, no.
Wikipedia seems to suggest research is inconclusive whether consuming CSAM increases the likelihood of committing abuse.
Do we know that AI child porn is bad? I could believe it would get them in the mood for the real thing and make them do it more, and I could believe it would make them go “ok, itch scratched”, and tank the demand for the real stuff.
From bits/articles I’ve seen here and there over the years about other things that are kind of in the same category (porn comics with child characters in them, child-shaped sex dolls), the latter seems to be more the case.
I’m reminded of when people were arguing that when Internet porn became widespread, the incidence of rape would go through the roof. And then literally the opposite happened. So…that pushes me toward hypothesizing that the latter is more likely to be the case, as well.
I’d like to know what psychologists think about it. My assumption is the former, it escalates their fantasizing about it and makes them more likely to attack a child.
There seems to be no way to conduct that experiment ethically, though.
You’re missing the point. They don’t care what’s more or less effective for helping kids. They want to punish people who are different. In this case nobody is really going to step up to defend the guy for obvious reasons. But the motivating concept is the same for conservatives.
Depending on which way it goes, it could be massively helpful for protecting kids
Weeeelll, only until the AI model needs more training material…
I’m not sure if that is how it would work? But this is exactly the kind of thinking we need. Effects: intended plus unintended equals ???
You need more training material to train a new AI. Once the AI is there, it produce as many pictures as you want. And you can get good results even with models that can be run locally on a regular computer.
That’s not how it works. The “generative” in “generative AI” is there for a reason.
I seem to remember Sweden did a study on this, but I don’t really want to google around to find it for you. Good luck!
There are literally mountains of evidence that suggest that normalizing child abuse in any fashion increases the rate at which children are actually abused, but it never stops there from being a highly upvoted comment suggesting that jacking it to simulated kids is some how a “release valve” for actual pedophilia, which makes absolutely no fucking sense given everything we know about human sexuality.
If this concept were true, hentai fans would likely be some of the most sexually well-adjusted people around, having tons of experience releasing their real-world sexual desires via a virtual medium. Instead, we find that these people objectify the living shit out of women, because they’ve adopted an insanely overidealized caricature of what a woman should look and act like that is completely divorced from reality.
There definitively is opportunity in controlled treatment. But I believe outside of that there are too many unknowns.
There’s like a lot of layers to it.
- For some, it might actually work in the opposite direction, especially if paried with the wrong kind of community around it. I used to moderate anime communities, the amount of loli fans wanting to lower the age of consent to 12 or even lower was way too high, but they only called people opposed to loli as “real predators”, because they liked their middle-school tier arguments (which just further polarized the fandom when the culture wars started).
- Even worse might be the more realistic depictions might actually work against that goal, while with (most) loli stuff, at least it’s obvious it’s drawn.
- An often overseen issue is, data laundering. Just call your real CP AI generated, or add some GAI artifacts to your collection. Hungary bans too realistic drawings and paintings of that kind, because people even did that with traditional means, by creating as realistic tracings as possible (the calling CP “artistic nudes” didn’t work out here at least).
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Honestly, I don’t care if it is AI/not real, I’m glad that the man was arrested. He needs some serious help for sexualising kids.
You and I both know he’s not going to get it. I have a kinda sympathy for ppl attracted to kids **but refuse to act on it. **They clearly know it’s not normal and recognize the absolute life destroying damage they can cause if they act on it. That being said there’s not many places you can go to seek treatment. Any institutions that advertised treatment would have ppl outside with pitchforks and torches.
Before anyone tries to claim I’m pro pedo you can fuck right off. I just wish it was possible for ppl are attracted to kids and not out touching them to get some kind of therapy and medication to make them normal (or destroy their sex drive) before something terrible happens.
to get some kind of therapy and medication to make them normal
Hi, Psychologist here. Does society have strong evidence that therapeutic interventions are reducing rates of, say, the most common disorders of anxiety and depression? Considering that the rates of these are going up, I don’t think we can assume there’s a hugely successful therapy to help those attracted to CSA images to change. Psychology is not a very good science principally because it offers few extremely effective answers in the real world.
In terms of medication androgen antagonists are generally used. This is because lowering testosterone generally leads to a lower sex drive. Here is an article about those drugs, including an offender who asked for them: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/01/what-should-we-do-about-paedophiles
TW: the article contains discussion of whether offenders are even psychologically disordered, when set within a historical cultural context of child-marriage. This paragraph is two above the illustration of people trapped within concentric circular walls, and starts “In the 2013 edition …”.
Collis began to research the treatment and decided that it was essential to his rehabilitation. He believes he was born a paedophile, and that his attraction to children is unchangeable. “I did NOT wake up one morning and decide my sexual preference. I am sexually attracted to little girls and have absolutely no interest in sex with adults. I’ve only ever done stuff with adults in order to fit in with what’s ‘normal’.” For Collis, therefore, it became a question of how to control this desire and render himself incapable of reoffending.
[…]
Many experts support Aaron Collis’s self-assessment, that paedophilia is an unchangeable sexual preference. In a 2012 paper, Seto examined three criteria – age of onset, sexual and romantic behaviour, and stability over time. In a number of studies, a significant proportion of paedophiles admitted to first experiencing attraction towards children before they had reached adulthood themselves. Many described their feelings for children as being driven by emotional need as well as sexual desire. As for stability over time, most clinicians agreed that paedophilia had “a lifelong course”: a true paedophile will always be attracted to children. “I am certainly of the view,” Seto told me, “that paedophilia can be thought of as a sexual orientation.”
Brain-imaging studies have supported this idea. James Cantor, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, has examined hundreds of MRI scans of the brains of paedophiles, and found that they are statistically more likely to be left-handed, shorter than average, and have a significantly lower density of white matter, the brain’s connective tissue. “The point that’s important for society is that paedophilia is in the brain at all, and that the person didn’t choose it,” Cantor told me. “As far as we can tell, they were born with it.” (Not that this, he emphasised, should excuse their crimes.)
