Mixed Feelings

Here’s a story that gets me all philosophical:

A child psychiatrist in Charlotte, North Carolina, used artificial intelligence (AI) to make child porn, and he is now facing the consequences.

In a press release Wednesday, the United States Attorney’s Office Western District of North Carolina announced 41-year-old David Tatum will spend the next 40 years behind bars, then 30 years of supervised release for the sexual exploitation of a minor and the AI-generated child porn.

I’ll get to the philosophical bit in a moment because emotionally, of course, I want this perverted bastard to be burned at the stake and his ashes scattered far away from any children’s playground, never mind imprisoned forever.

However.

Did not some Supreme Court, in its Supreme Wisdom, decree a while ago that making cartoon-based child pornography did not constitute a crime?  Why yes, yes it did.  (The whole story, country by country, can be found here.)

I myself once looked at 3D-printed sex dolls, with the logical extension thereof as it pertained to creating sex dolls of children (FFS).

So ‘splain this to me Simon:  if it’s okay (perhaps) to create sex dolls of children, why not AI-generated images or even movies?  Remember:  no actual person is being harmed by this activity.

This is but my philosophical musing, of course — see my “burned at the stake” suggestion above.

And boy, have we created an Alps-sized slippery slope with this one.

2 comments

  1. “And boy, have we created an Alps-sized slippery slope with this one.”
    ======
    LOL
    Maybe, maybe not.
    Are laws for people, or for imaginations?

    “Remember: no actual person is being harmed by this activity.”
    ========
    While you might consider such a person as described, perverted, if no one is harmed where’s the problem?

    I’m reminded of the peanut farmer that lamented, “I have lusted in my heart.” I don’t recall him being jailed for that offense.

  2. Actually, he took hidden video of underage girls undressing. So there’s that. Also, the AI bit (and I know everyone is all scared of the “evil” AI), was not some innocent no one was harmed fake pictures. He took real pictures, of real children, and used basically a very fancy photoshop tool (using AI, of course) to turn the pictures of clothed children into naked children.

    The fact that he started with real pictures of real children is the key here. There are victims.

    That said, with all caveats in place, philosophically, if he simply made naked kid pictures entirely from scratch – no real children, no real pictures – I could see the point that there’s no victim. Same as if he doodled some naked drawings on a napkin from his imagination. This shit is going from theoretical to real in a very fast manner. I think drawing the line on what’s porn and what’s not is going be way more difficult.

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