New Mexico is seeking an injunction to permanently block Snap from practices allegedly harming kids. That includes a halt on advertising Snapchat as “more private” or “less permanent” due to the alleged “core design problem” and “inherent danger” of Snap’s disappearing messages. The state’s complaint noted that the FBI has said that “Snapchat is the preferred app by criminals because its design features provide a false sense of security to the victim that their photos will disappear and not be screenshotted.”
I don’t understand how this would be fine but pedophiles generating them at home without distributing them would be illegal.
Cause the cops are creating CSAM and putting it out there in some shape or form, which you could argue would encourage pedophiles same way circulating ai images would as well.
Either generating under age sensitive material is always wrong or it’s not.
Federal law is creating fictional CSAM at home without transmitting it is legal.
The few AI arrests I’ve seen they transmitted them.
Huh, that’s very different from what other people have said before
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors
Section 1466A of Title 18, United States Code, makes it illegal for any person to knowingly produce, distribute, receive, or possess with intent to transfer or distribute visual representations, such as drawings, cartoons, or paintings that appear to depict minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and are deemed obscene.
Specifically: distribute, receive, or possess with intent to transfer or distribute visual representations
By the statute’s own terms, the law does not make all fictional child pornography illegal, only that found to be obscene or lacking in serious value. The mere possession of said images is not a violation of the law unless it can be proven that they were transmitted through a common carrier, such as the mail or the Internet, transported across state lines, or of an amount that showed intent to distribute.[135]
Edit: So it has to be 100% locally generated and never transmitted. You still wouldn’t want to try and fight this in court though, I’m sure they’d do their best to throw you in jail, or fabricate an intent to distribute if you’d made a lot, even with all the images you generated to try and get the images you actually wanted.
Edit: Also this is federal, there may be other state laws.
I mean with the intent just means that possession is illegal cause all it takes is the judge to decide there was intent.
I guess I was right that possession is essentially illegal too.
The prosecutor needs to convince the jury there was intent. Intent is one of the hardest things to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in court without evidence and motive. It’s not a guarantee especially with no history.
Edit: And in this case, a history means you’ve probably already been convicted as thats what the history would lead to.
If it gets to a trial instead of a plea deal, but fair enough, that is a rather reasonable guardrail.
Ya, I imagine many of these highly specific cases would plead out to something not involving jail and/or pedophile record. Stakes are pretty high and that’s a big gamble. A case like this it’d be hard to have a sympathetic jury.
The article didn’t say the cops generated AI CSAM. It said they created a profile pic, which was shown in the article.
So if someone generates a minor’s image and it’s not nude, is that not CSAM?
I’m genuinely asking, I always thought it was about sexualizing children, not whether they are nude or not.
I don’t think so. People keep throwing that acronym around but I suspect they didn’t read the article and find out that it was one normal picture of a high school-aged girl.
I actually read it and then made a comment because even though it’s a profile picture, the intent is to have a viewer sexual the picture and thereby sexualizing a minor.
I do get how it’s a normal picture, but it made me think of this slippery slope and where the line is.
In an alternate universe:
Cops help pedophiles with AI pics of teen girl. Ethical triumph or new disaster?
“Heather” also tested out Snapchat’s search tool, finding that “even though she used no sexually explicit language, the algorithm must have determined that she was looking for CSAM” when she searched for other teen users.
But literally in just the previous paragraph:
Posing as “Sexy14Heather,” the investigator swapped messages with adult accounts, including users who "sent inappropriate messages and explicit photos.
Gee, I wonder how the algorithm could’ve possibly suggested these users. What a mystery.
I’m not defending Snapchat here - they’re a scumbag company with a scumbag product and they should be held responsible for enabling the sharing of CSAM on their platform - but it doesn’t just match you with random predators out of thin air. They went in with specific keywords in their username and a pattern of account engagement.
They’re also trying to claim screen shots are a major security issue, even though everyone knows they can just do that and the real benefit of deleted messages is that no corpo, cop, or cracker can snoop on them later.
They are completely incompetent and tech illiterate, is what I’m saying
You know that on Snapchat the messages aren’t deleted anymore right? They are stored on your phone and the Snapchat servers. That is how “memories” works, and there used to be screenshot workaround to grab the photo back after the fact, but I am not sure if they have hid them better by now.
Snapchat is not even close to a secure messaging program…
Wow that’s fucked. That’s the entire reason snapchat is even still a thing.
The messages never disappeared really.