[…]
Clinical reality is a little more complicated. “There’s no pretence that the treatment is somehow going to cure them of paedophilia,” Grubin told me. “I think there is an acceptance now that you are not going to be able to change very easily the direction of someone’s arousal.” Grubin estimates that medication is only suitable for about 5% of sex offenders – those who are sexually preoccupied to the extent that they cannot think about anything else, and are not able to control their sexual urges. As Sarah Skett from the NHS put it: “The meds only take you so far. The evidence is clear that the best treatment for sex offending is psychologically based. What the medication does is help people have a little bit of control, which then allows them to access that treatment.”
Some research on success rates:
Prematurely terminating treatment was a strong indicator of committing a new sexual offense. Of interest was the general improvement of success rates over each successive 5-year period for many types of offenders. Unfortunately, failure rates remained comparatively high for rapists (20%) and homosexual pedophiles (16%), regardless of when they were treated over the 25-year period. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11961909/]
Within the observation period, the general recidivism and sexual recidivism rates were 33.1% and 16.5%, respectively, and the sexual contact recidivism rate was 4.7%. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306624X231165416 - this paper says that suppressing the sex drive with medication was the most successful treatment]
Men with deviant sexual behavior, or paraphilia, are usually treated with psychotherapy, antidepressant drugs, progestins, and antiandrogens, but these treatments are often ineffective. Selective inhibition of pituitary–gonadal function with a long-acting agonist analogue of gonadotropin-releasing hormone may abolish the deviant sexual behavior by reducing testosterone secretion. [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199802123380702 - this paper supports that lowering testosterone works best]
Isn’t it more about power than sex many times anyway?
For people actually abusing? Spot on, most of the time.
For non-offending paedos? Nah… a horrible affliction.
Not always. There are people with brain injuries who suddenly develop an attraction towards kids and it’s not really due to power dynamics or anything else.
I don’t understand why we haven’t used inhalable oxytocin as an experimental drug for people attracted to children and animals. It seems intuitive- children and animals generate oxytocin for humans automatically, and it’s possible some people need a stronger stimulus to release oxytocin or may not have a lot of oxytocin endogenously. Oxytocin can be compounded at a pharmacy and has been used successfully for social anxiety.
Thank you for such a well laid out response and the research to back it up. I rarely see people approaching the subjects of pedophilia, and how best to treat pedophiles, rationally and analytically.
It’s understandable considering the harm they can cause to society that most can only ever view them as nothing more or less than monsters, and indeed, those that are incapable of comprehending the harm they cause and empathizing with those they could potentially cause or have caused harm to, are IMHO some of the more loathsome individuals.
That said, I think too often people are willing to paint others whose proclivities are so alien and antithetical to our own as not only monsters, but monsters that aren’t worth understanding with any degree of nuance, that we ultimately do ourselves and future generations a disservice by not at least attempting to address the issue at hand in the hopes that the most harmful parts of our collective psyche are treated palliatively to the best of our ability.
Your annotated sources indicate that there is not nearly as clear a path forward as detractors to the “pedophiles are simply monsters and there’s no reason to look into their motives further” would pike to believe, while also, by the nature of the existence of the attempted treatments themselves, points out that there is more work to be done to hopefully find a more lasting and successful rate of treatment.
Like many of the paychological ailments plagueing societies today, you cannot simply kill and imprison the problem away. That is always a short term (albeit at times temporarily effective) solution. The solution to the problem of how to greatly reduce the occurrence of pedophilia will ultimately require more of this kind of research and will require more analysis and study towards achieving such ends.
Again, I thank you for your nuanced post, and commend you for taking your nuanced stance as well.
You don’t actually know this. See my comment here.
And that guy gets that help in a prison, riiight.
Chemical castration offers the best success rates, see my comment under OP citing research.
I don’t think that’s actually help him.
You don’t think that reducing testosterone and therefore sex drive will change offending rates? That is contrary to research which has reliably found that this is the best therapy, in terms of effectiveness on recidivism.
Cutting off their testicles and straight up executing them would also reduce the offending rates. Ever more effectively than chemical castration, I’m sure. But we wouldn’t be calling that helping the offender, would we? And the comment above was specifically talking about helping them.
What we have now is more of a best middle ground between the amount of damage caused to the patient and safety guarantees for the society. We obviously prioritize safety for the society, but we should be striving for less damage to the patient, too.…we should be striving for less damage to the patient, too.
Can you make someone just not sexually interested in something they find arousing? As far as I know, conversion therapy for non-heterosexual people doesn’t have good success rates. Also, those therapies also tended to involve some form of harm, from what I’ve heard.
Can you make someone just not sexually interested in something they find arousing?
No, I can’t. Doesn’t mean that we (as a society) shouldn’t be working on finding ways to do it or finding alternative solutions. And it’s necessary to acknowledge that what we have now is not good enough.
those therapies also tended to involve some form of harm
They probably did. But nobody here is claiming those were good or helping the patients either.
It’s not about making someone want something, less, but helping them to never act on those needs.
Computer generated imagery could in theory be helpful, so the itch gets scratched without creating victims and criminals.
I’d call that a win-win in terms of societal well being, as also less funds are wasted on police work, jailing a perpetrator, and therapy for victim.
That guy didn’t even commit anything just having AI imagery depicting children.
That guy has a mental problem that you can’t only treat by chemical castration. He needs more than that.
That does not change the fact that chemical castration is the most successful treatment we have to stop CSA recidivism at present.
That guy didn’t even commit anything just having AI imagery depicting children.
Possessing and distributing images that sexually objectify children may be a crime, even if generated by AI.
He didn’t just have it, he distributed it.
Depending on the state, yes actually.
I did time in a medium security facility that also did sex offender treatment (I was there on drug charges). I still have friends that went through that program.
