Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, jailed after transforming normal pictures of children into sexual abuse imagery
A man who used AI to create child abuse images using photographs of real children has been sentenced to 18 years in prison.
In the first prosecution of its kind in the UK, Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, was convicted of 16 child sexual abuse offences in August, after an investigation by Greater Manchester police (GMP).
Nelson had used Daz 3D, a computer programme with an AI function, to transform “normal” images of children into sexual abuse imagery, Greater Manchester police said. In some cases, paedophiles had commissioned the images, supplying photographs of children with whom they had contact in real life.
He was also found guilty of encouraging other offenders to commit rape.
I think the last two paragraphs in the body of this post are the real issue here, not that he was just using AI to create CSAM.
Yeah, that changes it a bit - that definitely has more of a creep factor. I still question if it’s really the kind of thing that should land you in jail for a long time.
There’s the fact that the images he was creating were pictures of real kids. Deep fake porn is already creepy enough, add in that it was csam…
Right? Feels like this is being tacked on as a shot at AI. Otherwise nobody is harmed except the guy. Pedos are ick, but if harmless then why punish? I don’t think anyone should have to take a fall because others think their desires are gross.
Because they are using images of real children.
I agree, but if there were some way to create CSAM without using real children (I’m not sure how you would train such an AI model), it would probably be worth seeing if that did anything to make pedophiles less likely to act out on their desires.
Because my god, we need to figure out something.
I mean trying to help them get treatment instead of going all pod-people on anyone showing even the possibility of being attracted to kids would be helpful.
I’ve been saying that for ages. Obviously we don’t want to enable any pedophiles to do anything horrific to children, but we’re at a state right now where if you have those urges to begin with, you’re basically already told to accept that you’re an incurable monster. So why not act on the urges?
Somehow we need to get through to such people that they need to get help before they do anything terrible. I’m not sure how to do that in the current climate though.
The way AI models work, you don’t have to train it on the thing you want it to do, you can ask it to combine the things it knows about. Take any of the meme loras for example, like pepe punch or patcha.
So literally any model that can generate pictures of naked adults and clothed children - which is to say almost all of them - is going to be at least somewhat competent in creating CP unless those prompts are being actively censored and blocked.
Wouldn’t that generate images of children with small-sized adult bodies?
If it doesn’t know what a child’s body looks like, it can’t just figure it out.
The datasets will have enough images of kids in bikinis and underwear from stock photos and clothes shop listings etc to figure that part out rather easily.
Train it to depict humans that look like anime characters that are
definitely 18 or olderimmortal dragons that are taking on the bodies of young human beingsDisclaimer
I am not condoning, endorsing, or suggesting this
actually, how about not looking into state-sponsored CP
I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
“it would probably be worth seeing if that did anything to make pedophiles less likely to act out on their desires.”
What’s the implication here? You’re saying we should look into placating child predators by creating AI CP for them to consume?
That would be worth a scientific study, don’t you think? Isn’t it worth trying to find ways to stop child predators before they become predators?
You seem to think I’m suggesting that the UK government create childporn.gov.uk or something.
Which means?
Its a form of stalking, probably makes it more likely for them to rape that child, even if they don’t wind up doing that it would still qualify as a form of revenge porn.
It’s not stalking and “probably” shouldn’t rouse a courtroom.
It is when they are commissioning these “works”.
Ed8t: To be clear, that’s what happened here.
Commissioning as in buying? I’m not sure how that changes it to stalking.
IMO, the worst part about it is that there’s someone else out there who thinks less of me because there’s some naked imagery of me.
Oh I didn’t realize I needed to be a lawyer.
I can buy photos of Robert Downey Junior from Marvel Studios and that’s not stalking.
I think this was a crime because he modified images of actual kids. If the images were 100% AI (not of real people) I’m not sure on what basis that would be considered a crime, no more than a handmade drawing of a nude minor drawn from imagination.
Any sexual representation of a child is illegal in the UK whether it looks real or not. In fact I believe it doesn’t need to even be a child, it’s a illegal if a reasonable person would believe it was depicting a child. This came up when adults who were into age play got into trouble distributing their images because it looked convincingly underage.
Wait so even if the subjects are adults in costume its illegal? Fuck man, school uniforms is a whole genre of porn.
