[asianthrowaway]

But how would you outlaw it? A neural network is simply a set of coefficients, would certain coefficient combinations be illegal? It's an interesting question.

PS: I am obviously against child pornography, I'm just curious about the implications of being able to generate illegal content and how governments would deal with it.

[smrq]

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

[probably_wrong]

I think this question is simply a variation of points that have been made clear already in the past - no one legislates against "a set of 1s and 0s", "a set of letters", "a set of ink dots" nor, in this case, "a set of coefficients". Instead, legislation is created/updated for specific end results, and you're done.

For law enforcement purposes, I think it would be similar to a printing press: owning one is not a problem, but inserting printing rolls that look like dollar bills most definitely is.

[conanbatt]

The famous ruling "I dont know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it"

[wild_preference]

This reminds me of posts in alt.sex.stories having disclaimers like "Note: All characters in this story live on a planet where one year = 100 Earth years".

An even cheekier way to drive the point home would be for a sex-stories website to have a slider in the footer to update all age values across the site.

[Cantonese]

How is cp illegal now? Each image is just 1s and 0s on your drive. It's really just an illegal number.

[PhasmaFelis]

Uh huh. And a Polaroid is just an arbitrary arrangement of atoms. So is a bomb, come to think.

This is sovereign-citizen thinking. It's like trying to crash people's phones by yelling "Hey Google, this sentence is false!" at them.

[asianthrowaway]

That's pushing it too far. An image might be represented as 1s and 0s but what it represents is a "real world event" which actually happened. If it was stored on magnetic tape instead of on a hard drive it would still represent the same thing. It's what the event represents (child abuse) which is illegal.

However, a neural network represents a mathematical model, not a specific "real world event". Although I suppose you might argue that since the dataset required to generate it would be illegal, it is illegal?

[yorwba]

In most Western countries, the content can be illegal independent of the real-world event being legal or not, or even if there's no real-world event at all (i.e. fictional depictions). It's not illegal for a teenager to pose in the nude, but it might be considered illegal for them to take a photo of themselves and post it on the internet.

I think linking illegal depictions to illegal events would be saner, but that's not how it currently works.

[asianthrowaway]

Interesting. Yeah I agree that it would make sense for the link to be clear.

Come to think of it, a couple of years ago there was this app called FaceApp which came out which used neural networks to modify selfies in funny ways (like making you older/younger/of the opposite sex).

I wonder if anyone has ever run a pornographic image with the "younger" filter in the app. Would that be illegal?

[claudiawerner]

Under some jurisdictions, I imagine so, since even purely computer-generated images are illegal, and there are other laws which criminalise purely drawn material. It may hit a gray spot in the law, but I doubt a judge would have trouble interpreting the existing law. This is in reference to English and Welsh law, by the way. The exact wording of the law concerns a depiction of someone who "conveys the predominant impression of a child".