The men who were actually invested in getting better, got better. The ones invested in staying well, are still well.
Do you think he’s going to get help in prison?
Possibly yes. See my comment here.
Hey, remember that terrible thing everyone said would happen?
It’s happening.
It’s not really children on these pics. We can’t condemn people for things that are not illegal yet
It’s not really children on these pics.
You are certain about this? If so, where are you getting that info, because it’s not in the article?
Generative image models frequently are used for the “infill” capabilities, which is how nudifying apps work.
If he was nudifying pictures of real kids, the nudity may be simulated, but the children are absolutely real, and should be considered victims of child pornography.
It’s Florida. They will simply book him and then present him a deal for “only x years prison”, which he’ll take and therefore prevent this from going to court and actually be ruled upon.
I’ve always wondered the same when an adult cop pretends to be a kid only to catch pedos. Couldn’t a lawyer argue that because there actually wasn’t a child, there wasn’t a crime?
Intent.
They meant to solicit a child, thought they were soliciting a child, and thus committed the crime.
I’d like to watch that court case. “I knew it was an old cop and wanted to fuck him.”
There was an episode of “the boondocks” where that happened. https://youtu.be/3d200DatLtU?si=Uu2Jt-RlWOEo4juG .
Haha I need to watch this show.
Lolicon fans in absolute shambles.
CANNED IN BANADA
I must admit, amount of comments that are defending AI images as not child porn is truly shocking.
In my book, sexual images of children are not okay, AI generated or otherwise. Pedophiles need help, counseling and therapy. Not images that enable something I think is not acceptable in society.
I truly do believe that AI images should be subject to same standards as regular images in what content we deem appropriate or not.
Yes, this can be used to wrongfully prosecute innocent people, but it does not mean that we should freely allow AI-CP.
Agreed, especially considering it will eventually become indistinguishable.
Pedophiles need help, counseling and therapy. Not images that enable something I think is not acceptable in society.
I mean 30-40 years ago you could replace the word pedophile with homosexual and a vast majority of people would agree. I’m not defending pedophilia here but it’s important to remember these people are born the way they are. Nothing is going to change that, new pedophiles are born every day. They will never go away. The same way you can’t change gay or transgender people. Repressing sexual desire never works look at the priests in the Catholic Church. A healthy outlet such as AI generated porn could save a lot of actual children from harm. I think that should be looked into.
I would like to know what source you have for claiming that pedophiles are “born the way they are.”
We understand some of the genetic and intrauterine developmental reasons for homosexuality, being trans, etc. That has scientific backing, and our understanding continues to grow and expand.
Lumping child predators in with consenting adults smacks of the evangelical slippery slope argument against all forms of what they consider to be “sexual deviance.” I’m not buying it.
Look, I get what you are saying and I do agree. However, I don’t think that comparing pedophilic relations to LGBTQ struggles is fair. One is consented relationship between consenting adults, other is exploitation and high probability of setup for lifelong mental struggles from young age.
Cant speak for others but I agree that AI-CP should be illegal.
The question is how do we define the crime with our current laws? It does seem like we need a new law to address AI images. Both for things like AI-CP, revenge porn, and slanderous/misleading photos. (The Communist Harris and Trump with black people photos)
Where do we draw the line?
How do we regulate it?
Forced watermarks/labels on all tools?
Jail time? Fines?
Forced correction notices? (Doesn’t work for the news!)This is all a slippery slope but what I can say is I hope this goes to court. He looses. Appeals. Then it goes all the way up to federal so we can have a standard to point to.
The shit wrong.
Step one in fixing shit.Iirc he was prosecuted under a very broad “obscenity” law, which should terrify everyone.
I generally think if something is not causing harm to others, it shouldn’t be illegal. I don’t know if “generated” CSAM causes harm to others though. I looked it up and it appears the research on whether CSAM consumption increases the likelihood of a person committing child abuse is inconclusive.
the number of people willing to bat for this on Lemmy is truly disturbing. what do they think these ai models are trained on?
No necessarily is trained on CP, could be trained with images of children (already fuck up, who gave them that permission?) and pornography.
The article pointed out that stable diffusion was trained using a dataset containing CSAM
You’re not kidding.
The only possible way I could see a defense if it were something like “AI CSAM results in a proven reduction of actual CSAM”.
But. The defenses aren’t even that!
They’re literally saying that CSAM is okay. I’m guessing a lot of these same comments would argue that deepfakes are okay as well. Just a completely fucked up perspective.
Arrested but for what crime? I absolutely agree that AI generated cp should be banned however it’s not currently.
Iirc it was for Florida “obscenity” laws, which covers literally anything the state government finds objectionable.
I looked into this awhile back during a similar discussion.
Creating the content itself is not necessarily illegal if its ficticious.
Transmitting it over a public medium is very illegal, though.
So if you create your own ficticious child porn locally and it never gets transmitted over the internet, you’d maybe be okay legally speaking from a federal perspective anyway.
This guy transmitted it and broke the law.
Even unrealistic depictions of children in a sexual context is considered CSAM.
In the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court has defined child pornography as material that “visually depicts sexual conduct by children below a specified age”
See New York v Ferber for more details
He wasn’t arrested for creating it, but for distribution.
If dude just made it and kept it privately, he’d be fine.
I’m not defending child porn with this comment.
I’m not defending child porn with this comment.
This is one of those cases where, even if you’re technically correct, you probably shouldn’t say out loud how you personally would get away with manufacturing child porn, because it puts people in the position of imagining you manufacturing child porn.
Now I’m imagining you making child porn
If this thread (and others like it) have taught me aulnything is that facts be damned, people are opinionated either way. Nuance means nothing and it’s basically impossible to have a proper discussion when it comes to wedge issues or anything that can be used to divide people. Even if every study 100% said Ai generated csam always led to a reduction in actual child harm and reduced recidivism and never needed any actual real children to be used as training material, the comments would still pretty much look the same. If the studies showed the exact opposite, the comments would also be the same. Welcome to the internet. I hope you brought aspirin.
