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25 arrested in global hit against AI-generated child sexual abuse material
(www.europol.europa.eu)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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On one hand I don't think this kind of thing can be consequence free (from a practical standpoint). On the other hand... how old were the subjects? You can't look at a person to determine their age and someone that looks like a child but is actually adult wouldn't be charged as a child pornographer. The whole reason age limits are set is to give reasonable assurance the subject is not being exploited or otherwise harmed by the act.
This is a massive grey area and I just hope sentences are proportional to the crime. I could live with this kind of thing being classified as a misdemeanor provided the creator didn't use underage subjects to train or influence the output.
It's not a gray area at all. There's an EU directive on the matter. If an image appears to depict someone under the age of 18 then it's child porn. It doesn't matter if any minor was exploited. That's simply not what these laws are about.
Bear in mind, there are many countries where consenting adults are prosecuted for having sex the wrong way. It's not so long ago that this was also the case in Europe, and a lot of people explicitly want that back. On the other hand, beating children has a lot of fans in the same demographic. Some people want to actually protect children, but a whole lot of people simply want to prosecute sexual minorities, and the difference shows.
17 year-olds who exchange nude selfies engage in child porn. I know there have been convictions in the US; not sure about Europe. I know that teachers have been prosecuted when minors sought help when their selfies were being passed around in school, because they sent the images in question to the teacher, and that's possession. In Germany, the majority of suspects in child porn cases are minors. Valuable life lesson for them.
Anyway, what I'm saying is: We need harsher laws and more surveillance to deal with this epidemic of child porn. Only a creep would defend child porn and I am not a creep.
That's a directive, it's not a regulation, and the directive calling anyone under 18 a child does not mean that everything under 18 is treated the same way in actually applicable law, which directives very much aren't. Germany, for example, splits the whole thing into under 14 and 14-18.
We certainly don't arrest youth for sending each other nudes:
...their own nudes, that is. Not that of classmates or whatnot.