Isn’t it a good thing for pedophiles to have an outlet for their desires that doesn’t involve harming children? Am I not seeing an obvious downside?

It depends on whether you hold a world view where every person is valuable and needs help and understanding to become their best self or one where there are good and bad people and the baddies need to be punished and locked away so everyone else can live their life in peace.

That’s a ridiculously strict and binary view that reduces this issue to the point of absurdity.

involving minors

But if it’s just generated by AI there might be no involvement

It doesn’t matter. We cannot indulge the distribution of media with sex acts depicting minors.

I’m not saying it’s better alternative, I’m saying it might not make sense to talk about it “involving minors”.

All right, if we want to be picky about the wording “incredibly photo realistic depictions of minors.”