In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own life after cops discovered that he had used Grok to create 7,000 sexually explicit images using one photo taken when his stepdaughter was 11 years old, the amended complaint alleged.
Grok allowed the man to generate extreme images depicting incest and rape without flagging any harmful behavior, the complaint said. Seemingly, xAI’s child safety system only intervened after the man input a prompt for “gang rape.” That request sent a CyberTip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which alerted law enforcement to the AI CSAM.
Yet the harm was not stopped then, either. Despite mandatory reporting requirements to share information like a user’s IP address when CSAM is flagged, xAI repeatedly refused to help cops or NCMEC identify the user, the complaint alleged. For weeks, xAI allegedly “obstructed this investigation at every turn” and made it harder for “law enforcement efforts to locate, identify, and apprehend the perpetrator.”
Eventually, the stepfather was arrested after cops obtained a warrant to seize his devices. That’s when “a forensic review revealed approximately 7,000 AI-generated images and videos” depicting his stepdaughter, which were allegedly produced using Grok. Without Grok providing users with easy access to “undressing” capabilities, his family doubts he ever would have generated the harmful images, which he allegedly trafficked online in trade for “CSAM produced by other child sex predators.”
On one hand, this is great news, he's no longer here to be gross.
On the other hand, could these images have served as an outlet for his perversion, and kept his step-daughter safe for years?
On the other other hand, was access to this what twisted him? Was he reasonable at one time?
He did the right thing in the end, this was the best possible outcome for everyone.
If you have a fetish, and start masturbating to that fetish, does the fetish not get stronger? Like, if you are into feet, does jerking into to feet not make you more likely to want to engage in foot play?
It seems to be basic operant conditioning. See thing, jerk off, feel good. And there’s also desensitization, where you seek out more and more extreme stuff.
I don’t think CSAM replaces the desire to hurt children. I think it increases it. I also know that it’s a tool used to groom children.
I think we'll never know scientifically because there's no ethical manner of conducting the study. No one's going to supply a known pedophile with CSAM and see whether or they they molest someone, or hook up a gizmo to their head and measure their brainwaves when they go to a playground. It would probably answer a lot of questions if they did, but we as a society usually agree these questions aren't worth scarring a child over.
I’d argue for using a study with something like another common, but legal and harmless paraphilia - feet was the one I suggested earlier - but otherwise arbitrary. I’m making an argument based on transferability but that’s reasonable here I think. The only thing we can’t control is societal disapproval, so maybe you can substitute something else like hardcore BDSM, but you can’t really replicate the pure evil factor of CSAM. Maybe animal abuse content in an area where that is legal but I don’t really like that either. Rough misogynistic BDSM content is probably the happy medium here.
You’d do something like get two groups. One that you prevent from accessing the content somehow, and one that has access to that content. The obvious problem is controlling access to content. Maybe it’s just a monitoring program with unrestricted access to the internet but tracking visit frequency to that type of content, where one group is told/incentivized to not visit such content, while the other is given no such instructions; maybe it has to be self reported frequencies. Maybe one group is explicitly given just the instructions that specific type of content is specifically legal and that there is no harm in enjoying that content. Recruit among communities that enjoy that specific content, in forums where they are already not self censoring.
Maybe another DV is ranking subjective scores of intensity. I think you could do this by categorizing tags, which are amply available on most pornographic content, into sorta but arguable subjective ratings of intensity. Maybe this is a mixed methods paper where the quantitative aspect is the frequency of visits stuff, while qualitative is theme analysis on the tags.
If it has to be specific to CSAM, perhaps it’s measurements of how many possessors go onto be offenders over their life time. I doubt mandated counseling works often enough to be that much of a confounding variable.
Well, that's kinda a problem, because what if it's one way for a harmless paraphillia, but different for a harmful one? You'd never know without doing that crucial and specific experiment. You could at best extrapolate that it could plausibly be the same, but that's not the same as actually knowing.
I apologize if it looks like I'm being pedantic. I'm in kind of a philosophical mood. I felt the need to clarify I'm not trying to be difficult for whatever reason.
No research can prove a positive.
