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 underlying behavior is the problem though. While substitutions could potentially be made available, this isn’t the same as drug addiction. The reality is that while a pedo could be satiated with a drop in replacement for a time (and possibly indefinitely), there is a very real risk that after a while they’re not satisfied with pretending and could quickly jump to the real thing in a split second. The due course, in my mind, is either modifying the depraved behavior or removing the person from society. While drug addiction can be a vice that doesn’t inflict harm on the rest of society (ie an addict is potentially able to silo their use from the rest of society), pedophilia is always a crime with a victim. The entire purpose of the situation is ensuring that no one becomes a victim of sex crimes, especially minors, and it is too great a risk to allow in any form.
It also runs the risk of giving pedophiles something to form communities around wherein they reinforce the idea amongst one another that society is the one who has a problem not them.
Additionally, in those communities it becomes more difficult to identify pictures and video of abuse to real children by muddying the water. The more sophisticated AI image generation becomes, the harder it will become for law enforcement that deals with this shit.