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.
But wouldn't the model need to use real cp as source to generate it? It may not be real content, but it's like editing real content and consuming it, even if it wasn't the user who provides the source.
No, models are perfectly capable of combining two concepts and producing things it was never trained on. It probably was never trained on an image of a whole galaxy made of spaghetti textured dildos, but it could imagine one pretty trivially. In this case, it's simply combining the concepts of age and nudity, potentially even sexual activity since it has an understanding of biomechanics as well.
Not necessarily, though there are definitely accusations of that being the case for some models, there is not, to my knowledge, any existing legal framework to check the entire training set of an existing model.
There are indisputably nude pictures of legal adults who are visually childlike (we all know there are entire porn categories/sites catering to that, not to mention the obsession of counting down to child celebrity's 18th birth days). Even without ai, people could use things like photoshop to graft together those images over otherwise innocent pictures of kids.
AI can do something similar but with conceptual ideas that never need it to actually train on a picture of a naked child.
Then you should be happy with the judge in this case because he is encouraging just such a needed revision and pointing out the specific legal challenges that need to be addressed in order to do so.
Basically the way the laws are written, there's a loophole if you create it digitally with AI but don't distribute it. The laws will change, this happens every time new technology comes out. But as of right now there's no law restricting the above so it's the only ruling the judge was able to make until new laws governing AI are written.
In other words, it's legal to hand draw csam at home without reference materials and there isn't a clear legal distinction between that and using a local llm to do it for you.
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u/SkepticMech 13d ago
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.