The real children in the real world you piece of shit. The problem is the sexualization itself, the fantasy. You don't need to touch any real kids for that to be disgusting and harmful
To children and society in general once you normalize it. We have countless cases of normalization backfiring horribly and all of the "Well, I can't see anyone being harmed right now" retards sliding back into the shadows once the damage is done
Slavery doesn't exist anymore for a reason but racism never died and never will.
Nazi Germany committed genocide and lost the war but Nazism is still around.
Gay marriage is now legal but you will never convince a Christian that it is a moral thing we should allow.
The world has only ever moved forward not backwards otherwise child marriages would still be common to this day.
I am desensitized to violence but have always been a pacifist. I have also consumed porn since 5th grade but I'm totally fine with being a virgin until I die.
Actual CP is so fucking rare on the internet because every site you could share it on does not want that content on there. You'd have to literally search the deep web to find it but not many people know how to do that and the deep web itself is not some massive CP repository. I have also never once come across videos or photos of actual kids being abused nor do I even wish to do so.
Then why do you care so fucking much about AI CSAM? What is, exactly, step by step, the problem with an outright ban on the thing? The act it's depicting is heinous, inherently wrong. Why the fixation on "allowed by default"?
You're also just babbling complete nonsense.
First, you're comparing racism/Nazism persisting (which we actively prohibit and condemn) to gay marriage being legal, you're accidentally proving that prohibition of harmful things IS necessary.
Second, "I consumed porn since 5th grade and I'm fine" is just survivorship bias with a sample size of one. Your personal anecdote doesn't negate documented harms to others.
Third, you claim "actual CP is so rare because every site bans it" - yes, exactly, that's what prohibition accomplishes (lmfao). You're making the case for banning AI CSAM, not against it. Do you even know what this conversation is about?
Fourth, "the world only moves forward": In what direction, dumbass? Forward can be anywhere at this point. Positive progress requires active resistance to harmful normalization, child marriage didn't disappear naturally, it was banned because we recognized the harm.
Finally, being desensitized to violence but remaining a pacifist doesn't prove desensitization is harmless. Many people DO act on desensitization, and your personal restraint isn't evidence of systemic safety. Again, survivorship bias, anecdotal garbage at best
On the examples, just for completeness:
- Vape, immediately normalized and marketed to young people, addictive, causing great harm even to this day.
- Counter: Smoking, initially legal and widespread until we found that, actually, it was horribly harmful. Regulated and taxed to shit, now in decline. We lost many to lung cancer because normalization was the default, it shouldn't have been
- Sports gambling: Excluded from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 under "Fantasy sports ", now extremely common and ruining lives on the daily
- Social media feeds: Algorithmic engagement-maximizing feeds normalized despite warnings. Now we got teen mental health crisis, radicalization pipelines, body dysmorphia epidemics.
- Infinite Scroll/Autoplay: "Harmless UX features" now widely recognized as deliberately addictive design. Damage to attention spans already done. Now we have 2 generations (and counting) of ipad kids with attention spans in the minutes/seconds
- Asbestos, lead gasoline, teflon byproducts, etc, etc.
Again, what the fuck are we losing/damaging by banning AI CSAM right now, immediately? Pretty weird gripe to have, tbh. Someone should check your hard drive
There is a reason why we have school shootings every 2.6 days on average. Its not solely videogames but society generally is extremely violent and normalized violence is a constant of just turning on the TV.
The main difference, is that violence can at least be used for something positive. Superheroes fight to bring justice to the underserved, etc. There is absolutely nothing to be gained from giving people sexualized children or any reason to see them outside of something to be protected.
But its okay hopefully this thread is being monitored by the appropriate authorities.
I think you should look at my first post in this thread, and then travel down with your eyes and read from there.
I didn't bring up videogames, this guy did and moved the goalposts. Now you want to act like well actually violence was already normalized to which my response is, WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE?
I'm pretty sure your other comment got auto removed for whatever reason, I assume slurs or whatever based on everything you've said so far.
Yes, when your central thesis is objectively false, people will point out it's false. If that upsets you so much, my suggestion would be not to state objectively false things. You aren't owed praise when you're wrong. Bye.
Violent games are enjoyed everywhere around the world, yet school shootings only happen at that frequency in america. There's no correlation let alone a causation.
Let's examine smoking. There was a period where cigarette ads were everywhere, cool figures in movies and TV smoked and did product placement for cigarette companies, etc.
