Late last year, California passed a law against the possession or distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) generated by AI. The law went into effect on January 1, and Sacramento police announced yesterday that they had already arrested their first suspect: Darrin Bell, a 49-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist.
The new law, which you can read here, states that AI-generated CSAM is harmful even without an actual victim. In part, the law says, this is because all kinds of CSAM can be used to trick children into thinking that sexual activity with adults is normal. But the law specifically criticizes AI-generated CSAM because of the way generative AI systems work.
“Creating CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine learning models used by AI are trained on datasets containing thousands of images of known CSAM victims,” the report says, “revictimizing these real children are created by using their likeness to AI CSAM images forever.”
The law defines “artificial intelligence” as “a technical or machine-based system that varies in its level of autonomy and that, for explicit or implicit purposes, can infer from the inputs it receives how to generate outputs that can modify physical or virtual environments to influence. .”
