this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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If you read the article, this is a very specific legal question. And honestly, it's too gross to contemplate, and having a strong opinion about this on the internet is rightly suspicious.
The good news is the criminal in this case didn't just posess CSAM, and no matter how this shakes out, they going to jail.
Having a firm conviction about realizing fundamental rights & liberties to their logical limits isn't suspicious. Anything less is cowardice. The decision was sound.
I heard there is a theory from therapists that being able to create that content can help quell urges, and so we should allow it if it protects real kids, vile as it is. However others argue it could cause it cause more to cause harm.
Either way, the decision is well above my ability to decide, and while I would hope actual professionals would have a say, unfortunately it's going to be a political thing. Pandoras box is wide open though.
The problem there, which we won't ever solve because it's far too personal for most people, is that pedophilia is a mental disorder but we put it on the same level as child sexual abuse. So nobody would dare admit to it and nobody seeks actual treatment for it.
I don’t know if I buy the “could make them cause more harm” argument, specifically. IIRC there have been studies that show access to (adult) porn actually lowers the rate of sexual assault.
Yeah no idea personally, definitely something I'm not qualified to answer.
Ah, yeah to be clear I meant that in general and not specifically towards you.
This isn't someone drawing CP though. It's AI-generated CP, which means the model had to be actually trained on CP. You might argue that there are already models trained on CP, and the chicken is already in the nugget, but legalising it creates financial incentive to train on CP because then you can sell your model to paedophiles.
That's not how AI works. The people claiming that AI models have to be trained on CP to make CP have a fundamental misunderstanding of how image generation models work.
If I ask an AI model to make an image of a sexy air fryer fucking a sexy, anthropomorphic, ear of corn, it will produce said image. I promise it was not trained on sexy images of air fryers fucking sexy anthropomorphic ears of corn.
That's what makes AI so dangerous and difficult to regulate. We are not ready for this technology to be in the hands of everyone.
They're not wrong about the ruling incentivising CP though. I'm sure we'll see shitloads of sites outright advertising it now
You're wrong. Literally from the article
So get rid of that dataset, you'll still have systems that can generate similar images anyway. If it can generate images of things that do not and cannot exist in reality then it can generate CSAM without using real CSAM.
That doesn’t mean it has to be. It was, but that is a distinction. AI knows what children look like and AI knows what porn looks like. It is gross but it doesn’t mean there has to be a victim. There are, I’m sure, a ton of (pirated) medical journals and text books fed into many of them.
Correct, and another reason why it's complex. If it was trained on it that's bad, but if the user didn't do the training does that mean what they are doing is okay if it helps them? Or is it bad because of the source? It's a whole can of worms that we won't be able to come to a concensus here, too many grey areas.