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.
Could this be considered a harm reduction strategy?
Not that I think CSAM is good in any way, but if it saves a child would it be worthwhile? Like if these pedos were to use AI images instead of actual CSAM would that be any better?
I’ve read that CSAM sites on the dark web number into the hundreds of thousands. I just wonder if it would be a less harmful thing since it’s such a problem.
I guess my question is does access to regular porn make people not want to have real sex with another person? Does it ‘scratch the itch’ so to speak? Could they go the rest of their life with only porn to satisfy them?
It depends on the person. I feel like most people would be unsatisfied with only porn, but that’s just anecdotal.
I honestly think ai generated csam isn’t something the world needs to be produced. It’s not contributing to society in any meaningful ways and pedophiles who don’t offend or hurt children need therapy, and the ones who do need jailtime(and therapy, but Im in the US so thats a whole other thing). They don’t ‘need’ porn.
My own personal take is that giving pedophiles csam that’s AI generated is like showing alcohol ads to alcoholics. Or going to the strip club if you’re a sex addict. It’s probably not going to lead to good outcomes.
by the same metric, i wonder why not let convicts murderers and psichopaths work at Slaughterhouses
On the other hand, are people who work at slaughterhouses more likely to be murderers and psychopaths?
Many years ago (about 25) I read an article in a newspaper (idk the name, but it may have been the The Computer Paper, which is archived on line someplace}. This article noted that a study had been commissioned to show that cp access increases child abuse. The study seemed to show the opposite.
Here’s the problem with even AI generated cp: It might lower abuse in the beginning, but with increased access it would ‘normalise’ the perception of such conduct. This would likely increase abuse over time, even involving persons who may not have been so inclined otherwise.
This is all a very complex. A solution isn’t simple. Shunning things in anyway won’t help though, and that seems to be the current most popular way to deal with the issue.
Actual pedophiles (a lot of CSA is abuse of power, not pedophilia - though to be clear fuck abusers either way) have a high rate of suicidal ideation because they think its as fucked up as everyone else. Of course we can’t just say “sure AI material is legal now” but I could imagine a regulated system accessed via doctors akin to how controlled substances work.
People take this firm “kill em all” stance but these people just feel the way they do same as I do towards women or a gay man feels toward men. It just is what it is - we all generally agree gay isnt a choice and this is no different. As long as they dont act on it, I think we should be sympathetic and be open to helping them live a less tortured life.
I’m not 100% saying this is how we do it, but we should be open to exploring the issue instead of full stop demonization.
Dan Savage coined the term “gold star pedophile” in a column years ago, referring to people who acknowledge their attraction to children but never act on it by harming a child or accessing CSAM. I do feel bad for these people because there are no resources to help them. The only way they can access actual therapeutic resources for their condition is by offending and going to jail. If the pedophile goes to a therapist and confesses attraction to children, therapists are mandated reporters and will assume they’re going to act on it. An article I read a few years back interviewed members of an online community of non-offending pedophiles who essentially made their own support group since no one else will help them, and nearly all research on them is from a forensic (criminal) context.
Don’t get me wrong - I think offenders need to be punished for what they do. I unfortunately have a former best friend who has offended. He’s no longer in my life and never will be again. But I think we could prevent offenders from reaching that point and hurting someone if we did more research and found ways to stop them before it happened.
I agree for the most part, particularly that we should be open minded.
Obviously we don’t have much reliable data, which I think is critically important.
The only thing I world add is that, I’m not sure treating a desire for CSAM would be the same as substance abuse. Like “weaning an addict off CSAM” seems like a strange proposition to me.
“Normalized” violent media doesn’t seem to have increased the prevalence of real world violence.
You would think so but you basically are making a patch work version of the illicit actual media so it’s a dark dark gray area for sure.
Generative AI is basically just really overpowered text/image prediction. It fills in the words or pixels that make the most sense based on the data it has been fed, so to get AI generated CSAM…it had to have been fed some amount of CSAM at some point or it had to be heavily manipulated to generate the images in question.