It’s not about reducing harm to children, it’s about moral superiority.
And I suppose we can rely on the courts to know sexual when they see it, so people don’t get in trouble for taking pictures of cherubs at the Louvre.
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Nice try lol, non-sexualised nudity is not illegal. UK law has a degree of common sense about it. A stick figure, even mildly sexualised, is unlikely to pass the test for indecency. Having said that, if someone drew some sort of extreme circumstance then, I don’t know for sure, but I can imagine someone getting into shit about it.
This stick figure is cumming. I’m the author, so I decide that.
Doesn’t pass the test for “reasonable doubt” ;)
Thanks for clarifying, I didn’t know that. Seems like a bit of an overreach to me, but I suppose in this particular case it’s best to err on the side of caution.
Ah now it makes sense.
In the US federally you might be able to get away with creating the images for yourself if they are 100% fictional, but the guy also was doing commission work. The moment you start transmitting the images (and selling would involve that) it becomes very very illegal.
I don’t really think anything is 100% AI. I also don’t really believe in the concept of thought being a crime and extend personally kept data to that realm.
The fuck? Nothing about generating and distributing CSAM material is harmless, and especially if images of real children are being used to generate it.
Okay. Who is harmed and how?
Would it harm you to have identifiable nude photos of you available for download on the internet?
Would it harm you to have identifiable nude photos of you being used to train AI so that it can create more nude images that are “inspired” by your nude images?
Would you be happy to upload your children’s nude photos so that people on the internet can share them and masturbate to them? Would you be harmed if your parents had done that with your images?
Most AI generated images are not of real, identifiable people. I agree that deepfake porn is bad, whether of a child or adult, but that’s a separate category.
You’re definitely right, and I’m aware. The smaller the sample size, though, the more likely an AI art generator would create something that looks very similar to a given individual.
As well, some AI art generators accept prompt images to use as a starting point.
Ok but that’s a pretty niche thing to be worried about, is my point. You can’t apply that broadly to all AI porn.
As a child? No. In fact, I can milk that for pity money. As an adult, I can’t see how it matters. I don’t like it, but it doesn’t hurt me any.
Also definitely no.
Again, double no.
To clarify, the second last question about your children was “would you be happy to …”
If you wouldn’t be happy to, then why not?
And if you would be happy to do that, then why? Lol
You got me there. It’s definitely weird and gross and therefore no. That’s harm enough, but that’s more a matter of it being published and real. This dude doing it for himself is hardly different to me from fantasizing in your head or drawing in your sketchbook. That said, what was his AI training material? He’s also doing this for other people and encouraging rape and shit.
Daz3d ? It’s a “modelling” SW, there’s no AI in it… https://www.daz3d.com/
“a computer program with an ai function” what if he just used Windows, it has an ai function
i’ve used that software for years and didn’t know the AI thing. Thanks for the link.
Good riddance. Now go after the fucks that bought this shit from him.
Absolutely. It feels like there’d be relevant data to trace it back to them somehow, even though these types can be obsessively good at covering their tracks. There will be slip-ups somewhere.
Most AI porn images looks quite underage to me, to be completely frank. :/
I have not personally explored AI porn, but as someone with experience in machine learning and accidental biases that’s not very surprising to me.
On top the of the general societal bias towards youth for “beauty” related roles, smoother and less-featured faces (that in general look younger) are closer to an average face so defaulting to that gets a bit of training boost (when in doubt, target the mean). It’s probably also not helped by youth-related porn keywords (teen, daughter, young) that further associate other porn prompts (even ones not about youth) with non-porn images of underage women that also have those keywords.
At least with a human being it’s a matter of factuality whether or not they’re over 18. But with AI it’s unverifiable, especially considering some models have already been trained on CSEM.
Once someone has that model locally, do they technically possess CSEM, even unknowingly? Do they only possess it if they try to make the AI make it? Seems like something someone in charge should have thought about in a legally binding way before dumping the internet into an image generator!
In this case he used pictures from actual children and transformed them into CSAM using AI. So there’s no question about the age, and there are real victims, too.