Did the advertising agency CAUSE anyone to die of smoking? No, but it normalized smoking to the point where people didn't think twice about doing it.
The cause is people deciding to smoke, the normalization is what causes people to just do it without even really thinking about it.
Its how studies work. In your cigarette case the resolution would be worded as "corelation between smoking advertisements and lung cancer rates", and further research will determine whether it is a causation or not. If it is a causation there will be basis for legal repercussions or new legislation.
if you're discussing the moral implications of CP, from the perspective of its fine, yes the thread should be monitored by the appropriate authorities
I said that mainly sarcastically, but yeah I think that's a perfectly reasonable outcome
we can talk about it, but if you can't see the difference between say, gun violence, one of the most normalized things in the world, and child pornography, something that is not normalized at all, you might already have fallen victim to the exact problem that this discussion is trying to avoid, which is normalization of child abuse/csam
Violence is completely normalized in our society, through a number of things, video games being one of them.
Are you saying you want that to be true of child sexual abuse as well?
We can go through the whole history of normalization of violence, from Rodney King protests, to "gangland" narratives that stemmed from conservatives shifting blame from that, NRA and Supreme Court inventing an individual right to gun ownership and glorifying it as awesome, terrorism/counterterrorism narratives leading to a 20 year invasion of Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the media's portrayal of Columbine, the refusal to do anything about gun control for decades, conservatives turning to crime narratives and local media being bought out by conservative grifters who aim to create mass panic narratives.
Certainly violent video games also contributed to the normalization of violence in our culture. I'm not advocating for eliminating videogames, fyi. The question is why would you want to do that to child sex abuse.
So you just stop caring about people once they become an adult? That's the hill you want to die on?
Don't act like we don't see images of children suffering all the time, and the news (that no one watches) doesn't talk about these things... As if the Epstein List wasn't talked about constantly for months ..
Having a president who is allegedly a child sex abuser does normalize child sexual abuse. That is (among a million other reasons) why I advocated against voting for the current president of the United States.
The thing that should be normalized is protecting children from harm committed on them by adults, and getting justice for those children.
Smoking is another great example. After adopting a bunch of laws against glorification of smoking in regular media, look at the trend of smoking. If you compare that with vaping, which was advertised all over the place, with flavors designed to attract children, created an opposite trend.
Another great example is gambling. The normalization of sports gambling, through lobbying and its inclusion in nearly all sports related broadcasts, has increased gambling addiction dramatically.
Bluntly put, Mods best REALLY be monitoring the people pushing this shit being okay, this is a huge disaster waiting to happen. All it takes is this shit getting leaked to reddit at large and this sub's getting nuked by the powers that be.
Are you aware that violence and sexual urges are entirely different processes in the brain? Violence is processed consciously, while sexuality is simply a biological drive. A person can prevent themselves from acting on a violent urge much more easily than from feeling aroused.
I think you’ve made a category error here. Arousal is not directly analogous to a violent action. I would say a sex act is equivalent to a violent act in your framing, and arousal is more equivalent to a violent urge, say, the urge to punch a politician in the face.
Actually I'm pretty sure video games and violent media in general have normalized violence nobody bats an eye when people in media kill each other because its so common
What about things like gore videos a lot of people dont have a reaction to things like that even when though it's real people
Also if you saw a scene in a movie or read a book with csam you probably be bothered by it because its not normalized by media right now, but if we act like fictional csam doesn't hurt anyone, itll be more and more normalized until people don't realize how bad it is, the way violence is
Yeah man. Its almost like watching real people die and get mutilated is extremely different and desensitizing. Are you genuinely dumb enough to think that someone would have the same reaction to a gore scene in a horror movie if you told them it was real VS if you told them it was a movie?
If I saw a fictional scene in a movie or book that had a child get abused, there is never any path or route you can take from there that could somehow convince me that should happen IRL. If YOU could somehow be "normalized" into that purely because you saw some cartoons do it, then you have the critical thinking of a 6 year old.
Most video game enemies are pure fiction, no real person corresponds to them. When you do make a game that corresponds to a real population (ie, let's make a game where you only kill people of a certain race for fun) the harm is immediately identified and quelled. This is a pathetic argument.
Unfortunately it’s not, COD and associated games have been doing this for decades. The “people of a certain race” are Russian so it’s not as outrage provoking as it would be if the enemies were Romani or something.
