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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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A major consideration most people are missing is that the legal definition of child pornography includes:

"any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where— such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct"

If you ship an AI waifubot capable of creating sexually explicit content, and you can't robustly keep it from saying "tee-hee, I'm only 16," you are going to get arrested.

That is sadly true, I'm a big fan of fixed Schelling points otherwise but the age limits are too sacred (for good reason, to be clear). I see no way we get around this with waifubots unless we can categorically declare AI tools as not harmful in this regard because no actual children get hurt, and because the concept of age doesn't even apply to LLMs, but I think it's obvious this line of argument will not fly in the current climate.

This is complicated further by advocates having thoroughly poisoned the well. I've spent enough time in the company of vocal pedos loli enjoyers to have genuine disdain for their arguments and tactics, even considering where I come from. The chatbot threads have a rich tradition of shitstorms on the topic, every second or third thread has a minor meltdown over either loli-adjacent things being the canary in the coom coal mine that is always the first to go but never the last to go - once censorship comes the powers-that-be will never stop at loli - OR pedos ruining everything they touch for everybody because, like furries of yore, they are physically incapable of keeping their (repulsive to many) fetish to themselves.

It's actually a good example of a motte-and-bailey in action: (motte) nothing is truly uncensored as long as age stuff is verboten, and technically AI stuff is completely harmless anyway, so (bailey) this means a coomer is literally oppressed unless he can plaster loli porn over everything with zero repercussions. It's a regular pattern at this point:

  • New source/exploit is found
  • All is well, security in obscurity
  • People obsessed with loli grow bolder, start shitting up threads
  • This eventually blows up into a proper Masquerade breach
  • Source is cracked down on, exploit is fixed
  • Loli lovers retreat to the motte en masse and deny any responsibility

The above link is from the first Anthropic hackathon back in May, which was immediately noticed by 4chan as a lucrative source of Claude access and, once their janitors woke up and actually started screening teams, was raided via Discord in righteous fury. This has since become a tradition and loli lovers have a reputation as harbingers of doom - as CSAM is considered one of the gravest threats at the moment, as soon as there is evidence of it being generated (and, knowing 4chan, it was being generated from T-5 minutes of the source being discovered), people scramble to shut it down.

To link all this back to the main topic, this was how it went for Chub as well: the reason Lore got panned by the journo and was forced to update his ToS for is mostly because one retard on a crusade (SFW link, surprisingly), an infamous thread lolcow responsible for most "CP" cards mentioned in the article, has been insistent on using AI-genned photorealistic pics for his loli cards. He was warned, he did nothing, the pics and some cards got purged, and he has been sperging in threads and on chub ever since.

I hope to never know what prompts a man to shit out a literal manifesto when he is not allowed to use photorealistic lolis as thumbnails for his cards, esp. considering the pic changes literally nothing about the content of the card itself. Sanest internet pedo, I suppose.

That definition flies in the face of current Supreme Court precedent

Lol, congress really just changed, "is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct", to, "is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct".

To be fair, current image generation technology was unthinkable back in 2003.

That definition is very clear that it pertains to "visual depictions". I don't think LLMs have anything to worry about. If text erotica involving minors was illegal, then prisons would be filled with fanfic writers. It is a PR risk, but that's all.

Also, even for visual depictions, one should note that it says "indistinguishable from". Which is very narrow and not nearly as broad as "intended to represent", so e.g. drawn or otherwise unrealistic images don't count. My guess is this was intended to prevent perps with real CP trying to seed reasonable doubt by claiming they were made by photoshop or AI.

I suspect this was never expected to be a real issue when it was written, just closing a loophole. Now that image generation has gotten so good, it is a real legal concern. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a large part of why SDXL is so bad at human anatomy and NSFW.

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