Comment by defrost

My comment was in response to a portion of the comment above:

> because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims

I'd argue that CSAM imagery falls into two broad categories; actual real photographic image of actual real abuse and generated images (paintings, drawings, animations, etc) and all generated images are more or less equally bad.

There's a peer link in this larger thread ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn... ) that indicates at least two US citizen have been charged and sentenced for 20 and 40 years imprisonment each for the possession and distribution of "fictional" child abuse (animated and still japanese cartoon anime, etc).

So, in the wider world, it's a moot point whether these specific images came from training on actual abuse images or not, they depict abuse and that's legally sufficient in the US (apparently), further the same depictions could be generated with or without actual real abuse images and as equivilant images either way they'd be equally offensive.