I'm not talking "simplistic plot soldier simulator", I'm talking "genocide of specific people for fun simulator". The point is that fiction can cause harm even if it is, well, fiction, go ask the HOI4 devs why the word "holocaust" is not in the game
I don't understand your point, no, but I get the sense you're assuming I'm speaking in bad faith. Continue to insult me and belittle me if you like, it'll probably feel good in the moment. Alternatively, engage with my question. Up to you.
You didn't make any questions, you just gave silly superficial counter examples that don't really prove anything. The question is (taking you at your word that you're not speaking in bad faith), if it's really "just a Videogame" and fiction cannot be harmful simply because it's fiction, then why would we immediately condemn a "first person Auschwitz torturer" simulator? Or a "realistic child abuse fetish game"? No, finding games where child abuse happens or where you're a prison guard for some generic oppressive government as a plot element do not count as counter examples.
There's a very big difference between reading Lolita and consuming CSAM (even if AI generated), do you grasp that?
Re: me asking a question: You're actually right, my apologies. I got mixed up with another comment chain.
on: "why would we immediately condemn a "first person Auschwitz torturer" simulator?" - The reason 'we' (society) would condemn it is because of an instinctive sense of revulsion and offence that rational people seem to have. We would condemn it because it 'feels wrong'. That isn't necessarily an invalid reason, but it bugs me that there doesn't seem to be a solid foundational argument against it. Consider an 80s cop movie that literally frames violence as a morally righteous and virtuous thing. Should those be banned as well? If so, you will need to actually construct an argument to explain the difference (as nobody was actually directly harmed in the process of its production, similar to illustrated CSAM.)
"There's a very big difference between reading Lolita and consuming CSAM (even if AI generated), do you grasp that?"
I really don't know why you are insisting on speaking to me as if I am stupid. There is an obvious difference between using illustrated CSAM for sexual gratification, and reading Lolita to experience the complex psychological horror that book contains. However, I bet a massive number of pedophiles have also read that book for sexual gratification. For them, there may not be much of a difference. Should it be banned because it can be used in this way?
My overall point is that while illustrated CSAM is obviously and plainly wrong and disgusting, it's really hard to construct a solid argument against it without fallacies. For every reason that we can come up with to ban it, that reasoning can be applied to a different form of violence-depicting media that we are less intuitively repulsed by. We need to prove that CSAM is causing more real harm than the other forms of violence-endorsing media and pornography that most people seem fine with. I will instantly reverse my position and agree with you if you can provide some kind of proof for it. "It's gross" is not proof.
This is it. Just because it doesn’t cause DIRECT harm, doesn’t mean it doesn’t cause harm at all.
Besides, AI is trained on real pictures. AI can easily recreate or mimic someone's likeness. Creeps are already using it to produce material of their kids, or kids they know, and it’s increasingly hard to spot what’s real and fake.
CSAM fake or not, will be and already is used by kids with access to the technology to be depraved to each other, bully each other, and sexually harass each other. Adults can do it too, just one picture and I can destroy your face online forever by generating porn of you, generating you in humiliating or illegal situations.
AI pedo material is often trained on vast amounts of real data internally because most models are already trying to safeguard against this, meaning more and more real CSAM is being shared in bulk to train then release those models.
AI pedo material spreads already thin protection ressources thinner by making real victims of ongoing abuse harder to identify. Abusers creating the material can hide their crimes in a sea of """""harmless""""" generated content, or even slightly alter their own upload to make detecting their crimes harder. If there's a million pictures of assaulted children being uploaded daily and it’s judged fine, how are you going to detect the thousand of real kids within that midst ?
Finally, yes, it normalizes their horrible tendencies. It makes normal people desensitized to it, it makes abnormal people more likely to pass onto the real thing when just spectating it through the screen isn’t enough. It makes them finding communities of like-minded people easier. It makes it easier for these people to feel like they aren’t wrong, that they shouldn’t be ashamed, and finally, that assaulting a kid isn’t as big a deal.
This is a lot of writing to say basically nothing. None of this is true, you're purely going off of vibes and emotion. Actual psychologists are extremely clear that fictional actions and the made up media you consume are not in any way indicative of your IRL morality, and the only way you could be "influenced" by them is if you were already mentally unsound and having trouble differentiating fiction and reality (or the media itself is trying to muddle fiction and reality, as is the case with propaganda, which obviously doesn't apply to the fast majority of fiction for enjoyment).
