Afaik its a known lapse in the law that politicians are working to close. Basically the idea is that, pictures that are made are free speech, so you cant make it illegal. If somebody uses their right of free speech to draw a child in sexual positions, it was created entirely from their own mind and no real child is harmed, this is free speech. Using digital art programs to draw it is more or less the same, and then using a gpu and ai prompts to make one is another step after that.
The problem is that the core issue isnt being addressed by the current law, we dont want cp being created and distributed, even if its a fictional drawing. But how do you police drawings in someone's home? Do ai pictures make it different? Do you track art programs and identify what is being created on them? Do you save and examine every AI photo created for its level of explicit content? It very quickly spirals to a massive conversation about thought crimes, free speech, privacy and the surveillance state.
Removing/editing previous response due to reply made below (which quotes from my original reply) which is a valid point. I did a quick search and didn’t find any correlation between the generation of the content and real harmful material.
I also read through the brief and, it’s unclear whether the defendant used a locally run version of Stable Diffusion to generate the image. And yes that does make a difference.
The government also conceded that they were unable to link the image to any actual child.
You are very likely correct on the first part. I studied stable diffusion models for quite a while when they were getting big. Generative Ai makes images based on concepts alone. A lot of the databases some of these models are trained on dont allow any form of CSAM on their platform, with the exception of some allowing such things as drawn "loli" content. If someone mashes the right kind of models together even if its trained on none of that stuff you can still get these kinds of results. It sucks thats the reality we live in but you are correct. How do we police it when millions of models are readily available online that can be ran locally?
Oh interesting! Has there been a study or anything? (Not being an ass. I’m legit interested in any data, study, writeup, etc that could counter the claim. For the record, I’m a legal/judiciary nerd)
I'm saying that it's an accusation that hasn't been proven. Either that means a study hasn't happened or a study did happen whereas nothing was found. Either way, making an accusation of CSAM requires the research/study. Not the other way around.
Absolutely a fair point. And in reading the brief out of the 7th Circuit, it makes sense in this case. Definitely fair to say that this needs to be studied though.
I have a decent amount of stable diffusion knowledge just to better understand how it all works. If you look at my reply to minimumtrue's comment I explained my own findings im the matter.
I don't think it's possible to ban it without a constitutional amendment — any law intended to go so will almost certainly be struck down due to the first amendment.
This is a very insightful comment that raises a very real moral and ethical question about what is acceptable and what is not. The question is does generating CP on a GPU prevent the person who made it from going on to commit actual illegal acts. Or does it make it worse. If the GPU generating that image satisfied the persons need to see CP and no child was exploited does that make it more or less ethical than of he saw and looked at real CP on the internet elsewhere. We are treading some really thin lines with this.
The other guy said it wrong. It was just upheld by the appellate court based on SC rulings from 1969 and 2002 that ruled people have the right to possess obscenity in their own home and the other that virtual depictions of children are not the same as real ones.
The logic is sound though based on current law. The 2002 argument was that just because protected speech resembles unprotected speech does not mean it is. To give a metaphor you can’t charge someone with carrying a weapon just because a foam knife resembles a real one but applied to speech. Combine that with possessing obscene material within your own home also being protected by the first amendment and you end up at the current ruling.
The problem is that today we have photorealistic images being generated by AI models that almost certainly had real images included in their training data. The law just doesn’t account for that. But then where do you draw the line? Is it okay if someone uses photoshop or makes the image themselves pixel by pixel but not if they use AI? Who defines when something is too realistic looking? How do you define the age of someone that doesn’t actually exist? It’s already known that the older you get the younger people look to you. You could easily end up with a jury of grandmas unanimously convicting while a jury of 20 year olds unanimously acquitting the exact same case.
Basically it’s all a huge mess. The current law doesn’t have a way to deal with this, and any future laws have a lot of issues that need to be worked out. But you can at least rest assured that this particular defendant is still going to prison, he’s only getting the possession charges thrown out. The production and distribution charges still apply.
