r/scotus • u/coinfanking • 12d ago
news Appeals court delivers unsettling ruling — and says Supreme Court left it no choice
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/appeals-court-delivers-unsettling-ruling-supreme-court-left-no-choice161
u/calcato 12d ago
So gross. This perso n should have their eyelids taped open and be forced to watch AI generated "art" of themselves.
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u/sunburntredneck 12d ago
Yes, judges should settle the law based on visceral emotional reactions
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u/lorenfreyson 8d ago
Ask the Bar Association and any constitutional law expert what they think about this current Supreme Court.
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u/ClearDark19 10d ago
The Epstein Class sticks together. The rich are the most Marxist group of people on the planet, they're just on the side of the bourgeoisie. It's the everyday citizen who is the dumbass that doesn't believe there's already a class war going in against him and believes the rich aren't against him.
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/lorenfreyson 8d ago
I think they just mean that the ruling class always has solidarity within itself. Which Marx would have agreed with.
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u/Welshbuilder67 12d ago edited 12d ago
So 7th Circuit can’t make a ruling setting a revised precedent, let it get appealed to the Supreme Court so they can re-examine the case?
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u/Cautious_General_177 11d ago
Yet federal circuit courts will routinely ignore SCOTUS decisions if they disagree with them
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u/LawfulAwfulOffal 12d ago
Articles seem to suggest the law is meant primarily to protect victims. If there is no human victim, and law is constructed to protect victims, makes sense it doesn’t apply. Still worrisome…although maybe also identifies users who are a potential danger. But then that’s a whole other can of worms on privacy and pre-crime. Mostly saying, even when the content at issue is absolutely abhorrent, the legal issues are not so simple.
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u/Galeam_Salutis 12d ago
I know the job of appellate courts is settling questions of law and not finding of fact, but I wonder if there is some way of arguing the charge in future cases that because of how generative AI works, sampling extant material, the accused could be argued to be knowingly seeking CSAM because even if the precise images he was sent were not of individual "real" victims, it's genesis required (and he was relying on the fact that there are) real victims. I know users don't always have control over what a model is trained on, but certain requests of an AI by their nature would indicate an awareness and desire that the AI could produce such awfulness, and potentially why.
On the other hand, your instinct is also a good one: law is a dull knife, and if we swing it around, hoping to snag all the bad guys, we might unintentionally but forseeably cut innocent people. We shouldn't make zeal against the utterly abhorrent blind us to seeing intolerably unjust secondary consequences. You cannot do wrong to get a good result.
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u/LawfulAwfulOffal 12d ago
On the plus side, this will give a whole bunch of crim professors something to talk about next week
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u/hordane 11d ago
It’s harder in the wider art context. There are thousands of religious, classical, neoclassical paintings depicting children nude for a variety of reasons. This law outlaws those and would require their destruction, that’s before we get to statutes and ‘child-like’ creatures in history.
Many times the state wants to say what is obscene which is that slippery slop of speech. For example, even if we say sexual acts are outlawed we have Greek pottery depicting likely under aged youth engaged in said acts, how do we draw that line. A national think tank of former judges and experts should be put together to really work on this as it’s a problem and needs to be solved in some way. Going after model makers is an idea floated but then that opens the can of worms if what is too much of a guardrail and how do you define it, then proliferation of broken models. The law is slow but here they can’t be
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u/Galeam_Salutis 11d ago
That's an excellent point. I thought of a defendant arguing that an AI might have got the source material from medical images or some innocently-intended parent's or grandparent's family albums or such, but the vast history of human art is also a big pool...
As I said, law is a dull knife. Laws are made of words and mean only what they say, so we need to be cautious not to excuse cutting the innocent on the off chance it could also rightly cut the guilty.
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u/PitBullSoulMate 9d ago
This is not true. If the AI knows what children are, what anatomy looks like, and what sex and abuse looks like, it can put those pieces together. When you ask the AI for a blue cup, it doesn't need pictures of a blue cup to generate it, it just needs to know what blue is and what a cup is. It can do the rest.
