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’ve literally got no idea what you’re talking about or what your point is. Are you saying this person hasn’t committed a crime? Because that’s incorrect. Lots of jurisdictions have laws preventing things like CSAM generated imagery, deepfake porn and a whole raft of other things. ‘Harm’ doesn’t begin and end with something done to an individual for a lot of crimes.
Are you saying this person hasn’t committed a crime?
Yes, and if the law is interpretet in a way that it is considered illegal, and the person is punished for it, then that’s a moral injustice and the kind of senselessness we as humans should grow out of. The fact that this “crime” has no victim is the whole point of why punishing for it makes no sense.
CSAM is illegal for a very good reason; producing it without abusing children is by definition impossible. By searching for and viewing such content, the person becomes part of the causal chain that leads to it being produced in the first place. By criminalizing it we attempt to deter people from looking for it and thus bringing down the demand and disincentivizing the production of it.
Using AI that is not trained on such content is out of this loop. There is literally nobody being harmed if someone decides to use it to create depictions of such content. It’s not actual CSAM it’s producing. By the very definition it cannot be. Not any more than shooting a person in a video game is a murder. CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material (I hate even saying that) so in other words; proof of the crime having happened. AI generated images are fiction. Nobody is being harmed. It’s just a more photorealistic version of a drawing. Treating it as actual CSAM in the court is insanity.
Now. If the AI has been trained on actual CSAM and especially if the output simulates real people, then that’s a whole another discussion to be had. This is however not what we’re talking about here.
