Man Arrested for Creating Child Porn Using AI
Man Arrested for Creating Child Porn Using AI
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Man Arrested for Creating Child Porn Using AI
A Florida man is facing 20 counts of obscenity for allegedly creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography, highlighting the danger and ubiquity of generative AI being used for nefarious reasons.
Phillip Michael McCorkle was arrested last week while he was working at a movie theater in Vero Beach, Florida, according to TV station CBS 12 News. A crew from the TV station captured the arrest, which made for dramatic video footage due to law enforcement leading away the uniform-wearing McCorkle from the theater in handcuffs.
It's hard to have a nuanced discussion because the article is so vague. It's not clear what he's specifically been charged with (beyond "obscenity," not a specific child abuse statute?). Because any simulated CSAM laws have been, to my knowledge, all struck down when challenged.
I completely get the "lock them all up and throw away the key" visceral reaction - I feel that too, for sure - but this is a much more difficult question. There are porn actors over 18 who look younger, do the laws outlaw them from work that would be legal for others who just look older? If AI was trained exclusively on those over-18 people, would outputs then not be CSAM even if the images produced features that looked under 18?
I'm at least all for a "fruit of the poisoned tree" theory - if AI model training data sets include actual CSAM then they can and should be made illegal. Deepfaking intentionally real under 18 people is also not black and white (looking again to the harm factor), but also I think it can be justifiably prohibited. I also think distribution of completely fake CSAM can be arguably outlawed (the situation here), since it's going to be impossible to tell AI from real imagery soon and allowing that would undermine enforcement of vital anti-real-CSAM laws.
The real hard case is producing and retaining fully fake people and without real CSAM in training data, solely locally (possession crimes). That's really tough. Because not only does it not directly hurt anyone in its creation, there's a possible benefit in that it diminishes the market for real CSAM (potentially saving unrelated children from the abuse flowing from that demand), and could also divert the impulse of the producer from preying on children around them due to unfulfilled desire.
Could, because I don't think there's studies that answers whether those are true.
I mostly agree with you, but a counterpoint:
Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them. I've read many articles over the years about men getting arrested for trying to meet up with minors, and one thing that shows up pretty often in these articles is the perpetrator admitting to downloading CSAM for years until deciding the fantasy wasn't enough anymore. They become comfortable enough with it that it loses its taboo and they feel emboldened to take the next step.
CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation, and creation is inherently abusive and exploitative of real people, and generating it from a model that was trained on non-abusive content probably isn't exploitative, but there's a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it's associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.
Not an easy question for sure, and it's one that deserves to be answered using empirical data, but I imagine the vast majority of Americans would flatly reject a nuanced view on this issue.
The problem is empirical data cannot be morally or ethically found. You can't show a bunch of people porn and then make a statistical observation of whether those shown child porn are more likely to assault children. So we have to go forward without that data.
I will anecdotally observe anal sex, oral sex, and facials have gone up between partners as prevalence in porn has gone up. That suggests but does not prove a direct statistical harm caused by even "ethically produced CSAM."
To expound on this: prior to this point, the creation of CSAM requires that children be sexually exploited. You could not have CSAM without children being harmed. But what about when no direct harms have occurred? Is lolicon hentai 'obscene'? Well, according to the law and case law, yes, but it's not usually enforced. If we agree that drawings of children engaged in sexual acts aren't causing direct harm--that is, children are not being sexually abused in order to create the drawings--then how much different is a computer-generated image that isn't based off any specific person or event? It seem to me that, whether or not a pedophile might decide that they eventually want more than LLM-generated images is not relevant. Treating a future possibility as a foregone conclusion is exactly the rationale behind Reefer Madness and the idea of 'gateway' drugs.
Allow me to float a second possibility that will certainly be less popular.
Start with two premises: first, pedophilia is a characteristic that appears to be an orientation. That is, a true pedophile--a person exclusively sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children--does not choose to be a pedophile, any more than a person chooses to be gay. (My understanding is that very few pedophiles are exclusively pedophilic though, and that many child molesters are opportunistic sexual predators rather than being pedophiles.) Secondly, the rates of sexual assault appear to have decreased as pornography availability has increased. So the question I would have is, would wide availability of LLM-generated CSAM--CSAM that didn't cause any real, direct harm to children--actually decrease rates of child sexual assault?
