You read that right- the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) court of appeals has just ruled the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess images or videos of child sexual abuse created using artificial intelligence, if the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home.
Categories: Grooming ChildrenPedos
6 Comments
Anonymous · August 28, 2026 at 5:57 pm
It’s prob only for nonwhite on white children.
Meanoldfart · August 28, 2026 at 6:59 pm
Skynet diddles?
oldvet50 · August 29, 2026 at 7:38 am
What this really means is if a person is caught with these explicit images, he can claim they are AI, and it is up to the prosecution to produce the real person depicted in order to convict. Our country is getting sicker by the minute!
The Southern Nationalist · August 29, 2026 at 10:55 am
When I first saw AI generated images I had a gut feeling that this was going to be misused and now here we are.
Being able to create these images may hold some of these monsters at bay but since they can’t hold or touch them, they will still desire a real child.
These images need to be outlawed the same as if it were a real person and those in possession need to be prosecuted the same as if it were photos of a real child.
Bear Claw · August 30, 2026 at 5:46 pm
God has the final say.
hh475 · August 31, 2026 at 8:14 pm
I think that, unfortunately, it was the correct call, based on the law. The law is that it’s not the image per se that is the justification for making it illegal, since that in an absolute sense is protected by the First Amendment. The justification for outlawing child porn is not the aesthetics of morality of the image but the fact that a child is necessarily harmed in the making of it. Thus, the rationale is that this *is* child abuse. See New York v Farber, 1982, This was extended to modified images and processed images on the grounds that the underlying image still referred to an abused child.
This goes back to the “old days” of child porn. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a very limited amount of “real” child porn in circulation. Most of it came from a “golden age” of child porn in the mid 1900s in Europe where a ton of it was produced. Most “modern” child porn in the 1980s came from recirculating these images. The FBI had the world’s largest collection of child porn at the time. When “new” child porn was found, it was checked against that cache, and they could usually get its provenance. This collection was eventually transferred to the Department of Commerce. I don’t know where it is now.
Then came digital image processing, and pervs started manipulating these old photos by putting the bodies in new images, swapping heads, etc. There was a surge in these semi-synthetic images and then purely synthetic images. Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition, 2002 found that this did not apply to non-obscene synthetic images, since no child was being harmed. The image might fall foul of obscenity law, but that can be hard to prove or prosecute. It should be remembered that not all child porn is technically “obscene.”
As digital photography became cheap and easy, we saw an explosion of new *real* child porn, coming out of soccer coaches, teachers, pervy families, etc. I was involved in forensic image processing issues at the time, and it was pretty amazing to see this influx of crap coming in. Frankly, the semi-synthetic stuff seemed to be *way* overtaken by real stuff thanks to cheap, high quality, digital image acquisition. I got out of the federal forensic image analysis biz in 2003, so I don’t know what it’s like now.
This can be fixed in a couple of ways. A creative court might opine, for instance, that since AI generated imagery is based, however loosely, on real image data then there is still that link, however tenuous, to a real child, and thus the law stands. The images are thus not truly synthetic, and Ashcroft does not apply. That would not require a new law.
Another option would be to craft some law that outlaws any image, period. The problem with that is that it will *inevitably* be applied to not-really-porn images, and will fail First Amendment challenge as it has in the past. The classic example is the old naked-baby-in-the-bath image that was popular and not considered sexual a few decades ago, but people have been prosecuted for having a naked picture of their baby. There are huge cultural variations on the acceptability of child nudity where it is *not* considered sexual. It could also be applied to various health and medical related texts and illustrations. A law like that may, once again, eventually be overturned on a First Amendment basis because, while there are images that are clearly porn and images that are clearly not porn, it’s almost impossible to legislate in words the exact line that separates the two.
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