• Coffee Junky ❤️@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Yeah exactly, I don’t want to see it but the same goes for a lot of weird fetishes.

    As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.

    • Barry Zuckerkorn@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.

      It’d be hard to actually meet that premise, though. People are getting hurt.

      Child abuse imagery is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims. Extending that financial/economic analogy, seeding that economy with liquidity, in a financial sense, might or might not incentivize the creation of new authentic child abuse imagery (that requires a child victim to create). That’s not as clear, but what is clear is that it would reduce the transaction costs of distributing existing child abuse imagery, which is a form of re-victimizing those who have already been abused.

      Child abuse imagery is also used as a grooming technique. Normalization of child sexual activity is how a lot of abusers persuade children to engage in sexual acts. Providing victimless “seed” material might still result in actual abuse happening down the line.

      If the creation of AI-generated child abuse imagery begins to give actual abusers and users of real child abuse imagery cover, to where it becomes more difficult to investigate the crime or secure convictions against child rapists, then the proliferation of this technology would make it easier to victimize additional children without consequences.

      I’m not sure what the latest research is on the extent to which viewing and consuming child porn would lead to harmful behavior down the line (on the one hand, maybe it’s a less harmless outlet for unhealthy urges, but on the other hand, it may feed an addictive cycle that results in net additional harm to society).

      I’m sure there are a lot of other considerations and social forces at play, too.

      • fox_the_apprentice@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 year ago

        A lot of the comments in here seem a little bit too sympathetic

        It is a mental illness. If fake images result in less real-world abuse then that’s a good thing.

          • Coffee Junky ❤️@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Do you think people that are gay are mentally ill? Do you think those people choose specifically to be attracted to people from the same sex? A lot of the same things can de said about people that are attracted to kids.

            I’m not trying to say we should in any shape or form tolerate child abuse. But it’s important that we recognize that there are people like this and they didn’t choose to be that way. People have no problem to talk about punishment, but don’t like to also accept that they are also victims in a way.

          • CorruptBuddha@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            This took me 2 seconds to google.

            Perhaps the most serious accusation against pornography is that it incites sexual aggression. But not only do rape statistics suggest otherwise, some experts believe the consumption of pornography may actually reduce the desire to rape by offering a safe, private outlet for deviant sexual desires.

            “Rates of rapes and sexual assault in the U.S. are at their lowest levels since the 1960s,” says Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. The same goes for other countries: as access to pornography grew in once restrictive Japan, China and Denmark in the past 40 years, rape statistics plummeted. Within the U.S., the states with the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and therefore the least access to Internet pornography—experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the states with the most access experienced a 27 percent drop in the number of reported rapes, according to a paper published in 2006 by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University.

            https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-sunny-side-of-smut/#:~:text=Perhaps the most serious accusation,outlet for deviant sexual desires.

              • CorruptBuddha@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                Not saying it is impossible, but the simple fact that internet exists or not is absolutely not indicative of porn having a positive or negative effect. It is a pretty weak article to use as evidence against what I am saying when it states clearly that these are only associations and correlations and essentially guesswork.

                It’s more than you’ve provided.