Oh yeah, this dude without a question is guilty and a pedo. I meant more that ‘out of the box’ models may still produce material that looks really CSEM adjacent, and you have no way of telling whether or not it used CSEM to generate the image if the whole dataset is poisoned by actual CSEM being included.
Bound to be tested in court sooner or later. As far as I understand it one is “in possession” if they have access to a set of steps or procedures that would recover an image. So this prevents offenders from hiding behind the fact their images were compressed in a zip file or something. They don’t have a literal offending image, but they possess it in a form that they can transform.
What would need to be tested is that AI generators are coming up with novel images rather than retrieving existing ones. It seems like common sense but the law is quite pedantic. The more significant issue is that generators don’t need to be trained on csem to come up with it. So proving someone had it with the intent of producing it would always be hard. Even generators trained on illegal material I’m not sure it would be straight forward to prove that someone knew what it was capable of.
I assume any CSEM ingested into these models is absolutely swamped by the massive amount of adult porn that’s much more easily available. A handful of images aren’t going to drive model output in datasets of the scale of the image generation models. Maybe there are keywords that could drill down to be more associated with the child porn, but a lot of “young” type keywords are already plentifully applied to adults, and I imagine accidental child porn ingests are much less likely to be as conveniently labeled.
So maybe you can figure out how to get it to produce child porn, but it probably won’t just randomly produce it for an innocent porn prompt.
The actual issue is that models who are trained on porn, or even just nudity, and simultaneously trained on perfectly innocent pictures of children will be able to produce at least an approximation of CSAM if you know what you’re doing.
More recent commercial foundation models are absolutely neutered when it comes to nudity and, or at least that’s the hypothesis, that’s why so they’re godawful at anatomy. Which is why upcoming community models are going to go the way of include the porn but not include any pictures of any child in any situation.
Absolutely agree. My comment above was focused on whether some minimal amount of CSEM would itself make similar images happen when just prompting for porn, but there are a few mechanics that likely bias a model to creating young-looking faces in porn and with intentional prompt crafting I have no doubt you can at least get an approximation of it.
I’m glad to hear about the models that are intentionally separating adult content from children. That’s a good idea. There’s not really much reason an adult-focused model needs to be mixed with much other data. There’s already so much porn out there. Maybe if you want to tune something unrelated to the naked parts (like the background) or you want some mundane activity, but naked, but neither of those things need kids in them.
I’m not the person to clear up this legal grey area. I just think that AI porn often has these incredibly young faces which makes the enjoyers of that porn extra creepy.
Creeps, or young themselves, and/or have shit all for an artistic eye. AI models have given us a whole new uncanny valley and that’s photorealistic textures on comic/anime abstraction.
Oh yeah, I was agreeing with you, sorry if I was unclear. It pisses me off this situation exists to begin with.
Most AI porn I’ve seen looks like Eldritch abominations, but then I haven’t seen any for a while so maybe it’s improved
I don’t want to kinkshame freaks who like eldritch abominations. I wanna kinkshame pdf file creeps.
Most real porn has women who look like kids to me.
Even the so-called MILFs look about 15 years younger than me and I’m 47.
You have to get into “mature” and shit to see women my age.
I’m not into young women. I’m just not. It looks like they’re fucking a high schooler and it’s icky to me.
And then there’s all the schoolgirl and incest or incest-adjacent shit. “Playing with my stepdad.” No. Just no.
So… anyone who’s not your age looks like a child to you? That’s kind of fucked up.
You gotta give me your yoga instructor because that’s a big stretch!
He literally said that 32 year old women look too young for him.
No?
The majority of the women in porn, who can’t be more than their very early 20s, look like children to me. And they infantilize them too. I’m not sure where you got anyone not my age from.
Fair, you didn’t explicitly state it. Just implied it with statements about how most people in porn (who should all be adults, unless you’re looking at questionable material) look like children to you. Then make comments about how even the “milfs” are too young.
Maybe it’s not about them being too young, maybe it’s time you accept that you’re old. You’re putting a lot of your own biases into your judgment instead of looking at it objectively.
Sorry… why should I look at what I personally want out of the porn I want to see objectively? It’s entirely subjective.
I mean I’m not sure how I could have been clearer that this was about my personal preferences. I said “to me” twice.
Ive seem some grandmas
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