[HN Gopher] Appeals court rules that Constitution protects posse...
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Appeals court rules that Constitution protects possession of AI-
generated CSAM
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 21 points
Date : 2025-03-20 21:51 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techpolicy.press)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techpolicy.press)
| sparky_ wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but this sure seems to open a legal and ethical can
| of worms.
|
| Image generation models capable of generating this type of
| content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing,
| the possession of which is inarguably illegal and immoral.
|
| So how could the model be legally or ethically trained? And if
| they _cannot_ be legally or ethically trained, then how can the
| _use_ of those models be okay?
|
| What will be the implications of this in cases where _real_ CSAM
| was produced or possessed? Certainly this opens the door to a
| whole plethora of new "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses. After
| all, how can one definitely prove that CSAM is authentic or not,
| unless the chain of production is verified?
|
| From the article: > ...If purely private possession of AI-CSAM is
| constitutionally protected under current caselaw but production
| is not, then using AI models (even locally-hosted ones) to
| generate child obscenity in one's own home is not wholly
| insulated from criminal prosecution. Subsequently transmitting it
| to someone else, especially someone underage, is also grounds for
| liability...
|
| Can of worms, ye be released!
| braiamp wrote:
| This is a common misunderstanding. The thing knows how a naked
| woman looks, also knows how a child looks, it puts two and two
| together and voila. It doesn't need to be trained on the real
| thing to be able to generate it.
| delecti wrote:
| Does that necessarily follow? Wouldn't that be prone to
| outputting small naked adult women, and/or naked children
| with boobs?
| roenxi wrote:
| > Image generation models capable of generating this type of
| content would necessarily need to be trained on the real thing,
|
| I doubt that is so. In practice they _might_ be trained on the
| real thing, but models generalise pretty well. It is going to
| be technically possible to train a model on other material
| (children, nudity and non-CSAM abuse scenes or maybe not even
| that) and have it generate CSAM.
|
| But even if it was true, that would only make training the
| model illegal and ethically dubious. We use a tonne of
| technologies where the creator was legally and morally dubious.
| It's never been an ongoing issue before. So once the model is
| created there isn't a good reason to encumber it by how it was
| created.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Certainly this opens the door to a whole plethora of new
| "it's AI art, I swear!" defenses
|
| You are probably right, given what we saw with all the porn
| popup adware back in the 90's and 2000's. A friend of mine was
| a malware analyst for the FBI for a while.
|
| All CSAM possession cases she heard about, the defense was
| "malware did it". Nearly all cases the jury convicted them.
| 100% of her cases for sure.
|
| At some point using the defense everyone else uses and fails
| with is probably going to become a liability. Shit I am sure
| people are already trying to use this defense and failing!
| grepfru_it wrote:
| It only went to court because they had enough evidence to
| prove it is not malware. You have excluded all of the
| possible cases that used the malware defense and plea'd out
| or never went to trial.
|
| Similarly, I think using the AI art excuse may be an uphill
| battle but not one that is impossible to defend
| milesrout wrote:
| Misleading headline. This appears to be a district court
| decision, not an appeal court decision. The first four words are
| "A US district court" and the very end is about leave to appeal
| being granted by an appellate court - but the appeal hasn't been
| heard yet.
| treetalker wrote:
| Came here to say this. The article refers to a decision from
| the United States District Court for the Western District of
| Wisconsin (of all places). HN post title should be changed.
| danaris wrote:
| If it is AI-generated, it may be "child porn", but it is, by
| definition, _not_ "CSAM"--Child Sexual Abuse Materials--because
| no real, live child was harmed in its creation.
|
| Words have meaning, and while language does drift over time, it's
| important to maintain the meanings of certain kinds of words and
| phrases that draw important distinctions.
| RajT88 wrote:
| In the US at least. Last I heard in the UK you could still get
| sent to prison for Mangas.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_po...
| _--__--__ wrote:
| Not the whole US, the Texas state government just passed a
| ban on virtual and non-photorealistic 'obscene' depictions of
| minors
| basisword wrote:
| >> no real, live child was harmed in its creation
|
| That's a big claim. If the model was trained on CSAM then I
| would argue that any image generation that comes from it is
| harmful to the original children. In the same way copies of
| already existing content continue to harm the victim.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| English can be parsed multiple ways, and CSAM can just as
| validly refer to a depiction or topic or subject, like "flying
| alien dogs material" as some actual act. Unless there is some
| legal definition on the books that does explicitly make that
| distinction.
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(page generated 2025-03-20 23:01 UTC)