this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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This is a very difficult topic to engage with rationally. But put the emotions aside and try.
We generally don't ban things just because they're gross. We ban child porn because children were hurt in the making of it. Without real kids involved, what's the justification to ban it, other than we just find it horrible? Again, we generally do not ban porn simply because it makes people uncomfortable. There's a lot of porn of adults I would never want to see. Hell, I don't even like porn of any kind. I'm more a romance novel type myself.
But really, as gross as it is, from a purely legal perspective, if there are no kids involved in the creation of something, how is banning simulated child porn any different than homophobes wanting to ban porn because they think gay people are gross? Again, we don't ban porn simply because we find it gross.
I could see an argument that maybe having virtual child porn out there could make pedophiles more likely to offend. But that seems like a very shaky assumption. The opposite case could just as easily be true. Virtual child porn could very well lower the rates of assault against minors. By banning it, we could very well be harming real children in the name of protecting virtual ones.
AI models only know what they are trained on. Inherently, that means real children are harmed in the production of AI-generated CSAM.
That's not necessarily true. You could have all sorts of training models that didn't rely on any real children at all. You're just assuming it was trained on actual child porn. Other ways it could be trained:
Trained on images of adults that look younger than 18. You could commission a bunch of pornography by people with whatever medical condition this guy has and use that as your training data.
Trained on pornographic images of adults and regular images of kids. (This one is questionable legally, even though again, no kids were harmed in the making of it.)
Trained on entirely on images of adults, reviewers are tasked with trying to identify the age of the person in the image generated, and using that as training data.
If someone was deliberately trying to create a legal child porn engine (what a horrible phrase to type), they would be sure to do it without using any actual child porn as the training data. There would be little point otherwise.
Would they, really...? That's giving the sort of guys actually responsible for doing this stuff an un-earned benefit of the doubt.
https://cyberscoop.com/xai-grok-csam-class-action-lawsuit/
In this thread we're not talking about grok. We're talking about whether simulated child porn itself is automatically illegal. And my point is that no, it need not be. I would agree that anything made using actual child porn images should be illegal. But if no actual children are involved at any point in the process? Changing the interpretation of the Constitution to allow making such a thing illegal would do more harm than you can possibly imagine.