US court rules AI child abuse content is protected under First Amendment

[gagzus 24,419]

Isn’t this the type of stuff right wing people would cry wolf about leftists doing? Like saying we’d go so far left that we’d act like awful people have the rights to “ethically ambiguous” things like this.

Ironic  

America is so rigid with rules men made hundreds of years ago. Like the right to bare arms for instance originates for guns that could shot one round at a time and primarily was made to fend off the Native Americans. Not for George from Ohio to have an AK47 to threaten people in his neighbourhood.

American law literally lacks nuance and needs updating.

Edited yesterday at 09:39 AM by gagzus

[huttont 6,031]

This BS is so f**king vile. I don’t want to live here anymore. 

[Helxig 45,537]

DO THEY NOT REALISE THE AI IS TRAINED ON ACTUAL CHILD P*RN?

The US is a disgusting place

[Ladle Ghoulash 55,040]

3 hours ago, gagzus said:

American law literally lacks nuance and needs updating.

The sad thing is that the reasoning here is very nuanced, to the point that it can feel like it lacks the intuitive common sense of “we know this is wrong, so why not just say it’s wrong?” But that’s not really how the law works. Courts have to deal with the conduct in front of them, the specific statute being applied, and the specific charges being brought.

The reasoning, more or less, is that because there are no “real children” involved (i.e. children who actually exist, rather than composite AI depictions)  the material is not legally equivalent to CSAM produced through the abuse of an actual child. And because the depiction isn’t of a specific real person, it also isn’t equivalent to deepfake-style sexual exploitation created without that person’s consent.

That’s not as vague as saying “all exploitative ****ography is protected speech because First Amendment.” And importantly, the ruling also doesn’t mean the court is saying AI-generated CSAM is categorically legal. The actual question here was much narrower: whether the government could criminalize the defendant’s mere possession, in his own home, of obscene virtual CSAM under this particular statute. His other charges involving production, distribution, etc. were not wiped away. So the court may simply be saying that this specific possession charge does not fit within the constitutional exception that allows the government to criminalize possession of CSAM involving actual children.

The whole argument essentially hinges on the idea that, if no actual person is directly victimized in either the production or depiction, the conduct is legally distinct from both physical sexual exploitation and nonconsensual sexual depictions of a real person. That’s similar to distinctions the law already makes with hand-drawn, animated, or written material.

And honestly, I think part of what makes the ruling feel so uncomfortable is that the judges themselves seem aware that older precedent is being applied to technology that looks very different now. That doesn’t mean they can just ignore Supreme Court precedent because the result feels morally wrong; it means the broader question of how AI-generated sexual material should be regulated is probably going to keep getting hashed out both in court and through future legislation.

As a victim of CSA, I get why people reacted how they did to this because I was shocked and conflicted when I read the headline, but the specifics of what makes this ruling appear egregious are narrow and case specific  as opposed to being sweeping proclamations that AI-generated CSAM is legal.

[bxr 2,617]

12 hours ago, Morphine Prince said:

A federal appeals court has ruled that privately owning AI-generated images of child sexual abuse, made without real child involvement, is protected under the First Amendment if the images stay in your own home. The Seventh Circuit affirmed a lower court's decision to dismiss a possession charge against Steven Anderegg, who used the AI image generator Stable Diffusion to create hundreds of photorealistic images depicting minors in sexual situations.

[ … ]

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/judges-rule-ai-child-abuse-161951440.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFADVEazo0TXf3WQzrMqe1w-L6Yh9r263p9vrU5SF8HGC7pDrz5JRKINjpBbrRv5h3GVmFgOEPPsfJ4Wb1M8P1YmX3OqadMWG4boayLmiq86oSPQu0PjzNzd1VjqbMsVRJmAbYI6e-gegDQ1iN1OC4gJZ7XlTGbklY9m1Spew9QL

Oh, wow … Stable Diffusion is Stability AI … ?

Lady Gaga probably wasn’t thinking that a coup would unfold in her greenhouse. Then again, she was cohosting a party there with Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of Napster and first president of Facebook. [ … ]

Spoiler

AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived ( Zoë Schiffer via Wired)

Lady Gaga probably wasn’t thinking that a coup would unfold in her greenhouse. Then again, she was cohosting a party there with Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of Napsterand first president of Facebook.

It was February 2024, and the singer had invited guests to her $22.5 million oceanside estate in Malibu to mark the launch of a skin-care nonprofit. One of the organization’s trustees was her boyfriend, whose day job was running the Parker Foundation. In the candlelit space, beside floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Pacific, Parker’s people mingled with Gaga’s, nibbling focaccia and branzino alla brace to music from a string quartet (Grammy-winning, of course).