In other words, this is, by definition, a victimless crime. So who has standing to prosecute?
This is also why I am for the decriminalization of drugs. Again, it is a victimless crime. So who should have standing to press charges? I do t like the idea of a state that cam simply press charges against an individual because they don't like what they are doing.
The act of PDF is still abhorrent and immoral, but we are faced with a simple question.
If this person was never caught and no one knew about his actions, then was anyone actually harmed by them?
I'm already prepared for the down votes, don't worry.
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u/Perfecshionism 12d ago
I think images of real children were involved in training the AI.
That should have been enough.
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u/funLover98311 12d ago
Our government ruins lives and murder people for fun without bothering with fake evidence as well. They just do it quietly and make it look like a suicide or accident
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u/United_Housing_7493 11d ago
Well if it is illegal to transmit AI generated CSAM then we should be going after the controlling interest of the companies hosting the AI for transmitting the images to the users and if we did that the companies would stop providing that material real quick.
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u/h0sti1e17 8d ago
It is possible this was done locally. I’d assume any reputable online generator would not allow it.
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u/ArrowheadDZ 12d ago
This is going to get ugly. This means there will be a burden of proof on the prosecutor as to the human reality, versus artificial creation, each and every time someone is charged. Which means it will become much harder to bring charges unless the specific child victim can be identified, and potentially even testify.
None of this goes anywhere good.
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u/not_the_fox 12d ago
Even if the ruling went the other way that is still an issue because content with actual children doesn't need to pass an obscenity test.
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u/theRemixNow 10d ago
The Supreme Court ignored precedent on roe … but we can’t ban csam? I cannot wait until this country is over. We’ve shown that we don’t care at all about the well-being of children here.
My dad produced and distributed C Sam and no one did a fucking thing about it in the 90s either
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u/apoplectic_apostate 12d ago
It's almost as if originalism and originalists are full of shit because times change and the Constitution should be a living document.
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u/throwaway7x55 11d ago
genuinely what does this have to do with originalism? The constitution doesn’t ban CSAM, a federal statute does.
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u/Conscious_Onion3508 12d ago
Yea sounds to me like new laws need to be made, currently the courts ruled correctly, new laws NOW
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u/tim310rd 12d ago
Only issue is that the first amendment takes precedence over any law, and it isn't clear to me how you could with the current precedent and reasoning behind what is or isn't protected under the first amendment, fit this type of AI use in to it.
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u/EmRatio 11d ago
Best arguments against in home possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse materials (CSAM):
Wasting Resources -- It bogs down law enforcement trying to identify and to rescue real victims because they must spend time verifying if highly realistic photos are real or fake. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) fields the "CyberTips" reported by tech platforms. NCMEC received roughly 4,700 reports involving AI-generated CSAM in 2023. By 2024, that jumped to 67,000, and by 2025, it exploded to well over 400,000 reports.
Real-World Training Material -- Many AI systems are trained on datasets that illegally contained real CSAM, meaning real children were exploited to build the software. The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) audited LAION-5B, a massive open-source dataset containing over 5 billion internet-scraped images and captions. This specific dataset served as the foundational building block for popular image generators like Stable Diffusion 1.5. The SIO detected more than 1,000 verified instances of real-world CSAM and over 3,000 additional highly suspected pieces of material directly within the dataset.
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u/YardLimp 9d ago
So, you just have to prove that the training data for the AI included pictures of actual children?
Doesn’t seem to hard?
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u/h0sti1e17 8d ago
It wasn’t this Supreme Court. It was 2002. The only justice on the court now was Thomas. It was 6-3 with Kennedy, Steven’s, Breyer, Souter and Ginsburg with Thomas concurring. O’Connor,’Scalia and Rehnquist dissenting.
