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One interesting tangentially related issue: deepfakes could destroy the CSAM market, because it will be far easier and safer to generate fakes than the documentation of a real crime. If someone wants internet point among the abusive pedophile community, they'll get far more of it from generating fakes (and claiming they're real) than the real thing itself.
On the other hand, there's a plausible argument than ubiquitous CSAM could induce more people to commit child sexual abuse. I'm not sure which effect would dominate.
Didn't Aella have a post a while back suggesting the government itself create a giant, free database of AI CP as a way to undermine the market?
I don't know if it would work, but it does seem like an interesting idea that only a rat-adjacent person would come up with, for good or for ill. It's never going to happen regardless, so there's no need to worry about what the real world effects of such an experiment would be.
The government will never have a CSAM database (generated or not) that it uses to divert pedophiles, regardless of the effectiveness or not of that particular, almost parodically, highly-decoupling idea.
In what I'm suggesting, though, it's not the government or external entities that will be doing anything. It's pedophiles themselves, who'll organically disrupt and flood themselves with fakes, with no way for someone to prove it's expensive authentic abuse.
The one thing I might worry about with that is that pedophiles are only using porn as a substitute for the harder to get thing that they really want, and they likely take pleasure in sharing evidence of their crime regardless of who pays for it. Flooding the market might make it harder to detect the real thing without actually dissuading pedophiles from abusing children.
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Rationalists aren't the only people willing to break taboos, and i've seen the idea of 'public cp database' in many other places, eg edgy political debates. And this was before AI, just "database of old, already publicly shared cp made available and legal while current stuff kept illegal to reduce incentive to make or look for new stuff." rationalists just combine it with 'very smart' and 'committed to kind and reasonable discourse'.
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