[IntronExon]

Things are going to get very weird in porn, when you don’t have convince a human to actually do it. I have to assume that early adopters will also be people with predilections which are unserved, or illegal. If people worry about their kids seeing disturbing porn now, imagine when it’s AI generated, photorealistic rape, snuff, child porn. Illegal or not, if it’s purely virtual law enforcement is going to focus on the subset of crimes which involve actual human victims.

[dragonwriter]

> If people worry about their kids seeing disturbing porn now, imagine when it’s AI generated, photorealistic rape, snuff, child porn.

There was a time when it was quite easy to find (without even trying for that specific content) photorealistic rape, snuff, bestiality, and child porn on the public web, without any AI involved.

> Illegal or not, if it’s purely virtual law enforcement is going to focus on the subset of crimes which involve actual human victims.

Actual prosecutions for virtual (generally not photorealistic) child porn in various jurisdictions demonstrate that this is not a hard and fast rule.

[djsumdog]

Animations or fiction of obscene content are not illegal in the US and Japan. They are illegal in the UK (a man was sentenced for Simpsons's porn) and many other countries.

Now with added realism, these lines could become blurry and we could see some of these issues brought up again.

[jstarfish]

> Animations or fiction of obscene content are not illegal in the US

Citation please. There is nowhere near enough precedent to draw such a conclusion in the US. The defendants in these cases often end up pleading guilty.

US v Hanley, US v Red Rose Stories, etc.

[djsumdog]

Hmm .. seems things have changed quite a bit since I last read up on this. It seems to vary by state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornogra...

[sushid]

But the legal reasoning right now that the children are harmed in the making of it and their victims, dead or not, suffered through the making and suffers through continued distribution of it. I'm sure there'll be some landmark cases soon enough.

[scandox]

I think this progression will do no more than force an existing moral question into the open. What is the moral quality of a thought?

Personally I believe that even unspoken thoughts can have a strong moral dimension for the individual, though of course I see no legal dimension.

One aspect of this will be does our indulgence of our own negative fantasies weaken our capability to act rightly when presented with a real world moral choice and does that make us culpable...or more culpable if we make a wrong choice.

[neveroffensive]

> One aspect of this will be does our indulgence of our own negative fantasies weaken our capability to act rightly when presented with a real world moral choice and does that make us culpable...or more culpable if we make a wrong choice.

It'll be really interesting to see more data come out about this. This concept is pretty much at the core of the video game violence debate which is still somewhat ongoing.

[intended]

It depend - if it’s executive decision making many hours after playing an immersive game - people figure out what’s fantasy and what is not.

I suspect that if it’s 2 seconds after pulling off a VR headset after being in a photorealistic world which had no forced errors then people would be very confused.

[jstarfish]

> imagine when it’s AI generated, photorealistic rape, snuff, child porn. Illegal or not, if it’s purely virtual law enforcement is going to focus on the subset of crimes which involve actual human victims.

In the US, all of that is already illegal. If you put yourself in a position where what you possess is indistinguishable from the real thing, the courts err on the side of the potential victim.

Law enforcement's priorities are not going to change; they don't distinguish between what's virtual or not. If it looks like CP, you can't point to a producer with valid 2257 documentation and it isn't obviously a cartoon, you're cooked.

[Fjolsvith]

This will change.

The 2257 law follows the legal reasoning that as a porn producer, you have the burden of proving your innocence. You have to show the proof that the person in your image or video is a real, live _adult_ person, and if you cannot, it is assumed that the person is a real, live _child_ person.

A landmark case will come along where a jury will decide that this new technology introduces reasonable doubt into this thinking. When this happens, the _government_ will then have the burden of proving that the person in the video or image is a real, live _child_ person.

[jpatokal]

How does "possession" work when everything's in the cloud and instantly accessible to anyone?

[jstarfish]

If it's in your Dropbox, it's presumed to be yours.

If you upload it to reddit, congratulations, you're no longer a consumer. You're a distributor. New charges apply.

If you just browse, you're sort of safe, but you better hope your browser isn't caching anything to disk. Forensic reconstruction still constitutes possession. But nobody just browses.

[djsumdog]

You're not "sort of safe" if you browse. The US has ISP reporting laws, as does Australia, South Africa, France and others:

http://chartsbin.com/view/q4y

It's a weird situation because in the UK, they simply block the content (no freedom of speech). In the US, we have freedom of speech so ISPs can't block anything. But they do have to report if you visit a site that contains illegal material or transmit it, plain text, through their services.

Child pornography is a strict liability crime to, so intent doesn't matter. Say you download something from /r/gonewild and the girl is 16, but she looks 20 to you. Too bad. You're not in violation of the law and can be put on a sex offender list.

Many people probably have illegal content without even realizing it. That's another reason why encrypting all your devices is so important.

[ceejayoz]

It's going to get very legally interesting when someone puts some child porn into the Ethereum blockchain.

[DanBC]

>Illegal or not, if it’s purely virtual law enforcement is going to focus on the subset of crimes which involve actual human victims.

I'm not convinced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Handley

[hndamien]

Will they really? There are already several thought crimes.