There have been alternate apps and even jailbreak workarounds for Snapchat since the beginning to copy and keep the messages.
The benefit of Snapchat was the theater of it
Tough call. If you put out bait, you’re gonna get someone. But would that person have done the same thing if they had not seen your bait? Chicken and the egg. On one hand, it looks like entrapment.
I mean, that part isn’t really at issue here. It’s fundamentally the same technique that’s been used since the 90’s, famously on To Catch a Predator. Seemingly, the “entrapment” angle has been settled.
But now they can argue that they aren’t sexually attracted to children, just AI artwork, which is technically not an image of a child. And unless I missed it, they were not trying to meet the girl.
The problem is going to be that images that aren’t real of a crime aren’t a crime. Of the opposite was true, images of murder would be illegal. Can’t just cherry pick.
If I draw a stick figure and label it “naked girl,” does it become child porn? What if I’m a really good artist?
When the “AI artwork” is made for the specific purpose of representing underage children and is indistinguishable from the real thing, that argument is going to get flattened pretty quickly.
Pretty easy to present a couple pages to a jury of kids pictures (not nude) and say “tell us which ones were AI”.
Well that’s not how the law works. A jury wouldn’t decide that. They don’t get to say “close enough for fake to be real” because real has a name and fake doesn’t have a name.
The crime is possessing a photo of a thing that happened. A real person was abused. The fake image, like a realistic painting of a fictional event, does not actually involve a person getting hurt.
Let me set up a situation: A person creates a very realistic, but fake, video. They first have the character walk onto the screen in a wireframe. Then, the animation begins to build on texture and now we have a person on a green background. They look real, but we know for sure it’s not real. Then the background enters in the same way. Now the video appears to be real, but… we know it’s not. Just like movie, those are just special effects even if it looks pretty believable.
The crime is a documented event of someone being hurt. If there was a video of a person actually killing a person, that video could be considered evidence of a crime. But if that event was staged as part of a video intended as entertainment, there is no crime and that video isn’t real.
Of course, the topic of child abuse is difficult to talk about. One may make the statement that fake images lead people to the real thing, and that would encourage people to do bad things. Well, they said the same thing about video games—so we would obviously need to apply the same laws to them. Movies and books about crimes could also encourage people to commit crimes, so those need to be banned entirely, and my huge collection of horror movies could put me in jail for life.
The line becomes impossible to draw.
And if that video built to feature a child performing fellario, it would still be child pornography
No, the voiceover will say in an adult voice “I am over 18, I have a fictional disease that makes me look like a younger.”
And now it’s not a child, because “youth” is subjective at this point.
There is very legal real commercial porn of adults engaging in “age play” and “incest,” both which are illegal in reality. Some of those videos would make you think, “how are they actually 18?!”
On the flip side, in most US jurisdictions, incest is illegal and an actual video of two adults engaging in that would be evidence of a crime and they could be prosecuted.
In conclusion (haha), real is illegal and fiction is not.
Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not advocating for specific things to be LEGAL, just arguing that a law making something that is FICTION illegal could be difficult to prove in many circumstances, and lead to many false accusations.
Ok, so when the police use a young-appearing officer to nail somebody who is looking to hook up with what is listed as a 14yo… that’s just going to get dropped? Because it seems that’s a tactic that’s been used often enough and the actual age of the officer matters less than the intent of the perp to engage in sex with a minor.
The argument “I just thought we were role-playing” isn’t significantly different from “I totally know this ‘14yo giving a BJ to old man.mp4’ was AI generated and that’s just my fetish, not real kids”
I believe that cartoon images depicting sex of underage kids is still illegal. At least in the US.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong but seems like I remember this from a news article a while back. Maybe it was just a specific state.
I am not going to Google that one though to find out though.
I think the bar is whether it could be reasonably mistaken for a real child. Which makes quite a lot of disgusting content legal.
I also find it to be repugnant, but if the images are not based on real people and the ai was not trained on real csam(good luck proving this either way), then it shouldn’t be illegal. The laws were made to protect kids, and drawings of purly fictional characters are not hurting the kids.
Pretty much every law ever made in the history of humanity that was ostensibly to protect children is actually about control of the population.
This is just plain wrong.
Obviously, there are loads of laws and very good legislation that does indeed protect children.
Just one example: child labour laws.
I suspect that what you really mean is that whenever a politician says whatever police powers are required to protect children, they really just want more power to violate privacy to make it easier to prosecute various crimes.