I was hoping to comment on this post multiple times today after I initially lost track of It and now I see you’ve covered about 75% of what I wanted to say. The rest is this:
Show me multiple (let’s say 3+) small-scale independent academic studies or 1-2 comprehensive & large academic studies that support one side or another and I may be swayed, Otherwise I think all that is being accomplished is that one guys life is getting completely ruined for now and potentially forever over some fabrications and as a result he may or may not get help, but I doubt he’ll be better off.
—My understanding was that csam has it’s legal status specifically because there are victims that are hurt by these crimes and possession supports a broader market that faciltates said harm to these victims. It’s not as easy to make a morality argument (especially a good one) for laws that effect everybody when there are no known victims.
My man. Go touch some grass. This place is no good. Not trying to insult you but it’s for your mental health. These Redditors aren’t worth it.
Actually. I needed that. Thanks. Enough internet for me today.
A lot of the places I’ve been to start conversation have been hostile and painful. If there is one thing that stands out that’s holding Lemmy back it’s the shitty culture this place can breed.
Have you ever been to Reddit? This is heaven
I’m convinced that a lot can be inferred from the type of reactions and the level of hostility one might receive by trying to present a calm and nuanced argument to a wedge topic. Even if it’s not always enjoyable. At the very least it also shows others that they may not be interacting rational actors when one gets their opponents to go full mask-off.
Agreed. And I’ve had my share of “being a dick” on the Internet here. But by the end of the interaction I try to at least jest. Or find a middle ground…I commented on a Hexbear instance by accident once…
Lol, my secondary account is a hexbear account, but I won’t hold it against you.
This time.
a single tear falls from my eye I don’t understand this place lol
It’s hard to have a nuanced discussion because the article is so vague. It’s not clear what he’s specifically been charged with (beyond “obscenity,” not a specific child abuse statute?). Because any simulated CSAM laws have been, to my knowledge, all struck down when challenged.
I completely get the “lock them all up and throw away the key” visceral reaction - I feel that too, for sure - but this is a much more difficult question. There are porn actors over 18 who look younger, do the laws outlaw them from work that would be legal for others who just look older? If AI was trained exclusively on those over-18 people, would outputs then not be CSAM even if the images produced features that looked under 18?
I’m at least all for a “fruit of the poisoned tree” theory - if AI model training data sets include actual CSAM then they can and should be made illegal. Deepfaking intentionally real under 18 people is also not black and white (looking again to the harm factor), but also I think it can be justifiably prohibited. I also think distribution of completely fake CSAM can be arguably outlawed (the situation here), since it’s going to be impossible to tell AI from real imagery soon and allowing that would undermine enforcement of vital anti-real-CSAM laws.
The real hard case is producing and retaining fully fake people and without real CSAM in training data, solely locally (possession crimes). That’s really tough. Because not only does it not directly hurt anyone in it’s creation, there’s a possible benefit in that it diminishes the market for real CSAM (potentially saving unrelated children from the abuse flowing from that demand), and could also divert the impulse of the producer from preying on children around them due to unfulfilled desire.
Could, because I don’t think there’s studies that answers whether those are true.
Because any simulated CSAM laws have been, to my knowledge, all struck down when challenged.
To the best of my knowledge, calling drawn works obscene has been upheld in courts, most often because the artist(s) lack the financial ability to fight the charges effectively. The artist for the underground comic “Boiled Angel” had his conviction for obscenity upheld–most CSAM work falls under obscenity laws–and ended up giving up the fight to clear his name.
Oh, for sure. I’m talking about laws specifically targeted to minors. “Obscenity” is a catch-all that is well-established, but if you are trying to protect children from abuse, it’s a very blunt instrument and not as effective as targeted abuse and trafficking statutes. The statutory schemes used to outlaw virtual CSAM have failed to my knowledge.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalition
That case was statutorily superseded in part by the PROTECT Act, which attempted to differentiate itself by…relying on an obscenity standard. So it’s a bit illusory that it does anything new.
The PROTECT Act has been, so far, found to be constitutional, since it relies on the obscenity standard in regards to lolicon hentai. Which is quite worrisome. It seems like it’s a circular argument/tautology; it’s obscene for drawn art to depict child sexual abuse because drawings of child sexual abuse are obscene.
I mostly agree with you, but a counterpoint:
Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them. I’ve read many articles over the years about men getting arrested for trying to meet up with minors, and one thing that shows up pretty often in these articles is the perpetrator admitting to downloading CSAM for years until deciding the fantasy wasn’t enough anymore. They become comfortable enough with it that it loses its taboo and they feel emboldened to take the next step.
CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation, and creation is inherently abusive and exploitative of real people, and generating it from a model that was trained on non-abusive content probably isn’t exploitative, but there’s a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it’s associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.
Not an easy question for sure, and it’s one that deserves to be answered using empirical data, but I imagine the vast majority of Americans would flatly reject a nuanced view on this issue.
Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them.
But this is like the arguments used to say that weed is a “gateway drug” by talking about how people strung out on harder drugs almost always have done weed as well, ignoring everyone who uses only weed. But this is even hazier because we literally have no real idea how many people consume that stuff but don’t ‘escalate’.
I remember reading once in some research out of Japan that child molesters consume less porn overall than the average citizen, which seems counter-intuitive, but may not be, if you consider the possibility that maybe it (in this case, they were talking primarily about manga with anime-stylen drawings of kids in sexual situations) is actually curbing the incidence of the ‘real thing’, since the ones actually touching kids in the real world are reading those mangas less.
I’m also reminded of people talking about sex dolls that look like kids, and if that’s a possible ‘solution’ for pedophiles, or if it would ‘egg on’ actual molestation.