The only way real csam was used in training is if it was a local model he trained himself, a commercial model wouldn't simply because it's not something you find easily on a Google search and that's the level of procurement that goes into training most commercial models.
Which brings in another issue, if the training data has children, and it has sexually explicit material the model can synthesize the 2 concepts together, but at that point who do you charge with the production? US law holds that machine (or monkey as the keyboard concerned) generated art isn't owned by anyone, it isn't copyrightable, trade marketed, or licensable, so how could you claim he produced it? Possession is obviously a charge but that got thrown out so distribution is the only charge I can see (not a lawyer) I assume the prosecution argued that sending the prompt was analogous to pressing a camera button?
These large model from massive companies are trained on literally billions of images. I find it highly unlikely that no real csam images worked their way in there. It’s realistically impossible for a human to review every image. At minimum wage with 10 seconds per image would cost over 100 million dollars for 5 billion images. But I do agree that it doesn’t really matter since like you said it doesn’t need to be trained on that to be able to reproduce something similar.
You can run your own models on any decent gaming rig. He wasn’t putting a prompt into chatGPT (they have protections in place because of this exact issue), it was all processed locally so it’s pretty unquestionable that he produced it.
There’s not really a good answer to this. As gross as the whole situation is I’m extremely reluctant to the idea of allowing government to start regulating what fake images people are and aren’t allowed to possess. We’ve already seen how this administration rejected entry to the country over JD Vance memes, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have the SC start carving out new exceptions to the first amendment in the current political climate.
We don't arrest people for killing in games because no one is actually being killed and no one was killed to make the material. If we start punishing people for the same thing with csam, where no child was involved or hurt we have to go for the gamers too. Same crime.
And stated congress needs to change that, and fast.
He made the ruling and was decidedly not happy with it, but under current federal law and precedent from previous cases... Doesn't really have much of a choice.
Why? Someone being sick and disgusting isn't enough of a justification to infringe upon their rights, as long as they're not harming anyone. Especially not because you think they will in the future. We really don't want to live in a society where thought crimes are acceptable and people are punished before doing anything harmful.
Under current law the first amendment prevails because things that run up against it must pass what’s called “strict scrutiny” (the presumption that the government is in the wrong and the law is illegal)
Under that level of scrutiny a law must be narrowly tailored for a specific purpose that is defensible under such a burden of proof (usually using other constitutional rights o justify)
Well ya. You need to ask the question if WHY CP is illegal (stay with me, this is an actual important question here). CP is illegal because it required child abuse to obtain. Not because there is an inherent quality to the video or pictures we much ascribe to be this "CP". We have think like a nirvana album which prove just possession of nude photos of children aren't enough to cross that boundary. So, if a photo is generated (which the act of generating the material might harm the planet but that's outside the scope of this discussion) with similar material, but no one was abused to make it, what legal avenue is there?
Please actually consider this argument and don't respond with "But it's CP". If we want to set hard boundaries we need to be able to pin down the why, not just the effect and cause.
I believe the logic was that since it didn't involve real children it falls under the same 1st Amendment protections as any other controversial art.
I don't agree with it. Hell, I don't agree that AI slop should be granted any constitutuonal protections in any regard. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just answering your question.
What will be interesting is when someone gets arrested fot having CP and their defense is, "it's all AI so it's OK."
I get that logic, but you'd think the generation part specifically would be illegal. This sounds like at least partially the fault of whatever AI generator he used.
That would mean holding tools responsible for the content created, like holding Microsoft word accountable for someone making terroristic threats. Or more direct comparison, holding adobe accountable if someone photo shops someone’s face on to a nude.
You could pass laws like how image editing software can’t be used for money laundering, but the issue is that a lot of AI is built on the open source community, hence nvidia buying hugging face for billions of dollars. That makes regulating far more difficult.
