> Is it really child abuse if no children were involved?
I think there is an empirical question one step beyond this. Does a pedophile who sees AI child porn get inured to it and then go on to try to act out fantasies with real victims? Or does this give pedophiles a way to satiate their desires indefinitely with only AI-based content, and lead to a lower portion abusing actual kids?
A second order issue is that distributing child porn is claimed to create demand for child porn which leads to more abuse. If there were no criminal penalties for purely AI-generated CSAM and the normal criminal penalties remained for CSAM that in any way derived from images of actual kids, would the cost-benefit difference push most consumers to demand only AI-generated stuff?
I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but I think it's at least plausible that more AI-generated CSAM would reduce actual sexual abuse of children, and from a harm-reduction standpoint, it should be beneficial to have more of it ... and it's also plausible that pedophiles being able to generate more and more extreme material at will would make things worse ... and it's also likely legally and institutionally impossible to do the studies to determine which of these is actually true.
I think there is an empirical question one step beyond this. Does a pedophile who sees AI child porn get inured to it and then go on to try to act out fantasies with real victims? Or does this give pedophiles a way to satiate their desires indefinitely with only AI-based content, and lead to a lower portion abusing actual kids?
A second order issue is that distributing child porn is claimed to create demand for child porn which leads to more abuse. If there were no criminal penalties for purely AI-generated CSAM and the normal criminal penalties remained for CSAM that in any way derived from images of actual kids, would the cost-benefit difference push most consumers to demand only AI-generated stuff?
I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but I think it's at least plausible that more AI-generated CSAM would reduce actual sexual abuse of children, and from a harm-reduction standpoint, it should be beneficial to have more of it ... and it's also plausible that pedophiles being able to generate more and more extreme material at will would make things worse ... and it's also likely legally and institutionally impossible to do the studies to determine which of these is actually true.