I think I lean on the side of ‘satiation’, from the limited bits of idle research I’ve done here and there. And if that IS in fact the case, then regardless of if it grosses me out, I can’t in good conscience oppose something that actually reduces the number of children who actually get abused, you know?
It’s less that these materials are like a “gateway” drug and more like these materials could be considered akin to advertising. We already have laws about advertising because it’s so effective, including around cigarettes and prescriptions.
Second, the role that CP plays in most countries is difficult. It is used for blackmail. It is also used to generate money for countries. And it’s used as advertising for actual human trafficking organizations. And similar organizations exist for snuff and gore btw. And ofc animals. And any combination of those 3. Or did you all forget about those monkey torture videos, or the orangutan who was being sex trafficked? Or Daisy’s Destruction and Peter Scully?
So it’s important to not allow these advertisers to combine their most famous monkey torture video with enough AI that they can say it’s AI generated, but it’s really just an ad for their monkey torture productions. And they do that with CP, rape, gore, etc, too.
People, please don’t just downvote with no comment. Why is this being downloaded? The comparisons to advertisements have validity. And, if you disagree, be productive and tell us why.
Because a huge percentage of Lemmy is sexist and I am openly a woman. You’ll know because this comment will get nuked also.
Fellow female here. I support your right to contribute on Lemmy.
The problem is empirical data cannot be morally or ethically found. You can’t show a bunch of people porn and then make a statistical observation of whether those shown child porn are more likely to assault children. So we have to forward without that data.
I will anecdotally observe anal sex, oral sex, and facials have gone up between partners as prevalence in porn has gone up. That suggests but does not prove a direct statistical harm caused by even “ethically produced CSAM.”
True, it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment, but we can (and probably do) collect lots of observational data that can provide meaningful insight. People are arrested at all stages of CSAM related offenses from just possession, distribution, solicitation, and active abuse.
While observation and correlations are inherently weaker than experimental data, they can at least provide some insight. For example, “what percentage of those only in possession of artificially generated CSAM for at least one year go on to solicit minors” vs. “real” CSAM.
If it seems that artificial CSAM is associated with a lower rate of solicitation, or if it ends up decreasing overall demand for “real” CSAM, then keeping it legal might provide a real net benefit to society and its most vulnerable even if it’s pretty icky.
That said, I have a nagging suspicion that the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all. There’s also the risk that artificial CSAM reduces the taboo of CSAM and can be an on-ramp to more harmful materials for those with pedophilic tendencies that they otherwise are able to suppress. But it’s still way too early to know either way.
True, it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment
I think it would be ethical for researchers to go onto the boards of these already-existing CP distribution forums and conduct surveys. But then the surveyors would be morally obligated to report that board to the authorities to get it shut down. Which means that no one would ever answer surveyor questions because they knew the board would be shut down soon so they’d just find a new site ugh…
Yeah nvm I don’t see any way around this one
the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all.
Perhaps. But what about when they can’t tell the difference between real and virtual? It seems like the allure of all pornography is the fantasy, rather than the reality. That is, you may enjoy extreme BDSM pornography, and enjoy seeing a person flogged until they’re bleeding, or see needles slowly forced through their penis, but do you really care that it’s a real person that’s going to end the scene, take a shower, and go watch a few episodes of “The Good Place” with their dog before bed? Or is it about the power fantasy that you’re constructing in your head about that scene? How important is the reality of the scene, versus being able to suspend your disbelief long enough to get sexual gratification from it? If the whole scene was done with really good practical effects and CG, would your experience, as a user–even if you were aware–be different?
I will anecdotally observe anal sex, oral sex, and facials have gone up between partners as prevalence in porn has gone up. That suggests but does not prove a direct statistical harm caused by even "ethically produced CSAM
Can we look at trends between consenting adults (who are likely watching porn of real people by the way) as an indicator of what pedophiles will do? I’m not so sure. It’s not like step sibling sex is suddenly through the roof now with it being the “trend” in porn.
Looking specifically at fake rape porn maybe and seeing if it increases rates of rape in the real world might be a better indicator.
That’s fair. I tried to make clear that my interpretation is not in any way scientific or authoritative. Better correlations are probably possible.
CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation
To expound on this: prior to this point, the creation of CSAM requires that children be sexually exploited. You could not have CSAM without children being harmed. But what about when no direct harms have occurred? Is lolicon hentai ‘obscene’? Well, according to the law and case law, yes, but it’s not usually enforced. If we agree that drawings of children engaged in sexual acts aren’t causing direct harm–that is, children are not being sexually abused in order to create the drawings–then how much different is a computer-generated image that isn’t based off any specific person or event? It seem to me that, whether or not a pedophile might decide that they eventually want more than LLM-generated images is not relevant. Treating a future possibility as a foregone conclusion is exactly the rationale behind Reefer Madness and the idea of ‘gateway’ drugs.
Allow me to float a second possibility that will certainly be less popular.
Start with two premises: first, pedophilia is a characteristic that appears to be an orientation. That is, a true pedophile–a person exclusively sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children–does not choose to be a pedophile, any more than a person chooses to be gay. (My understanding is that very few pedophiles are exclusively pedophilic though, and that many child molesters are opportunistic sexual predators rather than being pedophiles.) Secondly, the rates of sexual assault appear to have decreased as pornography availability has increased. So the question I would have is, would wide availability of LLM-generated CSAM–CSAM that didn’t cause any real, direct harm to children–actually decrease rates of child sexual assault?
With regards to your last paragraph: Pedophiles can indeed by straight, gay or bi. Pedophiles may also not become molesters, and molesters of children may not at all be pedophilic. It’s seems you understand this. I mentioned ITT that I read a newspaper article many years ago that was commissioned to show the access to cp would increase child abuse, it seemed to show the opposite.
