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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
In that case, the images of children were still used without their permission to create the child porn in question
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then also every artist creating loli porn would have to be jailed for child pornography.
But this is the US… and its kind of a double standard if you’re not arrested for drawing but for generating it.
