UK Man Sentenced to 18 Years in Prison for Creating AI Deepfake Child Porn

So, what is the actual thing going on here?

What about all those Japanese cartoons featuring little girls having sex? Those were never illegal.

What is the illegal act in doing AI porn? They’re calling this “child abuse,” but who is being abused? What does it mean?

The Guardian:

A man who used AI to create child abuse images using photographs of real children has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.

In the first prosecution of its kind in the UK, Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, was convicted of 16 child sexual abuse offences in August, after an investigation by Greater Manchester police (GMP).

Hugh Nelson

Nelson had used Daz 3D, a computer programme with an AI function, to transform “normal” images of children into sexual abuse imagery, Greater Manchester police said. In some cases, paedophiles had commissioned the images, supplying photographs of children with whom they had contact in real life.

He was also found guilty of encouraging other offenders to commit rape.

He sold his images in internet chatrooms, where he also discussed child sexual abuse with other offenders, making about £5,000 during an 18-month period by selling the images online.

Well, that isn’t very much money.

Did he know this was illegal? It’s not in the article, and I don’t think the UK has particularly open court records.

The other thing not in the article is the ages of the girls. Not that this should even matter in terms of the legality, given that the legal Japanese porno cartoons feature very young girls, but it would certainly help people to understand what is going on here. If “child” just means “under 18,” then millions of teenage boys are committing a major felony by doing AI porn of their classmates.

While there have been previous convictions for “deepfakes”, which typically involve one face being transferred to another body, Nelson created 3D “characters” from innocent photographs.

Sentencing Nelson at Bolton crown court on Monday, judge Martin Walsh said it was “impossible to know” if children had been raped as a result of his images. Walsh said Nelson had no regard for the harm caused by distributing the “harrowing and sickening” material.

What does that mean, “children raped because of the images”?

Obviously, this behavior is distasteful, and no one would want to defend the man on moral grounds. But porn is legal in the UK. Cartoon porn of children is legal in the UK.

Porn should be illegal, but it is legal.

So what exactly is the crime?

The reason these cases matter is that the government constantly uses “protect the children” for all sorts of attacks on freedoms. With every censorship or spying program enacted, they start talking about protecting children from sexual abuse.

It’s very obvious that the government wants to massively regulate AI so that the people do not have free access to these technologies, and it is very obvious that all of this stuff about child porn is an “in” to start undermining the people’s robots.

Of course this particular individual is distasteful. But they always roll this sort of thing out and say “look at it, look at this disgusting man, this is why we have to take away all your freedom.” It’s a very old gag, and it’s amazing it still works.