A sex offender convicted of making more than 1,000 indecent images of children has been banned from using any “AI creating tools” for the next five years in the first known case of its kind.
Anthony Dover, 48, was ordered by a UK court “not to use, visit or access” artificial intelligence generation tools without the prior permission of police as a condition of a sexual harm prevention order imposed in February.
The ban prohibits him from using tools such as text-to-image generators, which can make lifelike pictures based on a written command, and “nudifying” websites used to make explicit “deepfakes”.
Dover, who was given a community order and £200 fine, has also been explicitly ordered not to use Stable Diffusion software, which has reportedly been exploited by paedophiles to create hyper-realistic child sexual abuse material, according to records from a sentencing hearing at Poole magistrates court.
The bias with this approach is that it highlights those who did offend, while telling us nothing of those who didn’t. This is often repeated throughout research as well.
It’s very likely that a lot of child abusers did watch CSAM (after all, if you see no issue in child abuse, there’s no issue for you in the creation of such imagery), but how many CSAM viewers end up being abusers and is there an elevated risk? That is the question.
I guess if we’d make an “ask a pedophile” thread instead of “ask a rapist”, we could get some insights. Pedophiles, catch the idea!
But then we cannot say that in either direction. We simply don’t know if they are more or less likely to attack a child without data about it.
By “harmful ways” I meant consuming more real CSAM - something that is frustratingly underresearched as well, but one can guess.