New Mexico is seeking an injunction to permanently block Snap from practices allegedly harming kids. That includes a halt on advertising Snapchat as “more private” or “less permanent” due to the alleged “core design problem” and “inherent danger” of Snap’s disappearing messages. The state’s complaint noted that the FBI has said that “Snapchat is the preferred app by criminals because its design features provide a false sense of security to the victim that their photos will disappear and not be screenshotted.”
Tough call. If you put out bait, you’re gonna get someone. But would that person have done the same thing if they had not seen your bait? Chicken and the egg. On one hand, it looks like entrapment.
I mean, that part isn’t really at issue here. It’s fundamentally the same technique that’s been used since the 90’s, famously on To Catch a Predator. Seemingly, the “entrapment” angle has been settled.
But now they can argue that they aren’t sexually attracted to children, just AI artwork, which is technically not an image of a child. And unless I missed it, they were not trying to meet the girl.
The problem is going to be that images that aren’t real of a crime aren’t a crime. Of the opposite was true, images of murder would be illegal. Can’t just cherry pick.
If I draw a stick figure and label it “naked girl,” does it become child porn? What if I’m a really good artist?
I believe that cartoon images depicting sex of underage kids is still illegal. At least in the US.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong but seems like I remember this from a news article a while back. Maybe it was just a specific state.
I am not going to Google that one though to find out though.
https://cellebrite.com/en/ai-and-csam-a-look-at-real-cases/
Best I could find about this.
Imo as long as the ai was not trained on actual CSAM and the product is not depicting real people, then it shouldn’t be illegal as it is not hurting anyone which is why we have laws against CSAM in the first place.
What if it normalises CSAM and some people don’t discerne between real and AI?
And what if video games, movies, and books normalize killing? There is no evidence to show that it does or that it will.
While I’m not going to have this specific topic in my search history, sexually violent porn very likely does nothing to encourage actual sexual violence. Most studies show that it has no effect on sexual violence at all, some show it decreases it, and only a few studies show it increases it (and those ones tend to have smarter people than me saying they are flawed).
While media can have psychological effects, normalizing extreme behavior doesn’t seem to be one of them. That said, I wouldn’t trust an ai bro or their ai to handle something like that. At best they don’t know what goes into their training sets, at worst they would probably deliberately include csam.
We have porn games, but we don’t have CP games. There’s a line between violence and SA with minors.
Edit: oh wait, Japan might be an example 🙃 and yeah, they got issues.
Yeah don’t Google it hahaha
It what makes it a child? There’s some creepy anime girls who definitely fall into that questionable category. And if I label a stick figure with an age… does that make it illegal? What about an ai image with bubble text that says “I’m not real. I’m 18, I have a magical curse on me etc etc” now it’s fiction?
Since it isn’t actually real… what is the line, and how can that line be measured? Since this is just going to keep being a problem, this awkward conversation needs to happen in a logical, calm manner.
https://cellebrite.com/en/ai-and-csam-a-look-at-real-cases/
Best I could find about this.
Imo as long as the ai was not trained on actual CSAM and the product is not depicting real people, then it shouldn’t be illegal as it is not hurting anyone which is why we have laws against CSAM in the first place.
I definitely don’t want to sound as if I’m promoting this material, but I agree. Fake things are fake and real things are real. Yeah, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable to think about it and I totally understand.
Fake images of murder seem to be perfectly fine! And that’s arguably the worst crime possible. We show that shit to our kids.
Isn’t it sad that we even have to say we don’t promote it before we say anything else?
Yeah. But you know how it is here, you’re either against it or you’re one of them. Make a logical comparison between two nearly identical things and you’re whatabouting. I appreciate you recognizing the difference.
Probably not as bad on lemmy, at least.
I think the bar is whether it could be reasonably mistaken for a real child. Which makes quite a lot of disgusting content legal.
I also find it to be repugnant, but if the images are not based on real people and the ai was not trained on real csam(good luck proving this either way), then it shouldn’t be illegal. The laws were made to protect kids, and drawings of purly fictional characters are not hurting the kids.
Pretty much every law ever made in the history of humanity that was ostensibly to protect children is actually about control of the population.
This is just plain wrong.
Obviously, there are loads of laws and very good legislation that does indeed protect children.
Just one example: child labour laws.
I suspect that what you really mean is that whenever a politician says whatever police powers are required to protect children, they really just want more power to violate privacy to make it easier to prosecute various crimes.
Exception that proves the rule.
When the “AI artwork” is made for the specific purpose of representing underage children and is indistinguishable from the real thing, that argument is going to get flattened pretty quickly.
Pretty easy to present a couple pages to a jury of kids pictures (not nude) and say “tell us which ones were AI”.
Well that’s not how the law works. A jury wouldn’t decide that. They don’t get to say “close enough for fake to be real” because real has a name and fake doesn’t have a name.
The crime is possessing a photo of a thing that happened. A real person was abused. The fake image, like a realistic painting of a fictional event, does not actually involve a person getting hurt.
Let me set up a situation: A person creates a very realistic, but fake, video. They first have the character walk onto the screen in a wireframe. Then, the animation begins to build on texture and now we have a person on a green background. They look real, but we know for sure it’s not real. Then the background enters in the same way. Now the video appears to be real, but… we know it’s not. Just like movie, those are just special effects even if it looks pretty believable.