Most research in social sciences uses a p-value of 0.05. Statistically, this means that we are expected a 1/20 chance of a type 1 error, a false positive.
It’s more about establishing patterns than “proof” of any kind of absolute law. Human behavior isn’t governed like rigid bodies or genetics.
I'm more into art and philosophy than science, so if that's your background then I'm not going to argue with you. It's obvious from the way you talk versus how I talk that we're approaching the question from fundamentally different angles. I'll kindly return to up my own ass, where all philosophers go when we're done talking.
Geez, if only there were alternatives to ai generated csam, like therapy and medication??
Yes, it's not a perfect fix, and it is hard, but people overcome drug addictions with therapy and meds, and I am pretty sure that nothing beats heroin...
I'd bet that the societal stigma actually makes it more difficult than heroin in spite of the raw addictiveness. Society does look down on drug addicts, but there's still a decent chunk of people who will be understanding and rooting for them sincerely when they're trying to overcome it. I have to imagine it would be infinitely harder to find just one person you feel safe asking for help, much less an entire community.
I have to think they'd be much less dangerous in a society more willing to differentiate between pedophilia and predation just because of how much of a difference community support can make. If they feel like the only people they can open up to are other pedophiles, that's probably not a recipe for hearing healthy perspectives.
On the other hand, it's probably easier for me to say this stuff from my armchair with no children of my own and not even interacting with any children on a regular basis.
What kind of community support do you offer a person who needs external help to not sexually assault children? How the fuck do you welcome a person like that into a community? They will be a constant threat.
That's not to say all pedophiles are dangerous. I'm sure there's many people with that issue who just keep it to themselves and probably feel terrible about it, but these comments about them needing an outlet? Fuck no, they shouldn't be entertaining those kinds of thoughts at all, even as a fantasy.
You don't welcome someone who is currently dangerous. My point is that a person who is facing an entire lifetime of self-loathing in silence is more likely to eventually become a threat years down the road. Most people feel a need to get things off their chest after a long enough time hurting quietly, and someone in that position will be much more likely to turn into a predator if the only people they feel safe opening up to are other pedophiles. You can call opening up to someone who can give them healthy perspectives "an outlet", but I think it would be less harmful than repression. I'd rather they try to get help and have other people aware of the issue.
Realistically there's no magic wand to solve this, but I do believe that pushing people who are not predators underground is much more dangerous than looking at it as an illness that deserves support in mitigating.
Would medication even help in this case? We don't really have medication that can affect sexuality in that fine-grained a way.
Maybe a chemical castrarion
1: No, it would not work
2: wtf
This worked well for those pesky gays. It's the only humane option.
/s
Is there evidence therapies and medication actually help their desires for CSAM? I don't know if there's great research in either direction
GLP-1s have been found to curb all kinds of compulsive behaviors. Might be some promise there. I'd imagine intractable pedophiles are not the easiest demographic to round up for drug trials.
Would it even be possible to ethically research such a thing in the first place? You certainly can't just throw a battery of drugs and therapy at humans.
Plus, research into altering sexuality to that degree verges into quite uncomfortable territory. It doesn't take a great leap of the imagination to think that such research could easily be misused for things like conversion therapy.
Even if it was an outlet he used her image, which in itself is not okay, and was trading them to others online. Killing himself was the right choice. He should have done it before making the images in the first place. Or sought mental help but I'm not sure what can actually be done about pedophilia.
Read this last bit again: "Without Grok providing users with easy access to “undressing” capabilities, his family doubts he ever would have generated the harmful images, which he allegedly trafficked online in trade for “CSAM produced by other child sex predators.” He traded them for CSAM of other girls.
To play devil's advocate, it's inherently a bad idea to take a criminal's family's claims at face value. They are heavily incentivised to downplay the pedo's culpability
I don't think that's what the person you replied to was saying. They're highlighting that there was more to it than just him using AI to make CSAM as the family said.
He was trading these pictures for material from others so other children were hurt in trade of his step child being victimized. She may not have been physically victimized but her likeness was portrayed in CSAM which now she knows about and is going to damage her mentally.