Prem Akkaraju, one of Parker’s close friends and business partners, arrived in a tailored suit, his thick hair coifed to perfection. The two men had known each other since Parker was at Facebook and Akkaraju was in the music industry. Over the years, they’d tried unsuccessfully to launch a movie streaming platform together and—much more successfully—had taken over a renowned visual effects company. Lately they had been talking about starting an AI venture.

That evening at Gaga’s, Akkaraju found himself sitting next to an investor in Stability AI, the company that launched the wildly popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion in 2022. Despite its early success, Stability was “circling the drain,” the investor recalls. It was “within days of not having options.” He told Akkaraju: “You should take Stability and make it into the Hollywood-friendly AI model.”

[ … ]

The conversation drifts to rotoscoping. Legato explains that this process, where an artist sketches over a scene frame by frame, used to take hundreds of hours and was reserved for entry-level animators. Now AI can automatically isolate part of an image and add visual effects. “You’d never want your child to work on roto,” he tells me.

The comment is meant to sound optimistic, but it gets to a looming fear about how AI will impact Hollywood. Namely, that the technology will lead to widespread job losses.

“I hear artists at VFX companies say, ‘Hey, I don't want to get replaced.’ Of course you don't want to get replaced!” says Cameron. “If you guys are going to lose your jobs, you're going to lose your jobs over the work drying up versus getting bumped aside by these gen AI models.” The idea, echoed by Akkaraju and Parker, is that as movies become cheaper to produce, more films will get made and overall employment will rise.

When pressed on this point, Akkaraju reverts to an extended metaphor. “Every major transition or technological invention is always met with apprehension at first, and then acceptance, and then it's obvious,” he says. “When ATMs rolled out in the ’80s, all the tellers were really up in arms. They were like, ‘That’s our job. We give withdrawals, we take deposits, and now you’re having this machine do it.’ What’s happened since then is that there are more teller jobs than ever before, and their average pay is higher, even adjusted for inflation.”

Whether the coup that began in Lady Gaga’s greenhouse ultimately saves Stability AI, the AI revolution is here and already transforming Hollywood. That collapsing building, that burning forest, that crowd of people you see when you stream a show or go to the movie theater? One person with a keyboard could’ve made them. The thing about that bank-teller anecdote is that it’s often used by techno-optimists—including Stability AI investor Eric Schmidt. What they don’t mention is that the number of bank tellers peaked around 2015. Since then, it’s been on the decline.

[ Source ]

ETA: To be fair, on the first contextual blink, this particular chapter in Polansky‘s OuterBio investor network narrative reads as oddly entrenched on ethical grounds … and that he started working with the BTW Foundation mental health app development around the same time … maybe Polansky would do well to find new financing friends for the shared resources network, because what with Thiel and these guys: yikes? 

But/and/so, yes, I’m still new and novice to this whole AI tech world VC data sharing innovative financing shared networking thing … so, honestly, I’m just gleaning present information, but logistics are complicated sometimes, and this could be one of those times.

Edited yesterday at 04:35 PM by bxr

[Bronco 26,913]

1 hour ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

The sad thing is that the reasoning here is very nuanced, to the point that it can feel like it lacks the intuitive common sense of “we know this is wrong, so why not just say it’s wrong?” But that’s not really how the law works. Courts have to deal with the conduct in front of them, the specific statute being applied, and the specific charges being brought.

The reasoning, more or less, is that because there are no “real children” involved (i.e. children who actually exist, rather than composite AI depictions)  the material is not legally equivalent to CSAM produced through the abuse of an actual child. And because the depiction isn’t of a specific real person, it also isn’t equivalent to deepfake-style sexual exploitation created without that person’s consent.

That’s not as vague as saying “all exploitative ****ography is protected speech because First Amendment.” And importantly, the ruling also doesn’t mean the court is saying AI-generated CSAM is categorically legal. The actual question here was much narrower: whether the government could criminalize the defendant’s mere possession, in his own home, of obscene virtual CSAM under this particular statute. His other charges involving production, distribution, etc. were not wiped away. So the court may simply be saying that this specific possession charge does not fit within the constitutional exception that allows the government to criminalize possession of CSAM involving actual children.

The whole argument essentially hinges on the idea that, if no actual person is directly victimized in either the production or depiction, the conduct is legally distinct from both physical sexual exploitation and nonconsensual sexual depictions of a real person. That’s similar to distinctions the law already makes with hand-drawn, animated, or written material.

And honestly, I think part of what makes the ruling feel so uncomfortable is that the judges themselves seem aware that older precedent is being applied to technology that looks very different now. That doesn’t mean they can just ignore Supreme Court precedent because the result feels morally wrong; it means the broader question of how AI-generated sexual material should be regulated is probably going to keep getting hashed out both in court and through future legislation.

As a victim of CSA, I get why people reacted how they did to this because I was shocked and conflicted when I read the headline, but the specifics of what makes this ruling appear egregious are narrow and case specific  as opposed to being sweeping proclamations that AI-generated CSAM is legal.