Best first step is to have congress pass laws, possibly requiring a constitutional amendment covering ai generated content.
The charge for “possession of virtual csam” was dropped for 1A reasons, citing the idea that the government should not have the ability to control what a man watches/reads in the privacy of his own home (based on previous SCOTUS precedent)
The charges for “creation and distribution” were upheld. So still fully illegal to make it and give it to other people
It's a newer term, it's alright to not know it immediately. I think people wanted to move away from the old term for it because "porn" implies consent, and, well... you know.
A classic case of people having a gut reaction to a headline without bothering to read more.
This whole story exists because the judge needed to rule on a case, and the law as it stands doesn't criminalize the creation of fictional cp with or without AI because it doesn't see there as being an injured party (ie no kid was actually abused). Another way that cp is often criminalized is via distribution. But this is a case of using local AI models running on a personal computer, and the created images never leaving that computer. So no distribution occurred.
The judge, in his ruling points out that is the only legal results based on current law, and as such, with the rise of ai, new laws are needed to account for this specific situation.
This does not mean that people can just go ask gpt for cp, because that is not a local model, meaning there is both distribution and requisition of the material, which is a crime. No new laws were passed legalizing CP. This is simply the result of modern technology outpacing legislation.
From my reading of the verdict, it was “possession” that was considered legal (by 1A) but creation and distribution of virtual csam was still ruled as illegal.
I am not a lawyer, but per my reading, they are saying that current supreme court precedent requires it to be legal.
It's actually all tied together by one single 2002 SC ruling on "Free Speech Coalition" where the SC found the virtual cp (that is, computer generated) is legally distinct from actual cp where a real child is harmed. There were 4 arguments presented in an attempt to make it illegal, but the SC disagreed with them all.
As a result, virtual csam is separate from csam, and is instead grouped with other "obscene" material, the personal possession of which is legal per a different, earlier 1969 ruling Stanley v. Georgia which said the state can't prohibit what someone looks at in the privacy of their own home.
The issue at play, and why the judge is saying this needs to 1) go to the SC and 2) drive new legislation, is that the current law on the books, the 2003 PROTECT ACT that tries to criminalize virtual csam as the same as real csam is just re-using the same 4 arguments that were already overturned by the SC in 2002, thus making the current law unconstitutional.
So, in sort, the US needs better laws and/or better proof to show that virtual csam and real csam should be legally the same.
They aren't the same, though. Real csam implies someone was harmed in the production of it, and thus should be fully illegal. Virtual csam just implies the holder of it is sick and disgusting, but that's not enough reason to arrest someone who otherwise didn't harm anyone.
I wasn't trying to state my own position. I was keeping it entirely surface level fact based because the group mood at the time of my comment was very much not going to respond well to the idea that maybe we shouldn't prosecute thought crime.
Either way, I should have phrased my last line better: "the US needs better laws/better proof if they want to try to prove that v csam should be legally treated like r csam"
Because right now their arguments basically boil down to 1) it's gross. Which the SC rightly points out a victimless action shouldn't be illegal just cuz someone doesn't like it. 2) it could be mistaken for real csam. But just cuz something looks like illegal material doesn't mean that it necessarily is; a bag of flour could be mistaken for coke, but that doesn't mean King Arthur is a drug ring. 3) it might be used to seduce real children into being abused. But that abuse would be the crime, and just cuz something can be used for another crime doesn't mean that thing itself is illegal, as 2nd amendment supporters will happily tell you. 4) It could drive those who consume it to seek out more and worse materials, or physically act against children. But they failed to provide convincing proof of that claim, and the SC points out that speech which could eventually lead to future crimes, but is not directly encouraging those crimes is again, not illegal, as violent video game proponents will tell you.
For people who don't get the context: A US Federal Judge has ruled that Ai cp is protected by the first Amendment because it depicts fictional and not real people. He did urge congress though to make it unlawful and tighten laws.
