this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
510 points (95.4% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3183 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It feeds and evolves a disorder which in turn increases risks of real life abuse.
But if AI generated content is to be considered illegal, so should all fictional content.
Or, more likely, it feeds and satisfies a disorder which in turn decreases risk of real life abuse.
Making it illegal so far helped nothing, just like with drugs
That's not how these addictive disorders works.. they're never satisfied and always need more.
Two things:
Alternative perspective is to think that does watching normal porn make heterosexual men more likely to rape women? If not then why would it be different in this case?
The vast majority of pedophiles never offend. Most people in jail for child abuse are just plain old rapists with no special interest towards minors, they're just an easy target. Pedophilia just describes what they're attracted to. It's not a synonym to child rapist. It usually needs to coinside with psychopathy to create the monster that most people think about when hearing that word.
That's a bit of a difference in comparison.
A better comparison would be "does watching common heterosexual porn make common heterosexual men more interested in performing common heterosexual sexual acts?" or "does viewing pornography long term satiate a mans sex drive?” or "does consumption of nonconsensual pornography correlate to an increase in nonconsensual sex acts?"
Comparing "viewing child sexual content might lead it engaging in sexual acts with children" to "viewing sexual activity with women might lead to rape" is disingenuous and apples to oranges.
https://wchh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/tre.791
As for child porn, it's not a given that there's no relationship between consumption and abusing children. There are studies that indicate both outcomes, and are made much more complicated by one of both activities being extremely illegal and socially stigmatized making accurate tracking difficult.
It's difficult to justify the notion that "most pedophiles never offend" when it can be difficult to identify both pedophiles and abuse.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21088873/ for example. It looks at people arrested for possession of child pornography. Within six years, 6% were charged with a child contact crime. Likewise, you can find research with a differing conclusion
Point being, you can't just hand wave the potential for a link away on the grounds that porn doesn't cause rape amongst typical heterosexual men. There's too many factors making the statistics difficult to gather.
I would love to see research data pointing either way re #1, although it would be incredibly difficult to do so ethically, verging on impossible. For #2, people have extracted originals or near-originals of inputs to the algorithms. AI generated stuff - plagiarism machine generated stuff, runs the risk of effectively revictimizing people who were already abused to get said inputs.
It's an ugly situation all around, and unfortunately I don't know that much can be done about it beyond not demonizing people who have such drives, who have not offended, so that seeking therapy for the condition doesn't screw them over. Ensuring that people are damned if they do and damned if they don't seems to pretty reliably produce worse outcomes.