Making porn of actual people without their consent regardless of age is not a thought crime. For children, that’s obviously fucked up. For adults it’s directly impacting their reputation. It’s not a victimless crime.
But generating images of adults that don’t exist? Or even clearly drawn images that aren’t even realistic? I’ve seen a lot of people (from both sides of the political spectrum) advocate that these should be illegal if the content is what they consider icky.
Like let’s take bestiality for example. Obviously gross and definitely illegal in real life. But should a cartoon drawing of the act really be illegal? No one was abused. No reputation was damaged. No illegal act took place. It was simply someone’s fucked up fantasy. Yet lots of people want to make that into a thought crime.
I’ve always thought that if there isn’t speech out there that makes you feel icky or gross then you don’t really have free speech at all. The way you keep free speech as a right necessarily requires you to sometimes fight for the right of others to say or draw or write stuff that you vehemently disagree with, but recognize as not actually causing harm to a real person.
GenAI is vastly different though. Those are known to sometimes regurgitate people or things from their dataset, (mostly) unaltered. Like how you can get Copilot to spit out valid secrets that people accidentally committed by typing NPM_KEY=. You can’t have any guarantee that if you ask it to generate a picture of a person, that person does not actually exist.
Making porn of actual people without their consent regardless of age is not a thought crime. For children, that’s obviously fucked up. For adults it’s directly impacting their reputation. It’s not a victimless crime.
But generating images of adults that don’t exist? Or even clearly drawn images that aren’t even realistic? I’ve seen a lot of people (from both sides of the political spectrum) advocate that these should be illegal if the content is what they consider icky.
Like let’s take bestiality for example. Obviously gross and definitely illegal in real life. But should a cartoon drawing of the act really be illegal? No one was abused. No reputation was damaged. No illegal act took place. It was simply someone’s fucked up fantasy. Yet lots of people want to make that into a thought crime.
I’ve always thought that if there isn’t speech out there that makes you feel icky or gross then you don’t really have free speech at all. The way you keep free speech as a right necessarily requires you to sometimes fight for the right of others to say or draw or write stuff that you vehemently disagree with, but recognize as not actually causing harm to a real person.
Drawings are one conversation I won’t get into.
GenAI is vastly different though. Those are known to sometimes regurgitate people or things from their dataset, (mostly) unaltered. Like how you can get Copilot to spit out valid secrets that people accidentally committed by typing
NPM_KEY=. You can’t have any guarantee that if you ask it to generate a picture of a person, that person does not actually exist.