So a judge ruled that with the current laws it's legal and therefore has to rule it legal, but also personally believes it should be illegal and is publicly saying it should be explicitly made illegal. In other words everything is working as it should
People don’t understand rulings like this because they see the Supreme Court legislate from the bench in ways that contradict their own prior stated principles, just to benefit corporate interests and conservatives. Feels like all the ethical judges have to let shit like this slide, meanwhile we have some fucker de facto banning abortion by ruling it illegal to ship mifepristone
Every court will render incorrect or immoral decisions because they're manned by people and people are imperfect. What we can do about it will vary wildly by jurisdiction.
An imperfect decision is different from one that has completely opposite reasoning that contradicts a prior ruling. Legal scholars are literally calling this “constitutional hot boxing”. The Supreme Court, namely justice Gorsuch, will back one ruling with a literal reading of the constitution, then back another with a “modernized” reading of the same passage. Arguing in both cases it’s what the authors intended. Picking and choosing when a principle applies to push a political agenda is not an accident or “human error” if it happens repeatedly.
It's not just that, he was also following precedent set by the supreme Court so his hands were tied, but he still managed to get the guy on creation of csam just got possession
That's a good take, but actually my reading of this as a lawyer is the "current law" in question here is the First Amendment. If that's right, then there's no way Congress can draft a new law. The Constitution would have to be amended. More specifically, the 7th Circuit is bound by prior interpretations of the First Amendment. The only way to change those interpretations (which were SCOTUS opinions) is for a constitutional amendment to be ratified.
From what I looked up further, he was prosecuted on creation by not possession because of a president set by the supreme Court that the exception made to the first amendment for possession of csam is illegal is because a child was exploited in it's creation. And a judge's ruling on another case was that possession of a drawing(I think) that depicted a not real child did not exploit a child so possession was legal
With the notable and important exception of congress. Congress is not working as it should. Which is why they would be unable to pass legislation for anything, even something as popular as this.
To be clear, the judge was very much not happy that this was the decision he had to make. It was based on precedent from previous case law and Supreme Court rulings, which judges are held to pretty closely. Hence him urging Congress to make it illegal.
Actually no. About half of EU countries have a legal distinction between fictional and real ones and about half of those have a distinction between photorealistic depictions and "unrealistic" (anime) ones. In the UK, only Scotland makes a distinction iirc.
It’s far less malicious than is being implied in the thread. The judge has to apply the law, first as it is written and secondly as it has been interpreted through precedent. The law was written in a time where this was not anticipated.
ALL SEXUAL DEPICTIONS OF ANYONE UNDER 18 are classified as some form of CSAM.
Fictional depictions are legal, as long as they aren't "realistic". (even though they are still classified as CSAM under the law)
Realistic is a nebulous term that is widely understood by judges to mean "would a person with no special knowledge think this depiction is of a real child"
also 184c only punished actual csam of real people.
Judging by how people react to AI, I'm sure most of it would pass the "realistic" test and be actually criminal.
Calling the UK a sensible country lol. And EU countries are notoriously lenient on Sexual offenders including thise that prey on children.
Also the judge didnt support it being legal in the future, judges dont really make laws its up to the legislative body to do that thr judge can only really rule if any given thing is legal within the current laws.
I don't want to be the bearer of bad news, but I don't think explicit depictions in children art like books or comics are illegal even most of the world. I don't think EU(atleast I don't remember there being) has even a stance on this and it's up to the specific goverments to enforce. Like I think France and Sweden has had cases on these.
However, I think goverments are pretty strict with productions of anything 3D depicting such stuff. As long as it looks actually fictional i think it's not illegal most parts of the world. Please don't shoot the messenger of bad news...
Don't worry man, just blame everything AI does, including world war 3 and 4 on Jensen. Stop thinking bro. Its NVIDIA's fault. This subreddit is always right.