If persons could use AI to generate their own porn of their own personal fantasies (whatever those might be) and NOT share that content what then? Canada allows this for text (maybe certain visuals? Audio? IDK). I don’t know about current ‘obscene’ laws in the USA, however, I do recall reading about an art exhibit in NY which featured an upside down urinal that was deemed obscene, than later deemed a work or art. I also recall seeing (via an internet image) a sculpture of what seemed to be a circle of children with penises as noses. Porn? Art? Comedy?My understanding was that ‘pure’ pedophiles–ones that have no interest at all in post-pubescent children or any adults whatsoever–tend to be less concerned with sex/gender, particularly because children don’t have defined secondary sex characteristics. I don’t know if this is actually correct though. I’m not even sure how you could ethically research that kind of thing and end up with valid results.
And honestly, not being able to do solid research that has valid results makes it really fuckin’ hard to find solutions that work to prevent as many children from being harmed as possible. In the US at least research about sex and sexuality in general-much less deviant sexualities–seems to be taboo, and very difficult to get funding for.
Hard to say. I generally agree with what you’ve said though. Also, lots of people have other fantasies that they would never enact in real life for various reasons (e.g. it’s unsafe, illegal, or both; edit: I should also absolutely list non-consensual here). I feel like pedophilia isn’t necessarily different.
However part of the reason loli/whatever is also illegal to distribute (it is, right? I assume it is at least somewhere) is that otherwise it helps people facilitate/organize distribution of real CSAM, which increases demand for it. That’s what I’ve heard at least and it makes sense to me. And I feel like that would apply to AI generated as well.
It’s obvs. very hard to get accounts of what pedophiles are doing; the only ones that you can survey are ones that have been caught, which isn’t necessarily a representative sample. I don’t think that there are any good estimates on the rate of pedophilic tendencies.
the reason loli/whatever is also illegal to distribute
From a cursory reading, it looks like possession and distribution are both felonies. Lolicon hentai is pretty widely available online, and prosecutions appear to be very uncommon when compared to the availability. (Low priority for enforcement, probably?)
I’m not sure that increasing the supply of CSAM would necessarily increase demand for CSAM in people that aren’t already pedophiles though. To put it another way, I’m sure that increasing the supply of gay porn would increase consumption of gay porn, but I am pretty sure that it’s not going to make more people gay. And people that aren’t gay (or at least bi-) aren’t going to be interested in gay porn, regardless of how hard up (heh) they might be for porn, as long as they have any choices at all. There’s a distinction between fetishes/paraphilia, and orientations, and my impression has been that pedophilia is much more similar to an orientation than a paraphilia.
I’m not sure that increasing the supply of CSAM would necessarily increase demand for CSAM in people that aren’t already pedophiles though.
No, but allowing people to organize increases demand because then those who would want CSAM have a place to look for it and ask for it where it’s safe for them to do so, and maybe even pay for it to be created. It’s rather the other way around, the demand increases the supply if you want to put it like that. I’m not saying lolicon being freely available turns people into pedophiles or something like that, at all.
I guess where I come down is that, as long as no real people are being harmed–either directly, or because their likeness is being used–then I’d rather see it out in the open than hidden. At least if it’s open you can have a better chance of knowing who is immediately unsafe around children, and easily using that to exclude people from positions where they’d have ready access to children (teachers, priests, etc.).
Unfortunately, there’s also a risk of pedophilia being ‘normalized’ to the point where people let their guard down around them.
Yeah I agree.
but there’s a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it’s associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.
Why should that be a question at all? If it causes harm, ban it. If not, don’t. Being “associated with” should never be grounds for a legal statute.
Even worse, you don’t need CSAM to start with. If a learning model has regular porn and nude reference model photography of people under 18 that are used for drawing anatomy, then they have enough information to combine the two. Hell, it probably doesn’t even need the people under 18 to actually be nude.
Hell, society tends to assume any nudity inder 18 to be CSAM anyway, because someone could see it that way.
I don’t know if it’s still a thing, but I’m reminded of some law or regulation that was passed a while back in Australia, iirc, that barred women with A-cup busts from working in porn, the “reasoning” being that their flatter chests made them look too similar to prepubescent girls, lol…
Not only stupid but also quite insulting to women, imo.
I’m at least all for a “fruit of the poisoned tree” theory - if AI model training data sets include actual CSAM then they can and should be made illegal.
Now all AI is illegal. It’s trained via scraping the internet, which will include CP as well as every other image.
There’s “copywrite illegal,” and then there’s “cp illegal.” Those are two very different things.
I don’t understand the relevance of your statement.
I don’t see how children were abused in this case? It’s just AI imagery.
It’s the same as saying that people get killed when you play first person shooter games.
Or that you commit crimes when you play GTA.
The difference is intent. When you’re playing a FPS, the intent is to play a game. When you play GTA the intent is to play a game.
The intent with AI generated CSAM is to watch kids being abused.
Whose to say there aren’t people playing games to watch people die?
There may well be the odd weirdo playing Call of Duty to watch people die.
But everyone who watches CSAM is watching it to watch kids being abused.
Punishing people for intending to do something is punishing them for thought crimes. That is not the world I want to live in.
This guy did do something - he either created or accessed AI generated CSAM.
I’m not talking about “this guy”. I’m talking about what you just said.
Intent is defined as intention or purpose. So I’ll rephrase for you: the purpose of playing a FPS is to play a game. The purpose of playing GTA is to play a game.
The purpose of AI generated CSAM is to watch children being abused.
I don’t think that’s fair. It could just as well be said that the purpose of violent games is to simulate real life violence.
Even if I grant you that the purpose of viewing CSAM is to see child abuse, it’s still less bad than actually abusing them just like playing violent games is less bad than participating in real violence. Also, despite the massive increase in violent games and movies, the actual number of violence is going down so implying that viewing such content would increase the cases of child abuse is an assumption I’m not willing to make either.
