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.
Two things:
- Do we know if fuels the urge to get real children? Or do we just assume that through repetition like the myth of “gateway drugs”?
- Since no child was involved and harmed in the making of these images… On what grounds could it be forbidden to generate them?
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.
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
a review of 19 studies published between 2013 and 2018 found an association between online porn use and earlier sexual debut, engaging with occasional and/or multiple partners, emulating risky sexual behaviours, assimilating distorted gender roles, dysfunctional body perception, aggression, anxiety, depression, and compulsive porn use.24 Another study has shown that compulsive use of sexually explicit internet material by adolescent boys is more likely in those with lower self-esteem, depressive feeling and excessive sexual interest.1
some porn use in adult men may have a positive impact by increasing libido and desire for a real-life partner, relieving sexual boredom, and improving sexual satisfaction by providing inspiration for real sex.7
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.
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.