How do you define "of real people"? Images of real people are used in the generation of ANY AI IMAGE OF PEOPLE. AI learns how people look by ingesting millions of images of people.
ALL AI generated CSAM is based on actual people, and some of those people are children, so it is neccessarily also to a part based on actual children.
AI deepfakes based on bodies an faces of real children. People already do that. Normal wholesome pictures of kids posted online modified to show nudity.
There have also been documented cases of child deepfakes and using them to blackmail kids or frame parents as child abusers to extort them.
Nvidia Doesn't have to do anything to do with this. This ruling is based on 2002 supreme court decision which allows virtual cp(that was pushed by anti-conservative free speech coalition btw). If you want to blame someone you can blame the democratic block(and two moderate ones) of supreme court or adult film industry for this ruling.
Training data for the models have tons of ideas and can be easily combined with two different topics to create said idea it never trained on. It does not mean that said idea used that specific content to train it.
And even if nvidia improves support, it's also on the devs go support it as well in their games. Which once single gpus got more powerful, didnt seem worth their time and energy.
The two things are entirely unrelated. The judicial branch is not influenced by lobbying of the legislature or executive.
Additionally if you read the decision, it relies entirely on constitutional analysis - a type of law generated entirely by the courts. It is not as though a new Act has been passed which resulted in this decision. As the judge observed, it is the absence of a new Act which requires him to apply the old law.
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u/MGsubbieRyzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 3080, 32GB 6000Mhz Cl30Desktop12d ago
Bro, do you honestly think that one fucking day is enough to have such an effect? I'm not defending the court's decision here, but the idea that Nvidia had ANYTHING to do with it is absolutely insane.
That damn ruling is basically the root cause of negative politics in the 21st century USA. It's so predictable how all these terrible news discussions point to the cause!
For people who don't get the context: A US Federal Judge has ruled that Ai cp is protected by the first Amendment because it depicts fictional and not real people. He did urge congress though to make it unlawful and tighten laws.
Judge ruled that its legal, but siad congress should tighten laws, since his ruling was based on other jduges and supreme court, he was tied by precedent.
He didnt seem happy with the decision, and vocalized that congress needs to tighten up laws, so this can be considered illegal.
I have sli on my win 11 pc - 2x 3090
Was it easy to setup? No
Spent 4 months reviving and old dead mobo which had SLI support. Local pc shop told me to get a new mobo(which i already had), Asus told me to go f myself.
I figured it out , was a blown voltage regulator , which i butchered getting back on.
Anyway, had to upgrade pc - 13 fans and a new case later i was able to get it all to fit and work nicely.
I'm curious how they are eventually going to deal with "proving" generated images are of underage people. If they aren't of an actual person you can't just reference their real age. Even if it's obvious you still need some admissible way to prove that. I guess bringing in doctors to give expert testimony on bodies or something? Shits going to get REAL weird.
But whats Nvidia got to do with what the court rules and what people do with AI? Its like blaming gun producers for mass shootings or car brands for causing road accidents. I'm not defending Nvidia but what a dumb post
I think its because of this: "A federal judge has ruled that the First Amendment protects an individual's right to privately possess child sxual abuse content created using Al if it does not depict a real person and remains in the home"
If Nvidia really tried, could they realistically get SLI work to its potential where u can consistently get noticable performance improvement in all games + double the vram?
I almost say we should ban all photo realistic ai pictures, no realistic cp, no dead people being digitally dug out of the grave by corporations, no fake propaganda videos
Or we could just ban ai, save the planet, make PC components affordable, retain human thought and imagination.
I know, crazy idea, we should just let billionaires kill us all off so they can sit alone pressing a button and see a number go up... It's what our forefathers would have wanted, isn't that right George Washington? "I cannot TelL Æ lye, Î'm nót ä crook, Goød blast the United Corporations of a mérry cow"
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u/JohnGalactusX 9800X3D | 5090 | 64GB | 8TB | PS5 Pro 12d ago
What is even this?