The purpose of a game is to play a game through a series of objectives and challenges.
Even if I grant you that the purpose of viewing CSAM is to see child abuse
Very curious to hear what else you think the purpose of watching CSAM might be.
it’s still less bad than actually abusing them
“less bad” is relative. A bad thing is still bad. If we go by length of sentencing then rape is ‘less bad’ than murder. that doesn’t make it ‘not bad’.
so implying that viewing such content would increase the cases of child abuse is an assumption I’m not willing to make either.
OK?
I didn’t claim that AI CSAM increased anything at all. Literally all I’ve said is that the purpose of AI generated CSAM is to watch kids being abused.
Neither did I claim that violent games lead to violence. You invented that strawman all by yourself.
When you’re playing a FPS, the intent is to watch people being murdered.
How is this argument any different?
Then also every artist creating loli porn would have to be jailed for child pornography.
In some countries drawn child porn is illegal as well.
But this is the US… and its kind of a double standard if you’re not arrested for drawing but for generating it.
There is a difference between something immediately identifiable as a drawing and something almost photorealistic. If a generated image is indistinguishable from a real photo, it should be treated the same.
The core reason CSAM is illegal is not because we don’t want people to watch it but because we don’t want them to create it which is synonymous with child abuse. Jailing someone for drawing a picture like that is absurd. While it might be of bad taste, there is no victim there. No one was harmed. Using generative AI is the same thing. No matter how much simulated CSAM you create with it, not a single child is harmed in doing so. Jailing people for that is the very definition of a moral panic.
Now, if actual CSAM was used in the training of that AI, then it’s a more complex question. However it is a fact that such content doesn’t need to be in the training data in order for it to create simulated CSAM and as long as that is the case it is immoral to punish people for creating something that only looks like it but isn’t.
It could be argued that even drawn imagery can inspire and encourage later real world abuse.
Sure, but same argument could be made of violent movies / games / books … It’s a rather slippery slope and as far as I know there doesn’t seem to be correlation between violent games and real life violence, in fact I believe the correlation is negative.
I don’t advocate for either but it should NOT be treated the same. one doesn’t involve a child being involved and traumatized, id rather a necrophiliac make ai generated pics instead of… you know.
Not a great comparison, because unlike withh violent games or movies, you can’t say that there is no danger to anyone in allowing these images to be created or distributed. If they are indistinguishable from the real thing, it then becomes impossible to identify actual human victims.
There’s also a strong argument that the availability of imagery like this only encourages behavioral escalation in people who suffer from the affliction of being a sick fucking pervert pedophile. It’s not methadone for them, as some would argue. It’s just fueling their addiction, not replacing it.
How was the model trained? Probably using existing CSAM images. Those children are victims. Making derivative images of “imaginary” children doesn’t negate its exploitation of children all the way down.
So no, you are making false equivalence with your video game metaphors.
But the AI companies insist the outputs of these models aren’t derivative works in any other circumstances!
Cuz they’re not
A generative AI model doesn’t require the exact thing it creates in its datasets. It most likely just combined regular nudity with a picture of a child.
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That’s not really a nuanced take on what is going on. A bunch of images of children are studied so that the AI can learn how to draw children in general. The more children in the dataset, the less any one of them influences or resembles the output.
Ironically, you might have to train an AI specifically on CSAM in order for it to identify the kinds of images it should not produce.
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Well it doesn’t but it’s not correct.
Because the world we live in is complex, and rejecting complexity for a simple view of the world is dangerous.
See You Can’t Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs from the Alt-Right Playbook.
(Note I’m not accusing you of being alt-right. I’m saying we cannot ignore nuance in the world because the world is nuanced.)
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Good luck convincing the AI advocates of this. They have already decided that all imagery everywhere is theirs to use however they like.
That’s a whole other thing than the AI model being trained on CSAM. I’m currently neutral on this topic so I’d recommend you replying to the main thread.
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It’s not CSAM, it’s just pictures of children/people that are already publicly available. This goes on to the copyright side of things of AI instead of illegal training material.
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Wrong again.
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While i wouldn’t put it past Meta&Co. to explicitly seek out CSAM to train their models on, I don’t think that is how this stuff works.
Wrong.
Can you or anyone verify that the model was trained on CSAM?
Besides a LLM doesn’t need to have explicit content to derive from to create a naked child.
You’re defending the generation of CSAM pretty hard here in some vaguely “but no child we know of” being involved as a defense.
I just hope that the Models aren’t trained on CSAM. Making generating stuff they can fap on ““ethical reasonable”” as no children would be involved. And I hope that those who have those tendancies can be helped one way or another that doesn’t involve chemical castration or incarceration.
No they are not.
Well, the image generator had to be trained on something first in order to spit out child porn. While it may be that the training set was solely drawn/rendered images, we don’t know that, and even if the output were in that style, it might very well be photorealistic images generated from real child porn and run through a filter.
An AI that is trained on children and nude adults can infer what a nude child looks like without ever being trained specifically with those images.
Your argument is hypothetical. Real world AI was trained on images of abused childen.
Only because real world AI was trained on the dataset of ALL PUBLIC IMAGES, dumbass
So you’re admitting they are correct?
No, I’m admitting they’re stupid for even bringing it up.
Unless their argument is that all AI should be illegal, in which case they’re stupid in a different way.
Do you think regular child porn should be illegal? If so, why?
Generally it’s because kids were harmed in the making of those images. Since we know that AI is using images of children being harmed to make these images, as the other posters has repeatedly sourced (but also if you’ve looked up deepfakes, most deepfakes are of an existing porn and the face just changed over top. They do this with CP as well and must use CP videos to seed it, because the adult model would be too large)… why does AI get a pass for using children’s bodies in this way? Why isn’t it immoral when AI is used as a middle man to abuse kids?
