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- Hacker News
- Shit like this is why I can't take any of the "freedom indexes" seriously. Europe is constantly ranked highly but then you get shit like oh you're fake picture looks a little too real jail.
- Where does the training data for AI-CSAM come from?by dasKrokodil
- I, too, have an issue with this ruling.
CSAM laws exist to punish abusers, and seek justice for the abused. Not one or the other, but both. The law cannot function without the victims, else you're just attacking people for what amounts to thought crimes.
I find CSAM and pedophiles disgusting, and I imagine 100% of HN users agree with me on this, but this just opens the door for world governments to a) claim LLM output is real and factual (!), but b) minimizes the danger to victims and equates victimhood to being a fictional character.
I'm not Danish and I'm hoping this is just some Dane-specific weird quirk of their law, but from what I can see, this is a politically-biased ruling to "think of the children".
by DiabloD3 - The court was asked to annul the previous judgment since the defendant did not think that the pictures in question were CSAM, since the children depicted were fictional. The court found the pictures similar to photography and therefore rejected the appeal.
In my mind, this is pretty substantial technology news, at least in Denmark, since it rejects the notion that AI generated pictures are substantially different from other pictures, and therefore has to abide by the same laws.
I will be interested in seeing if anybody charges the big AI providers for producing these photos.
by delusional - It's slightly misleading to refer to 'CSAM' in the title, as the article doesn't actually use it.
CSAM is an American legal concept, and the idea that child porn should be legal as long as there's no provable abuse is a peculiarly American take. Most European countries don't work like that.
Danish law appears to outlaw (roughly translated) "sexual material containing visual representations of persons under the age of 18". Whether or not a specific minor was abused doesn't come into it. So clarifying that that covers AI-generated imagery seems to be a much smaller step than many in this thread are assuming.
by roryirvine - I'm seeing some other comments talking about how no one is harmed by AI CSAM. Fundamentally, I reckon AI CSAM is the same as Lolicon, which is illegal here in Sweden. I believe the same applies to Denmark, though I am by no means knowledged about Danish law.
AI is not something new in this space, it just means that a lot more grotesque fictional CSAM can be produced. It has been possible to create realistic-looking-but-fictional CSAM since Photoshop came out (and then some).
by regenschutz - There's a few comments (boldly) criticizing the ruling for being technically incorrect. If no child was abused, how can it be a child abuse crime?
I would counter with this: If it is technically impossible to tell the difference between AI generated images, and real ones, how could anyone ever be prosecuted for having presumptive real ones in their possession ever again? Everyone tried would simply say "AI" and that'd be that, unless there was a victim to testify, or it was a case on generation of it etc.
So AI images of this nature do have victims, just slightly less directly.
Another adjacent question: How would you feel if it was an AI generated image of a specific child. What is the precise threshold of victimhood that is necessary?
by colingauvin