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.
But this is the US… and its kind of a double standard if you’re not arrested for drawing but for generating it.
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.