Yes exactly. That people are then excusing this with “well it was trained on all.public images,” are just admitting you’re right and that there is a level of harm here since real materials are used. Even if they weren’t being used or if it was just a cartoon, the morality is still shaky because of the role porn plays in advertising. We already have laws about advertising because it’s so effective, including around cigarettes and prescriptions. Most porn, ESPECIALLY FREE PORN, is an ad to get you to buy other services. CP is not excluded from this rule - no one gets free lunch, so to speak. These materials are made and hosted for a reason.
The role that CP plays in most countries is difficult. It is used for blackmail. It is also used to generate money for countries (intelligence groups around the world host illegal porn ostensibly “to catch a predator,” but then why is it morally okay for them to distribute these images but no one else?). And it’s used as advertising for actual human trafficking organizations. And similar organizations exist for snuff and gore btw. And ofc animals. And any combination of those 3. Or did you all forget about those monkey torture videos, or the orangutan who was being sex trafficked? Or Daisy’s Destruction and Peter Scully?
So it’s important to not allow these advertisers to combine their most famous monkey torture video with enough AI that they can say it’s AI generated, but it’s really just an ad for their monkey torture productions. And even if NONE of the footage was from illegal or similar events and was 100% thought of by AI - it can still be used as an ad for these groups if they host it. Cartoons can be ads ofc.
Jesus Christ take your meds
Sweaty I think you’re the one who needs meds
Just say you don’t get how it works.
How many corn dogs do you think were in the training data?
Wild corn dogs are an outright plague where I live. When I was younger, me and my buddies would lay snares to catch to corn dogs. When we caught one, we’d roast it over a fire to make popcorn. Corn dog cutlets served with popcorn from the same corn dog is popular meal, especially among the less fortunate. Even though some of the affluent consider it the equivalent to eating rat meat. When me pa got me first rifle when I turned 14, I spent a few days just shooting corn dogs.
It didn’t generate what we expect and know a corn dog is.
Hence it missed because it doesn’t know what a “corn dog” is
You have proven the point that it couldn’t generate csam without some being present in the training data
I hope you didn’t seriously think the prompt for that image was “corn dog” because if your understanding of generative AI is on that level you probably should refrain from commenting on it.
Prompt: Photograph of a hybrid creature that is a cross between corn and a dog
Then if your question is “how many Photograph of a hybrid creature that is a cross between corn and a dog were in the training data?”
I’d honestly say, i don’t know.
And if you’re honest, you’ll say the same.
But you do know because corn dogs as depicted in the picture do not exists so there couldn’t have been photos of them in the training data, yet it was still able to create one when asked.
This is because it doesn’t need to have been seen one before. It knows what corn looks like and it knows what a dog looks like so when you ask it to combine the two it will gladly do so.
But you do know because corn dogs as depicted in the picture do not exists so there couldn’t have been photos of them in the training data, yet it was still able to create one when asked.
Yeah, except photoshop and artists exist. And a quick google image search will find them. 🙄
we don’t know that
might
Unless you’re operating under “guilty until proven innocent”, those are not reasons to accuse someone.
It’s just AI imagery.
Fantasising about sexual contact with children indicates that this person might groom children for real, because they have a sexual interest in doing so. As someone who was sexually assaulted as a child, it’s really not something that needs to happen.
Seems like then fantasizing about shooting people or carjacking or such indcates that person might do that activity for real to. There are a lot of car jackings nowadays and you know gta is real popular. mmmm. /s but seriously im not sure your first statement has merit. Especially when you look at where to draw the line. anime. manga. oil paintings. books. thoughts in ones head.
If you want to keep people who fantasise about sexually exploiting children around your family, be my guest. My family tried that, and I was raped. I didn’t like that, and I have drawn my own conclusions.
yeah and if you want to keep people who fantasize about murdering folk. you can’t say one thing is a thing without saying the other is. Im sorry you were raped but I doubt it would be stopped by banning lolita.
I don’t recall Nabokov’s novel Lolita saying that sexualising minors was an acceptable act.
Thanks for the strawman, though, I’ll save it to burn in the colder months.
You can call it a strawman but doing something evil if its killing folks or raping folks the effect should be the same when discussing non actual and actual. You can say this thing is a special case but when it comes to freedom of speech, which is anything that is not based in actual events. writing, speaking, thinking, art. Special circumstances becomes a real slippery slope (which can also be brought up as a fallacy which like all “fallacies” depend a lot on what else backs them up on how they are being presented)
If you’re asking whether anime, manga, oil paintings, and books glorifying the sexualization of children should also be banned, well, yes.
This is not comparable to glorifying violence, because real children are victimized in order to create some of these images, and the fact that it’s impossible to tell makes it even more imperative that all such imagery is banned, because the existence of fakes makes it even harder to identify real victims.
It’s like you know there’s an armed bomb on a street, but somebody else filled the street with fake bombs, because they get off on it or whatever. Maybe you’d say making fake bombs shouldn’t be illegal because they can’t harm anyone. But now suddenly they have made the job of law enforcement exponentially more difficult.
Sucks to be law enforcement then. I’m not giving up my rights to make their jobs easier. I hate hate HATE the trend towards loss of privacy and the “if you didn’t do anything wrong then you have nothing to hide” mindset. Fuck that.
There’s some serious slippery slope fallacy going on in this thread.
It’s not a fallacy, we’re already halfway down the slope
indicates that this person might groom children for real
But unless they have already done it, that’s not a crime. People are prosecuted for actions they commit, not their thoughts.
I agree, this line of thinking quickly spirals into Minority Report territory.
It will always be a gray area, and should be, but there are practical and pragmatic reasons to ban this imagery no matter its source.
Florida Man strikes again…
To be clear, I am happy to see a pedo contained and isolated from society.
At the same time, this direction of law is something that I don’t feel I have the sophistication to truly weigh in on, even though it invokes so many thoughts for me.
I hope we as a society get this one right.
We never do.