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If it's legal, it will become normalised. If it's legal to have AI-generated porn, and it's legal to make, distribute, and consume AI generated child porn, then by what rules or laws do you tell AI Pornhub "sure, fake me up some incest porn with barely-legal sixteen year old hot blonde twins but never oh never six year olds"?
Gay marriage is the ur-example here: we went pretty damn quick from "gay marriage will not affect you in the slightest, if you don't like gay marriage then don't get gay married" to "well now everyone surely agrees that gay marriage is moral and normal and only horrible monster bigots could ever have objected to it".
Porn is about selling what society considers taboo/shameful to those willing to pay for it. Blue clubs and stag movies were early versions, as were the jokes about barbers and "something for the weekend" as they would sell condoms on the side. Oral sex is shocking and depraved? Even prostitutes won't do it (as in the case of the Marquis de Sade where an early trial had a prostitute testify that he wanted her to perform certain unnatural acts)? Well we'll show it in porn because it's the shocking spicy act people want to see and then over time that leaks into the mainstream so that now blowjobs are now just another normal act people do.
AI kiddie porn is the most taboo? Even the AI-generated stuff? You don't want to go to the government centre to access it? Never fear, for the right money we'll sell it to you so you can consume it at home. And then it goes onto the mainstream porn sites. Because after all, it's legal and even the government is providing it for the MAPs at their centres!
Unless you really do sign up to the deontological "the bad thing is people getting off to CP", I don't see how this even sketches a slippery slope that actually ends up somewhere bad. How do we get from "CP is decriminalised, but actual sexual acts with children are as illegal as they always were" to any greater prevalence of the latter? You have to contend with at least one great counterexample, which is that simultaneously with depictions of graphic violence (and even compelling simulations of engaging in it) becoming ever better and more widely available, actual violence is on the decline.
Gay marriage fell so fast because the underlying moral taboo (on gay sex) had collapsed many decades prior, following the collapse of either moral framework it could be derived from (Christianity, dominant masculinity). The condemnation of sex with children rests on a different framework (rejection of children's moral and contractual autonomy), which I don't see as declining at all - in fact, if anything, with rampant safetyism, trigger warnings and coddled college students, the principle that some are too young and innocent to manage their own affairs is ascendant.
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By making it illegal to make or distribute or possess, of course. Unless you're the government.
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