The crime is a documented event of someone being hurt. If there was a video of a person actually killing a person, that video could be considered evidence of a crime. But if that event was staged as part of a video intended as entertainment, there is no crime and that video isn’t real.
Of course, the topic of child abuse is difficult to talk about. One may make the statement that fake images lead people to the real thing, and that would encourage people to do bad things. Well, they said the same thing about video games—so we would obviously need to apply the same laws to them. Movies and books about crimes could also encourage people to commit crimes, so those need to be banned entirely, and my huge collection of horror movies could put me in jail for life.
The line becomes impossible to draw.
And if that video built to feature a child performing fellario, it would still be child pornography
No, the voiceover will say in an adult voice “I am over 18, I have a fictional disease that makes me look like a younger.”
And now it’s not a child, because “youth” is subjective at this point.
There is very legal real commercial porn of adults engaging in “age play” and “incest,” both which are illegal in reality. Some of those videos would make you think, “how are they actually 18?!”
On the flip side, in most US jurisdictions, incest is illegal and an actual video of two adults engaging in that would be evidence of a crime and they could be prosecuted.
In conclusion (haha), real is illegal and fiction is not.
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not advocating for specific things to be LEGAL, just arguing that a law making something that is FICTION illegal could be difficult to prove in many circumstances, and lead to many false accusations.
Ok, so when the police use a young-appearing officer to nail somebody who is looking to hook up with what is listed as a 14yo… that’s just going to get dropped? Because it seems that’s a tactic that’s been used often enough and the actual age of the officer matters less than the intent of the perp to engage in sex with a minor.
The argument “I just thought we were role-playing” isn’t significantly different from “I totally know this ‘14yo giving a BJ to old man.mp4’ was AI generated and that’s just my fetish, not real kids”
Well, that’s somewhat different, and you have a very good example.
They were TOLD the person was underage, and they continued. They had no reason to think that the images were fictional. They were purposefully trying to find REAL images—a crime to possess, distribute, and create.
That is a situation where I would think some kind of legal action could be warranted because a person is asked: “do you want illegal content?” And even though that content is not real, they still engaged.
When you hear those stings where adults are busted trying to meet up with a kid but out pops the cops, that was the adults thinking a REAL thing was going to happen. Obviously the punishment for that is less than if they got caught for doing it, because one is solicitation and one is abuse. However they both get you on a list.
To elaborate, two adults arrange a role play scenario where one adult would meet another adult pretending to be a child where real ages are known, but fictional ages are “illegal.” Thats not a crime. If “fiction” was a crime, then anyone who likes to be called “daddy,” or “mommy” as kinky role play would be in jail because incest is illegal. All those ridiculous “step bro, nooo!” videos would be illegal too!
Finally, all this comes down to intention. Just like murder vs manslaughter. If someone goes to a website to get FICTIONAL content, that’s not a crime. But if they truly think they are getting the real thing, then lines begin to blur and legality could be in question.
That’s not what this article is about though.
They’re not saying “this user looked at our image so they’re a pedo and must go to jail”.
They’re saying snapchat is full of pedos, and using the proliferation of this account as evidence supporting that claim.
I agree completely with you that Snapchat is an unmonitored disaster that gives the user the impression that the person they are sharing their nudes with cannot save the content. A good portion of the videos on porn sites have that little Snapchat progress wheel on them and are clearly screencaps.
Aside: I think there is a big topic that conveniently gets overlooked because it’s so much easier to blame “social media” or the “predator,” and that is—where are the fucking parents?
The parents are out buying an AR-15 for their son.
On a more serious note, parents always get judged, just not always fairly.
IANAL, but my understanding is entrapment is when they convince you to do something you might not otherwise have done. So if the cops create an account of a minor and message an adult asking if they want to fuck, and the answer is like “uh no, absolutely not,” and then the cops follow up by repeatedly sexting, and the adult blocks their account, but the cops relentlessly keep sexting from burner accounts, and plant people in the adult’s work and social environments who keep talking about how normal it is to fuck minors who sext you out of the blue, and then the adult is finally like “oh whatever, fine” - that’s entrapment.
Now, most people still are literally never going to take the minor up on the offer, no matter how relentless they are or how normalized it is in their environment. That’s true about most crimes. The question is how many people wouldn’t have committed that crime unless this very specific police-created situation came up, and that difference is what falls into entrapment.
I’d argue this isn’t even close to entrapment, because all they did was set up an account much like all the others that exist, and waited for others to find them. It’s no different from leaving a bike unlocked, then catching somebody who steals it. There are unlocked bikes everywhere, and people don’t suddenly decide to steal the only bike of their life because they happened to find that unlocked bike.
Of course, they could also be spending this time and money getting to the root of societal issues and fixing the core problems instead of catching a small percentage of active pedophiles and letting the rest of them continue to cause irreparable harm.
The last paragraph is the big issue. Fix society. We can argue all day long about what line does “artwork” cross before it becomes illegal, but that’s not actually preventing anyone from getting abused.
And imo, it seems a little sick to say, “we made a bunch of kiddie porn that didn’t exist previously, and I’m going to distribute it to catch criminals—using tax dollars” … tf?