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.
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.
There’s a pretty good article by James Cantor talking about dealing with pedophiles in a therapeutic context here.
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.
We really gotta flip the standard and make therapist sessions 100% confidential. We should encouraging people to seek help in stopping their bad behavior, no matter what it is, and they’re less likely to do that if they think a therapist could report them.
You’re asking therapists to live with that information. It’s not so easy to hear that a child is being actively raped and not legally being allowed to report it.
We already lose tons of social workers in CPS because they can’t help those kids much or save them. Most normal adults can’t really mentally handle child torture without doing something about it. How many unreported child abuse cases before a therapist kills themselves?
Let alone that you’re sentencing a child to live in a rape nightmare, something most adults can’t tolerate, all so their abuser can get some help maybe. Wonder how many kids will kill themselves. What the actual fuck. Here’s a hint: kids are slaves, so passing laws that disempower them even more is really fucked up.
I mean, how many children get abused because people are too afraid to seek help? It’s not an area with an easy answer, and I don’t have hard numbers on how much harm either scenario would produce.
Well, if all the therapists kill themselves, then that system will be worse than the current one because no one will be getting help
A practically guaranteed scenario, no doubt.
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.
Maybe I was unclear, when I relate potential generated material to controlled substances, I mean in relation to how you obtain it.
You go see a psych, probably go through some therapy or something, and if they feel it would be beneficial you would be able to get material via strictly controlled avenues like how you need a prescription for xanax and its a crime to sell or share it.
(and I imagine… Some sort of stamping whether in the imagery or in the files to trace any leaked material back to the person who shared it, but thats a different conversation)
“Normalized” violent media doesn’t seem to have increased the prevalence of real world violence.
I actually think video games reduce crime in general. Bad kids are now indoors getting thier thrills.
That makes sense. I don’t know what a better answer is, just thinking out loud.
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.
Hmm ok. I don’t know much about AI.
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.
No actually, it can combine concepts that aren’t present together in the dataset. Does it know what a child looks like? Does it know what porn looks like? Then it can generate child porn without having ever had CSAM in its dataset. See the corn dog comment as an argument
Edit: corn dog
Some of the image generators have attempted to put up guard rails to prevent generating pictures of nude children, but the creators/managers haven’t been able to eradicate it. There was also an investigation by Stanford University that showed that most of the really popular image generators had a not insignificant amount of CSAM in their training data and could be fairly easily manipulated into making more.
The creators and managers of these generative “AIs” have done slim to none in the way of curation and have routinely been trying to fob off responsibility to their users the same way Tesla has been doing for their “full self driving”.
A dumb argument. Corn and dog were. But that’s not a corn dog like what we expect when we think corn dog.
Hence it can’t get what we know a corn dog is.
You have proved the point for us since it didn’t generate a corn dog.
Ok makes sense. Yuck my skin crawls. I got exposed to CSAM via Twitter years ago, thankfully it was just a shot of nude children I saw and not the actual deed, but I was haunted.
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.
Think of it this way - what if the government said one day: “All child porn made in the before this date is legal, all child porn made after this date is illegal”.
You would end up with a huge corpus of “legal” child porn that pedophiles could use as a release, but you could become draconian about the manufacture of new child porn. This would, theoretically, discourage new child porn from being created, because the risk is too high compared to the legal stuff.
Can you see the problem? That’s right, in this scenario, child porn is legal. That’s fucked up, and we shouldn’t do that, even if it is “simulated”, because fuck that.
You definitely have a good point. I was just thinking hopefully to reduce harm but obviously I don’t want it to be legal.
“Because fuck that” is not a great argument.
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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?
perhaps, but I said convicted.