But this is like the arguments used to say that weed is a "gateway drug" by talking about how people strung out on harder drugs almost always have done weed as well, ignoring everyone who uses only weed. But this is even hazier because we literally have no real idea how many people consume that stuff but don't 'escalate'.
I remember reading once in some research out of Japan that child molesters consume less porn overall than the average citizen, which seems counter-intuitive, but may not be, if you consider the possibility that maybe it (in this case, they were talking primarily about manga with anime-style drawings of kids in sexual situations) is actually curbing the incidence of the 'real thing', since the ones actually touching kids in the real world are reading those mangas less.
I'm also reminded of people talking about sex dolls that look like kids, and if that's a possible 'solution' for pedophiles, or if it would 'egg on' actual molestation.
I think I lean on the side of 'satiation', from the limited bits of idle research I've done here and there. And if that IS in fact the case, then regardless of if it grosses me out, I can't in good conscience oppose something that actually reduces the number of children who actually get abused, you know?
Why should that be a question at all? If it causes harm, ban it. If not, don't. Being "associated with" should never be grounds for a legal statute.
generally a very good point, however i feel it's important to point out some important context here:
the pedophiles you're talking about in your comment are almost always members of tight knit communities that share CSAM, organize distribution, share sources, and most importantly, indulge their fantasies/desires together.
i would think that the correlation that leads to molestation is not primarily driven by the CSAM itself, but rather the community around it.
we clearly see this happening in other similarly structured and similarly isolated communities: nazis, incels, mass shooters, religious fanatics, etc.
the common factor in radicalization and development of extreme views in all these groups is always isolation and the community they end up joining as a result, forming a sort of parallel society with it's own rules and ideals, separate from general society. over time people in these parallel societies get used to seeing the world in a way that aligns with the ideals of the group.
nazis start to see anyone not part of their group as enemies, incels start to see "females" instead of women, religious fanatics see sinners...and pedophiles see objects that exist solely for their gratification instead of kids...
I don't see why molesters should be any different in this aspect, and would therefore argue that it's the communal aspect that should probably be the target of the law, i.e.: distribution and organization (forums, chatrooms, etc.)
the harder it is for them to organize, the less likely these groups are to produce predators that cause real harm!
if on top of that there is a legally available outlet where they can indulge themselves in a safe manner without harming anyone, I'd expect rates of child molestation to drop significantly, because, again, there's precedence from similar situations (overdoses in drug addicts, for example)
i think it is a potentially fatal mistake to think of pedophiles as "special" cases, rather than just another group of outcasts, because in nearly all cases of such pariahs the solutions that prove to work best in the real world are the ones that make these groups feel less like outcasts, which limits avenues of radicalization.
i thought these parallels are something worth pointing out.
Even worse, you don't need CSAM to start with. If a learning model has regular porn and nude reference model photography of people under 18 that are used for drawing anatomy, then they have enough information to combine the two. Hell, it probably doesn't even need the people under 18 to actually be nude.
Hell, society tends to assume any nudity inder 18 to be CSAM anyway, because someone could see it that way.
I don't know if it's still a thing, but I'm reminded of some law or regulation that was passed a while back in Australia, iirc, that barred women with A-cup busts from working in porn, the "reasoning" being that their flatter chests made them look too similar to prepubescent girls, lol...
Not only stupid but also quite insulting to women, imo.
To the best of my knowledge, calling drawn works obscene has been upheld in courts, most often because the artist(s) lack the financial ability to fight the charges effectively. The artist for the underground comic "Boiled Angel" had his conviction for obscenity upheld--most CSAM work falls under obscenity laws--and ended up giving up the fight to clear his name.
Oh, for sure. I'm talking about laws specifically targeted to minors. "Obscenity" is a catch-all that is well-established, but if you are trying to protect children from abuse, it's a very blunt instrument and not as effective as targeted abuse and trafficking statutes. The statutory schemes used to outlaw virtual CSAM have failed to my knowledge.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalition
That case was statutorily superseded in part by the PROTECT Act, which attempted to differentiate itself by...relying on an obscenity standard. So it's a bit illusory that it does anything new.
When I used this phrase, someone told me it described a nonexistent concept, and that the CSAM term existed in part to differentiate between content where children were harmed to make it versus not. I didn’t wanna muddy any waters but do you have an opposing perspective?
Interesting. Sounds real bad. See what you mean about harm factor though.
Now all AI is illegal. It's trained via scraping the internet, which will include CP as well as every other image.
There's "copywrite illegal," and then there's "cp illegal." Those are two very different things.