I find it interesting that the relabeling of CP to CSAM weakens their argument here. “CP generated by AI is still CP” makes sense, but if there’s no abusee, it’s just CSM. Makes me wonder if they would have not rebranded if they knew about the proliferation of AI pornography.

The problem is that it abets the distribution of legitimate CSAM more easily. If a government declares “these types of images are okay if they’re fake”, you’ve given probable deniability to real CSAM distributors who can now claim that the material is AI generated, placing the burden on the legal system to prove it to the contrary. The end result will be a lot of real material flying under the radar because of weak evidence, and continued abuse of children.

Better to just blanket ban the entire concept and save us all the trouble, in my opinion. Back before it was so easy to generate photorealistic images, it was easier to overlook victimless CP because illustrations are easy to tell apart from reality, but times have changed, and so should the laws.

Not necessarily. There’s been a lot of advances in watermarking AI outputs.

As well, there’s the opposite argument.

Right now, pedophile rings have very high price points to access CSAM or require users to upload original CSAM content, adding a significant motivator to actually harm children.

The same way rule 34 artists were very upset with AI being able to create what they were getting commissions to create, AI generated CSAM would be a significant dilution of the market.

Is the average user really going to risk prison, pay a huge amount of money or harm a child with an even greater prison risk when effectively identical material is available for free?

Pretty much overnight the CSAM dark markets would lose the vast majority of their market value and the only remaining offerings would be ones that could demonstrate they weren’t artificial to justify the higher price point, which would undermine the notion of plausible deniability.

Legalization of AI generated CSAM would decimate the existing CSAM markets.

That said, the real question that needs to be answered from a social responsibility perspective is what the net effect of CSAM access by pedophiles has on their proclivity to offend. If there’s a negative effect then it’s an open and shut case that it should be legalized. If it’s a positive effect than we should probably keep it very much illegal, even if that continues to enable dark markets for the real thing.