Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So should we be more concerned more about how these 1 and 0 are produced (no one harmed, everything legal) rather than what is distributed using these 1 and 0.
It's curious how it's ok to depict a human being sadistically cut to pieces while he is in terrible agony as long as there is no sexual arousal involved.
Any thoughtful continuation of this subject requires us to get into the weeds: even doing just that is enough to attract heavy criticism.
When it comes to porn, the general consensus is that it must be based on consent. But even that is ambiguous: whose consent are we talking about? The actors, or the characters they portray?
It's very straightforward to require consent of each person filming. No matter what the story is, actors have human rights that must be actively preserved.
But what about the content itself? Porn that portrays fictional sexual assault is generally accepted as morally good. How? Audience.
A person may have a fantasy where they are the victim of assault. Are they doing anything wrong? No. It isn't wrong to be a victim, or to imagine it. From that perspective, the foundation of consent is met. An adult watching fictional assault porn can bring their own consent into the experience, reframing the content into a useful and healthy context.
But what if that person is not an adult? The general consensus is that a child cannot give consent. I think a better framing would be to say that an adult cannot ask for, accept, or use a child's consent. This rule is the foundation for making it criminal to sell porn to minors.
Many would argue that any fictional portrayal of a child being sexually assaulted cannot have a moral perspective or utility. A child might be able to fantasize as the victim of their own assault, but no adult can sell a fictional portrayal of that fantasy to them.
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So all that's left are the weeds: should a person watch fictional assault porn while imagining themselves as the perpetrator? Should fictional child sexual assault media be used as a pacifier for pedophiles?
These are hard ugly questions, and the emotional response from most people is an unequivocal, "no". Can we trust our emotions to lead to justice, or do they simply distract us with victory?
FWIW, my reaction to the side-of-a-bus adverts for Saw franchise films in the UK was visceral disgust that there exist enough people who would buy tickets on the basis of those adverts to justify the existence of the adverts, let alone the films themselves — if I thought banning them would actually make any difference, I would call for exactly that!
I don't know of human psychology really works like the toy model in my head (probably not, typical mind fallacy), but that's a separate thing to my own affect.
Yeah, i would not watch willingly any of that content if even i were paid to do so. I pitty content moderators who have to filter through such content.
Possession of "synthesised" CSAM (or extream pornography such as rape) is already illegal in the UK. There have been prosecutions too. I believe the reasoning was that studies revealed that viewing synthesised content, lead to a higher chance of possessing real CSAM content, or of committing sex crimes themselves.