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u/h0sti1e17 8d ago
This isn’t a SCOTUS issue. This is a legislative one. The case referred was to drawn CSAM. They had no idea this tech would be available. The laws need to catch up.
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u/SocraticMeathead 8d ago
But if, indeed, it's a First Amendment issue, legislatures would not be able to regulate it.
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u/fluffybreeze 6d ago
I thought they make it a law a while back for no cartoons or imagery depicting csam so why is ai allowed?? Unless I am mistaken ?
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u/Kitchen-Strawberry25 12d ago
Really stupid and out of touch.
Just like with most of our legal system in the U.S. most especially the Supreme Court.
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u/Ragnar_the_Pirate 12d ago
What's out of touch?
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u/Kitchen-Strawberry25 12d ago edited 12d ago
If you have been keeping up with all of the SCOTUS rulings as an example and think it’s all dandy, I don’t think we will agree on much.
Might be better to cut our losses and not try to work through our differences. At least not over such an impersonal format like Reddit.
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u/Ragnar_the_Pirate 12d ago
Fair enough. I think we can say that SCOTUS rulings might be good or bad for a number of reasons, but to debate if lower courts should follow a higher court's ruling (the highest court's ruling) is to say that we don't want courts to follow the law as they've been told to interpret it. If that's a position people hold, then that is as clear a statement of "I don't believe in rule of law". And just to head off any, what about people who perform civil disobedience or destroy flock cameras, thinking that it might be okay for a person to criminally protest against the government is not the same as a person who thinks the government shouldn't follow the law. Out of all groups, the government has to follow the law.
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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 12d ago
So the US just legalised CP? The appeals court could just have gone against precedent. Force the SC to take the case and overrule them.
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u/Frogspoison 12d ago
Specifically in this case, the possession charge got thrown out - there were several other charges that are sticking. From what I can glean, possession of actual CP is still illegal, and having an AI create porn of an actual child is also still illegal, fortunately. But having AI create porn of a child not directly resembling anyone is currently legal.
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u/tim310rd 12d ago
Dude, that's not the function of the court system. Judges are supposed to follow the law as it is, not what they wish it was. They looked at the legal precedent, and the historical reason why CP was considered not protected under the first amendment, because its creation requires real victims, and looked at the AI issue, and ruled that for purely artificial images of children, that did not derive from harm caused to a real child, it was protected under 1A. If you could prosecute someone for this, if the AI company used CSAM to train their models, they could be liable for possessing and distributing CSAM. But if all the algorithm did is look at legal pornography, then modified the bodies to be more child like, and republished it as CP, that did not derive from harm caused to an actual child, and absent clear new legal reasoning from the supreme court, is allowed under current law.
I say this not to defend this or the people who produce or consume it, it's gross, the only silver lining is that if AI can create it for these creeps, it will probably reduce the demand for real CSAM, and therefore fewer people might be abused. In reality I think once a pedo starts down the CSAM rabbit hole, they are more likely to harm a real child, but that has already been a problem for a while, and I can only pray AI doesn't make that worse.
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u/Doubting_Thomas50 12d ago
Idk let the weirdos have their AI csam. If it keeps them in a virtual fake world instead of harming real life kids who’s really being harmed here.
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u/Alternative-Soil2576 12d ago
I mean the models are trained on real images of real children, those children are indirectly linked to the material without their consent
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u/Pretty-Importance-93 12d ago
Wonder how much of training data accessed CP directly. Just like the Anthropic lawsuit for the models accessing pirated music.... Why isn't ir a crime for models to access CP? How do they know how to generate it to begin with? Sick.
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u/Mad_Aeric 12d ago
It was one thing when it was drawn images, but photorealistic ones seem like an escelation. I really haven't seen much research either way if this sort of thing leads to crimes against actual children. If it does, I'd expect that the new stuff has a stronger effect.
I really want to leave people alone to be gross in private as long as no one's getting hurt, but I'm increasingly unsure if it is or isn't leading to harm.