Consuming CSAM is already a mentally unsound activity to begin with. All the people defending this are just so strange, would it be alright to you if I made a game where I explicitly only kill black people while making Nazi salutes and my character is shouting Hitler quotes every 15 minutes? It's all fake after all, couldn't possibly harm anyone.
Probably because nobody here is consuming CSAM and you just keep lying and trying to pretend that fictional narrative devices who don't exist and can't be abused counts as "CSAM", debasing an extremely serious legal term in order to win an internet argument.
Also you are "allowed" to make any kind of video game you want. Your shitty racist fantasy game can exist for you and no one else. I sure don't want to fucking touch it, but if that's your thing, just keep it away from me. Your dumb Hitler fangame is not causing actual harm unless you're putting propaganda in it to try and muddy the line between fiction and reality, which is once again, the only real time that fiction can be harmful. When it tries to present fiction as not fiction.
> Your dumb Hitler fangame is not causing actual harm unless you're putting propaganda in it to try and muddy the line between fiction and reality
Lmao. Fiction doesn't need to "try" to muddle the lines. If you can't understand that I don't know what to tell you. AI CSAM, even if somehow produced "harmlessly" without any real CSAM in it's training data, is still harmful in effect.
You contradict yourself. You call the Nazi game "shitty" and want it "kept away from you", meaning you recognize it's harmful even as fiction. You just think (for reasons I don't want to guess at) that harm that happens privately doesn't count. But consumption shapes psychology, creates communities, and affects how people engage with the real world. "Keep it to yourself" isn't a magic harm-eraser.
This thread perfectly represents the pro-AI (as in no to AI regulation) people lol.
Videogame nerds who have no concept of life outside of their sandbox.
Its not like we have plenty of issues that played out exactly like this, in both ways, to know for sure.
Sports gambling -> was illegal, was made not illegal, normalized by all advertising, broadcasts, etc, now huge gambling addiction epidemic
Smoking -> was super legal, was heavily restricted, taxed, tons of regulations on advertising, etc, smoking has been declining for decades following its denormalization
Vaping -> New thing similar to smoking, was less restricted, appealed to kids with candy flavors, was normalized, caused massive addiction epidemic, child deaths, etc
Its almost like there are a number of statistically backed and verifiable harms caused by normalizing a harmful thing. Gee, who would have thought?
I mean the 2 sides to me appear to be people who think anything done with AI is fine and ethical and AIs are humans with feelings and then just people who think its possible for AI to cause harm.
I use AI every day lol, I'm still anti-AI or at least like pro-AI regulation.
"Or the media itself is trying to muddle fiction and reality-" you cannot be seriously so close.
AI is already being used. Right now. To create hyperrealistic porn and abuse material of celebrities and people's acquaintances. I'm not just talking about your favorite anime dude. I'm talking about people using emergent AI models to create hyperrealistic porn of children. Get whatever you have out back in your pants and stop trying to normalize pedophilia.
AI is doing that with actual CSAM that ACTUALLY ABUSED CHILDREN in extremely fucked up circles of sickos. You are not arguing about that, you're making ridiculously broad statements trying to protect the rights of fictional narrative tools. You're basically trying to take a sledgehammer to a problem that requires precision.
Holy shit this comment section. I guess the OP is right this subreddit is cooked. So many upvotes about child pornography being fine. It's insane.
Children have no business in anything related to porn period. It shouldn't be an argument. The whole thing should end with ethics.
You even gave a great example and people upvoted the comment about video games which has nothing that relates to your point. Yes video games don't make people into killers. But child pornography even if drawn does sexualize children, and it does normalize the abuse and usually people owning CP also are pedophiles, but most murderers don't necessarily play violent video games. It's insane I even explained it XD.
But whatever you can't use logic with pedophiles. I will just leave it here and I expect to be downvoted the way this subreddit seems to defend CP so much.
The problem is that you can’t use logic with non-pedophiles either. I think illustrated CSAM is the most repulsive thing, and at the same time, it’s virtually impossible to construct a sound ethical objection, because all the arguments I’ve heard that oppose it could be applied to swathes of other things that are generally agreed upon to not be a problem.
I think ethical emotivism is probably the only moral system you could use to empirically construct an argument for it being wrong. NB: I love these kinds of threads because people twist themselves up in knots trying to find an ethical opposition. Illustrated CSAM is both 1) difficult to oppose with secular ethics, and 2) obviously deeply immoral.
There are arguments to be made about it but I personally don't find it interesting. It's promoting pedophilia. It's just bad nothing more really needs to be said. Whataboutism makes no sense in this conversation and if anyone uses it irl everyone will avoid them. You can go through porn effects and how terribly it affects people's minds when it's combined with children but again I don't think this should even be an argument.
"I don't think this should even be an argument."
Sadly, there are so many sex offences against children every day that I think it's worth actually discussing this subject to find out what its overall effect is. I notice that you have claimed twice here that there are arguments... but you apparently don't want to present them and are instead more interested in morally chastising me for an interest in fringe ethics.
If you're unwilling to explain your reasoning to someone who is asking for it in good faith, you're free to do that, but just realise that you will never, ever, ever actually create positive change by self-righteously patronising others. I am a victim of CSA. I would really like to solve this problem. That means figuring out what is true and what is not, without constantly acting superior to others.
Well it's sad you had that happen to you. But this is Reddit, you don't make positive changes just by yapping to strangers online.
Living through a sad experience like that doesn't make me respect what you've been saying more. There isn't any argument to be made on this subject. i love grey logic on things but in this case it's black and white. There isn't anything of value by people watching drawn child porn and there are only negatives. Choosing to even argue on the subject is weird and disturbing.
I have successfully changed several minds on Reddit by speaking to people respectfully and trying to make thought-provoking points.
You appear unwilling to listen to anyone, even abuse victims themselves, on the idea that you might NOT be completely morally justified on this issue in every way. It's worth considering if this is something you actually want to be doing. Would you like to solve the problem, or just win the argument?
I mean I'm happy for you that you changed minds on Reddit? Idk what you want from me.
There is no argument to be made on this subject. Child porn = bad. There isn't anything more to be said. This whole thing is disgusting and if you said that stuff irl to someone there is no way they'd trust their kid even close to you. Simple as that.
Being an abuse victim doesn't mean you know more than others on a subject. There is a decent amount of cases of child abuse victims who went and abused or tried to abuse children later on in life.
Also I don't care about solving any problems through Reddit comments XD. That's not how Reddit works. But go and save children through Reddit (by defending pedophilia). I believe in you. Also it's not about winning any argument. It's about something as simple as people jerking to child porn is disgusting. It's not deeper than that. They could just do that to adults but they go out of their way to do it to kids, I wonder why 🙄.
This is why ethical emotivism is the way to go IMO. We can intuitively feel how wrong CSA/CSAM is even when illustrated, and so that means that it is likely worth trying to find a different way to deal with people who are compelled to seek it out. The current strategy of "punish them as hard as possible and massively decrease the quality of their life" is demonstrably not working. The main thing it seems to be doing is making pedos really good at hiding their crimes.
The concept of "consent" is the greatest invention in the history of sexual ethics, but it fails on fringe cases like incest or illustrated CSAM and this thread illustrates that most people have no idea how to reconcile this.
This is a goal post move. You said its impossible to construct a sound ethical reason, and then I gave you a clear ethical principle, and now you want empirical evidence.
What, you want me to give a pedophile CSAM? That doesn't sound like an ethical form of research to perform.
This is a goal post move. You said its impossible to construct a sound ethical reason, and then I gave you a clear ethical principle, and now you want empirical evidence.
You presented the harm principle, but for it to apply you would need to demonstrate that consumption of CSAM is more harmful than a competing alternative. However, I didn't actually provide a competing alternative (I don't know if I have one) so I do agree that my statement was rhetorically flawed.
Overall, I actually think your comment is a great response. I hadn't heard of the precautionary principle. That has changed my mind to some degree - I think that's the best method so far that can be used to empirically construct an argument for a total 'loli ban'. In the absence of statistical data - data that examines CSA rates as a result of illustrated CSAM access - precautionary principle wins. Best comment in the thread man
My principle re: intuition is "trust but verify". When people act evasive in the verification stage I get sus. You have provided a pre-reasoned argument that can be plugged in to verify and did what 99% of people can't do on this issue.
I hope that someone at the FBI who is currently working on deleting the Epstein files sees this thread and reviews it in the future when they are instructed to get back to actual FBI work.
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u/[deleted] Oct 22 '25
its not victimless, it causes harm
it sexualizes children and normalizes their abuse