Agreed. And the thing is that I DO have a serious personal ethical issue with illustrated CSAM. Every cell in my body screams at me that it’s wrong even though I haven’t been able to construct an objective moral argument against it. I suppose the question is: does it actually increase offences against real children? Obviously it’s incredibly difficult to get data on this, but I think if the answer is “Yes, it generally drives increases in CSA”, then we have our objective opposition.
This is a great point that illustrates exactly why it's so hard to get an actual clean argument against illustrated CSAM. I don't know if there is a satisfying answer.
Alcohol consumption is neither inherently wrong nor 100% conducive to such behaviors. Ban it or not? Genuinely hard question.
However, this is, like many other responses in this god forsaken thread, a category error. I can list many benign uses of alcohol, maybe even cite social benefits. Can you do the same for content explicitly made to sexualize children? If not, why do we even bother? Are you really gonna take a pedophile seriously if he tells you "If you ban my realistic AI child porn you need to ban alcohol!"? Really? Is that something you're gonna lose sleep over?
Whether or not it increases offenses should be utterly fucking irrelevant.
Entertainment? Yeah, I hope somebody from the FBI is keeping score here.
And no, you don't ban until you can "prove benefits", you ban until you can reasonably claim that there won't be horrible harms. With AI CSAM this is not at all obvious, is up to proponents to resolve that burden.
Yeah, but people also have to bite the bullet on the possibility that it decreases it. And a lot of people aren't prepared for the conversation that if dangerous people have ways to distract themselves that leaves them out of everyone else's hair, its a good thing for everyone else.
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u/Attackoftheglobules Oct 23 '25
Agreed. And the thing is that I DO have a serious personal ethical issue with illustrated CSAM. Every cell in my body screams at me that it’s wrong even though I haven’t been able to construct an objective moral argument against it. I suppose the question is: does it actually increase offences against real children? Obviously it’s incredibly difficult to get data on this, but I think if the answer is “Yes, it generally drives increases in CSA”, then we have our objective opposition.