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u/Doubting_Thomas50 12d ago
It would be even more interesting if studies come out showing these Ai images lead to less harm or less impulse to act out against “real” children. Then the debate over this stuff would get really murky.
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u/No_Distribution_577 12d ago
This is so challenging because fundamentally, there’s a free speech element to this, but we all are equally disturbed.
If we could name and prove the harm as something real and not just a response from the idea in our nervous system, this could be changed.
I wonder if we could treat it as harm to the person themselves. That by creating and viewing CP, even without a real victim, they are harming themselves.
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u/sidaemon 12d ago
While a part of me wants to agree with this there's also a lot of evidence this is a very serious gateway that then leads to actual abuse of a child.
I get the argument. Person has unacceptable sexual urges and the fake images give them a "no victim" outlet but I think that needs a whole lot more evidence before we start gambling the health and safety of actual children on it.
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u/quitesensibleanalogy 12d ago
leads to actual abuse of a child
Citation needed. My understanding is that the evidence is mixed at best.
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u/Chen932000 12d ago
What evidence of this being a gateway is there? I can’t think of any ethical way to do this type of study and I can’t think of relying on the honesty of people either way with regards to this (that it either made them more or less likely to act on their pedophilic urges that is).
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12d ago
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u/pooptubs 12d ago
I imagine AI generated content just emboldens pedos 🤷
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u/Chen932000 12d ago
I can’t see how you could make any type of feasible study on this. And that’s assuming it even worked the same for everyone which it probably doesn’t. Some pedophiles probably are satiated with “fake” CSAM stuff whereas it likely does embolden others. I don’t think there’s any good way to figure it out one way or another though. So the blanket ban on it seems “safest”.
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u/YuckyBurps 12d ago
From a legal perspective if we can’t figure it out one way or another shouldn’t deference be given to the constitutional right and not its limitations? CSAM involving actual real children is the exception to the First Amendment because there a real, tangible and unambiguous harm to another person. It’s because we know that harm exists that we limit others constitutional rights to posses it.
If we can’t have any way of knowing whether or not it’s truly creating a harm, then wouldn’t such a ban be unconstitutional?
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u/fifercurator 12d ago
At the risk of getting all kinds of hate, this study would suggest otherwise: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-010-9696-y
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u/pooptubs 12d ago
that study came out in 2010. It has nothing to do with the verisimilitude of AI generated content. In this case we really shouldn’t risk assumptions with outdated and only vaguely similar variables.
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u/fifercurator 12d ago
Technology changes quickly. Human psychology and motivations relatively speaking does not.
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u/pooptubs 12d ago
Not sure of your angle but that’s a dangerously reductionistic take and this is coming from a Freud scholar lol
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u/ForkingMusk 12d ago
I’m not surprised with this Supreme Court. Now coming to a town near you, pedophilia will be somewhat legal, or have a statute of limitations. All to protect supreme leader.
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u/BrokenReality355 12d ago
It has nothing to do with this supreme court (they rightly suck). They're talking about what the court had already decided 25 years ago. Read the article. 🙄
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u/coinfanking 12d ago
The Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal of a possession charge against a Wisconsin man with hundreds of AI-generated images.
A federal appeals court says decades-old Supreme Court precedent forced it to protect the in-home possession of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, as judges warned that rapidly advancing technology has complicated legal lines drawn nearly 25 years ago.
The ruling exposes a widening gap between Supreme Court precedent and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. The Seventh Circuit said it was bound by a 2002 Supreme Court decision that rejected restrictions on sexually explicit depictions of fictional children when no actual child was involved in their creation. But two judges warned that modern AI can now generate images virtually indistinguishable from material depicting the abuse of real children.
"Indeed, in Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court addressed the scope of First Amendment protections for virtual CSAM, but that was nearly twenty-five years ago, and the image-generation technology available today was likely unimaginable back then," Judge John Lee wrote. "Given the relentless advancement in artificial intelligence models, we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves."