9mo ago

Man who used AI to create child abuse images jailed for 18 years

www.theguardian.com

Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, jailed after transforming normal pictures of children into sexual abuse imagery

A man who used AI to create child abuse images using photographs of real children has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.

In the first prosecution of its kind in the UK, Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, was convicted of 16 child sexual abuse offences in August, after an investigation by Greater Manchester police (GMP).

Nelson had used Daz 3D, a computer programme with an AI function, to transform “normal” images of children into sexual abuse imagery, Greater Manchester police said. In some cases, paedophiles had commissioned the images, supplying photographs of children with whom they had contact in real life.

He was also found guilty of encouraging other offenders to commit rape.

99 comments

I think the last two paragraphs in the body of this post are the real issue here, not that he was just using AI to create CSAM.
- Right? Feels like this is being tacked on as a shot at AI. Otherwise nobody is harmed except the guy. Pedos are ick, but if harmless then why punish? I don't think anyone should have to take a fall because others think their desires are gross.
  
  Because they are using images of real children.
  
  I think this was a crime because he modified images of actual kids. If the images were 100% AI (not of real people) I'm not sure on what basis that would be considered a crime, no more than a handmade drawing of a nude minor drawn from imagination.
  
  The fuck? Nothing about generating and distributing CSAM material is harmless, and especially if images of real children are being used to generate it.
- There's the fact that the images he was creating were pictures of real kids. Deep fake porn is already creepy enough, add in that it was csam....
- Yeah, that changes it a bit - that definitely has more of a creep factor. I still question if it's really the kind of thing that should land you in jail for a long time.
- https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/bury-the-lede/
Good riddance. Now go after the fucks that bought this shit from him.
- Absolutely. It feels like there'd be relevant data to trace it back to them somehow, even though these types can be obsessively good at covering their tracks. There will be slip-ups somewhere.
Most AI porn images looks quite underage to me, to be completely frank. :/
- At least with a human being it’s a matter of factuality whether or not they’re over 18. But with AI it’s unverifiable, especially considering some models have already been trained on CSEM.
  Once someone has that model locally, do they technically possess CSEM, even unknowingly? Do they only possess it if they try to make the AI make it? Seems like something someone in charge should have thought about in a legally binding way before dumping the internet into an image generator!
  
  In this case he used pictures from actual children and transformed them into CSAM using AI. So there's no question about the age, and there are real victims, too.
  
  Bound to be tested in court sooner or later. As far as I understand it one is "in possession" if they have access to a set of steps or procedures that would recover an image. So this prevents offenders from hiding behind the fact their images were compressed in a zip file or something. They don't have a literal offending image, but they possess it in a form that they can transform.
  What would need to be tested is that AI generators are coming up with novel images rather than retrieving existing ones. It seems like common sense but the law is quite pedantic. The more significant issue is that generators don't need to be trained on csem to come up with it. So proving someone had it with the intent of producing it would always be hard. Even generators trained on illegal material I'm not sure it would be straight forward to prove that someone knew what it was capable of.
  
  I'm not the person to clear up this legal grey area. I just think that AI porn often has these incredibly young faces which makes the enjoyers of that porn extra creepy.
  
  I assume any CSEM ingested into these models is absolutely swamped by the massive amount of adult porn that's much more easily available. A handful of images aren't going to drive model output in datasets of the scale of the image generation models. Maybe there are keywords that could drill down to be more associated with the child porn, but a lot of "young" type keywords are already plentifully applied to adults, and I imagine accidental child porn ingests are much less likely to be as conveniently labeled.
  So maybe you can figure out how to get it to produce child porn, but it probably won't just randomly produce it for an innocent porn prompt.
- I have not personally explored AI porn, but as someone with experience in machine learning and accidental biases that's not very surprising to me.
  On top the of the general societal bias towards youth for "beauty" related roles, smoother and less-featured faces (that in general look younger) are closer to an average face so defaulting to that gets a bit of training boost (when in doubt, target the mean). It's probably also not helped by youth-related porn keywords (teen, daughter, young) that further associate other porn prompts (even ones not about youth) with non-porn images of underage women that also have those keywords.
- Most real porn has women who look like kids to me.
  Even the so-called MILFs look about 15 years younger than me and I'm 47.
  You have to get into "mature" and shit to see women my age.
  I'm not into young women. I'm just not. It looks like they're fucking a high schooler and it's icky to me.
  And then there's all the schoolgirl and incest or incest-adjacent shit. "Playing with my stepdad." No. Just no.
  
  So... anyone who's not your age looks like a child to you? That's kind of fucked up.
- Most AI porn I've seen looks like Eldritch abominations, but then I haven't seen any for a while so maybe it's improved
  
  I don't want to kinkshame freaks who like eldritch abominations. I wanna kinkshame pdf file creeps.
- Ive seem some grandmas
- "a computer program with an ai function" what if he just used Windows, it has an ai function
- https://www.daz3d.com/ai
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99 comments