US judge ruled AI-generated child sexual abuse material is protected by First Amendment.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1368970/judge-ruled-ai-generated-child-sex-abuse-material-is-protected-by-first-amendment

reason.com/volokh/2026/08/27/home-possession-of-ai-generated-porn-depicting-fake-children-remains-constitutionally-protected-seventh-circuit-rules/

If you read the article, this is a very specific legal question. And honestly, it’s too gross to contemplate, and having a strong opinion about this on the internet is rightly suspicious.

The good news is the criminal in this case didn’t just posess CSAM, and no matter how this shakes out, they going to jail.

I heard there is a theory from therapists that being able to create that content can help quell urges, and so we should allow it if it protects real kids, vile as it is. However others argue it could cause it cause more to cause harm.

Either way, the decision is well above my ability to decide, and while I would hope actual professionals would have a say, unfortunately it’s going to be a political thing. Pandoras box is wide open though.

This isn’t someone drawing CP though. It’s AI-generated CP, which means the model had to be actually trained on CP. You might argue that there are already models trained on CP, and the chicken is already in the nugget, but legalising it creates financial incentive to train on CP because then you can sell your model to paedophiles.

That’s not how AI works. The people claiming that AI models have to be trained on CP to make CP have a fundamental misunderstanding of how image generation models work.

If I ask an AI model to make an image of a sexy air fryer fucking a sexy, anthropomorphic, ear of corn, it will produce said image. I promise it was not trained on sexy images of air fryers fucking sexy anthropomorphic ears of corn.

That’s what makes AI so dangerous and difficult to regulate. We are not ready for this technology to be in the hands of everyone.