Largely agree, and it definitely highlights the fact that technology is vastly outstripping existing legislation and creating areas of high risk like this. 

But I do think the court made a mistake here and I hope this will be amended on appeal to a higher court on the basis that we know GenAI companies have used data sets that involved real CSAM not just CGI/Animated "art" and on that basis I don't think the judge can reasonably conclude that this material doesn't meet the legal definitions for CSAM because it's not involved actual harm to a minor. 

Again though. This is just proof we need a serious and i'd argue global approach to the regulation of GenAI's potential for criminality and potential to perpetuate these harms indefinitely. 

[River 128,259]

Once again, the people who have no clue about technology and AI are dealing with these situations and these are the results.

At the same time, the difference between this pedo-AI and Big Mouth, Euphoria and other media that portraying minors and children in explicit, sexual way, is very very little.

[Bling 31,690]

WHAT THE ****

WHAT ARE WE DOING

[Bronco 26,913]

50 minutes ago, River said:

Once again, the people who have no clue about technology and AI are dealing with these situations and these are the results.

Honestly 
The way the UK implemented the social media ban having had it go through 2 years worth of legislative debate after how ever long in prep work before then via Whitehall. 

Only for it to be pointed out on day 1 by literally everyone that it was bypassable via VPNs which predate the legislation by at least a decade. 

And then the Minister for Science & Technology basically said "well if people use VPNs they're naughty". 
 

[River 128,259]

11 minutes ago, Bronco said:

Honestly 
The way the UK implemented the social media ban having had it go through 2 years worth of legislative debate after how ever long in prep work before then via Whitehall. 

Only for it to be pointed out on day 1 by literally everyone that it was bypassable via VPNs which predate the legislation by at least a decade. 

And then the Minister for Science & Technology basically said "well if people use VPNs they're naughty". 
 

It's always like that, they ban something because it's the easiest approach to deal with a problem, but never check for the loopholes that makes the solution pretty much useless.

[Vanish Into You 232]

11 hours ago, SavetheEarthNow said:

There is definitely something going on between big tech and government in North America. Denmark has it right where they passed a law allowing citizens to copyright their face, voice and body to prevent AI create fake videos and images of them. AI is definitely a front for something we're not being told about. There is clearly something we're not being told about why suddenly everywhere across the US and now in Canada local governments are approving AI data centres. Why the sudden need for these huge alleged data centres to be built absolutely everywhere? We've had all this online data, such as images and other things saved directly to the cloud and to servers but now suddenly, that isn't enough, and they want to say we need all these data centres? We're not being told the truth. 

 

9 hours ago, PartySick said:

It's surveillance, plain and simple.

The more data they collect, the more data they can sell.

There is a lot going on that we don't know about for sure.. but on surface level we 'need' these huge data centers because basically the larger and more energy your data center has, the more your models can process and the stronger they will be... they are popping up quickly because many think we are in a 'race' now with China and cannot fall behind. I think most of the reason here is security, like imagine China has 10x the power to launch a cyber attack against us...

[PartySick 173,778]

1 minute ago, Vanish Into You said:

 

There is a lot going on that we don't know about for sure.. but on surface level we 'need' these huge data centers because basically the larger and more energy your data center has, the more your models can process and the stronger they will be... they are popping up quickly because many think we are in a 'race' now with China and cannot fall behind. I think most of the reason here is security, like imagine China has 10x the power to launch a cyber attack against us...

I'm not really scared of China tbh. Especially when it comes to AI.

They've been more responsible with it than we have, at least on a social level  

Heavy regulations on people basically adopting AI companions instead of talking to other people, limits on AI companies, making it illegal to fire a worker just 'cause their job was automated by AI.

Like, I'm not worried about a Chinese cyber attack. I'm worried about some cuck in the US government stalking me through a flock camera or something  

[DopeEnigma 1,799]

So this vile and disgusting ruling is protected yet the idiot in charge can start illegal wars without congressional consent, just banana republic madness, the midterms better deliver, it’ll be a start. 

[Vanish Into You 232]

2 minutes ago, PartySick said:

I'm not really scared of China tbh. Especially when it comes to AI.

They've been more responsible with it than we have, at least on a social level  

Heavy regulations on people basically adopting AI companions instead of talking to other people, limits on AI companies, making it illegal to fire a worker just 'cause their job was automated by AI.

Like, I'm not worried about a Chinese cyber attack. I'm worried about some cuck in the US government stalking me through a flock camera or something  

I mean yeah, homegrown terror is much, much worse for us.... & there is going to be no escaping the 24hr surveillance 

[PartySick 173,778]

25 minutes ago, Vanish Into You said:

I mean yeah, homegrown terror is much, much worse for us.... & there is going to be no escaping the 24hr surveillance 

When I don't have to fear my own government then I'll worry about China 'cause you're not wrong tbh