Link: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/thegentlemanpervert-producing-ai-csam-is-a-nj-prosecutor-say-cops/

Fitzgerald’s is a rare case where an official employed by the state’s top law enforcement and legal office has been accused of making and distributing AI CSAM, although some cops have been arrested for the crime. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania cop was arrested for making AI porn from photos on driver’s licenses, and more recently in Korea, a police officer was arrested for making AI porn, including CSAM, The Korea Times reported.

In New Jersey, the deputy attorney general has been charged with possession of CSAM, dissemination of photos or film of CSAM, and “criminal use of a communication facility,” detectives said.

I have made multiple videos lately intended to bring more visibility to the fact that American tech companies, and their models, are either being used to generate CSAM or promote people internationally who do, so seeing this headline makes my morning.

I personally don't care if it was produced artificially or not. These sick fucks need to be imprisoned and thrown in gen pop.

The companies that provide the bots should also be punished somehow. It's clear they either don't have any safeguards in place or the ones they have are insufficient.

100%

Right now the only real accountability for these companies is when they get sued or put on blast enough on social media. I think that will eventually change, but it won't happen due to the legal system in the US. It'll happen because some random country put their foot down internationally.

For real? Next you're gonna tell me Adobe is at fault too for letting you xray nude people (modifying existing colour channels in existing images to see through clothes), and knife manufacturers are at fault for you stabbing everyone

Fitzgerald’s is a rare case where an official employed by the state’s top law enforcement and legal office has been accused of making and distributing AI CSAM, although some cops have been arrested for the crime. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania cop was arrested for making AI porn from photos on driver’s licenses, and more recently in Korea, a police officer was arrested for making AI porn, including CSAM, The Korea Times reported.

Pigs don't do this, except for all the times they did. LOL

The CSAM was not "produced artificially", but rather trained on actual abuse images, with real victims.

Each "artificial image" is a kaleidoscope of a thousand children being raped.

There's a difference.

Both of those scenarios are meaningfully regulated under the law. (Specifically revenge porn, misusing a person's likeness, and stabbing people.) Also, if you don't think providing someone with a weapon in the knowledge that they intend to do harm to a person with it will get you into some serious legal shit, you would be incorrect.

CSAM via AI, currently, is not and major tech firms are flouting that fact for profit. (Or, more accurately, in a desperate grasp for any profit, since AI isn't profitable.) Absent meaningful regulation it is imperative to hold the companies knowingly creating the dangerous product accountable legally and financially. We know they can program their models not to do this because several of them don't have demonstrated it.

Also, thanks to leakers, we know 100% that the companies doing this are aware of what they're doing. I made a whole video about it.

CSAM absolutely is... What a wild thing to say

CSAM, yes.

CSAM via AI, no.

And the word you're ignoring here is 'meaningfully', which is pretty important.

Maybe this is the wrong post to start a comment with

I have made multiple videos lately

You're welcome to downvote me if you think so, but I assure you, my videos are tech critiques and not CSAM.

https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA240329

The FBI is warning the public that child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created with content manipulation technologies, to include generative artificial intelligence (AI), is illegal. Federal law prohibits the production, advertisement, transportation, distribution, receipt, sale, access with intent to view, and possession of any CSAM,1 including realistic computer-generated images.

Respectfully please stfu, you're spreading incredibly harmful misinformation. The article we're commenting on is even about the arrest of a CSAM generator??

a rare case where an official employed by the state ... CSAM

A rare case?

🤣😭🤮🤣🤣🤣

so rare!

All of this can be done on a graphics card from 3 generations ago locally though - it's like Photoshop you know, people can use Photoshop to make revenge porn but Photoshop isn't illegal, using it to make revenge porn is illegal.

I suppose it's rare in that it looks like someone might actually be held accountable.

Again, you're ignoring important context.

That's okay though. Have a nice Sunday.

It's only illegal if the law is actually enforced. Thankfully, due to MeToo, revenge porn gets way more of a response from the law than it did.

That is not currently the case in any meaningful way with image generators being used to make CSAM, which is why it's important that the companies themselves be held liable. Grok still lets you do this if you buy a sub. Copilot lets you do this and Microsoft knows it, per recent leaks from their prompt reviewers. Meta runs ads for CSAM on Facebook.

In this case, multiple tech companies are knowingly enabling these crimes without a peep from the law to stop them. (At least in the US.)

Well good. The sentence I quoted from only talks about accusations though. And the blurb seems to contradict itself in the very next sentence, citring several more "rare" examples.

I have nothing against ArsTechnica (yet) so I guess it's just bad phrasing.

Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, it's the case that's rare, not the crime.

I don't think you're understanding what they're trying to say.

You don't need to use Grok/Claude/Copilot/Gemini/ChatGPT/etc. at all. Hugging Face currently lists 111,953 text-to-image and 2,893 text-to-video models available.

You can run an image or video generator model at home on your own hardware you currently have. This technology doesn't require a $10k rig to run. The massive data centers are only necessary for the Software as a Service providers like ChatGPT to operate their systems as fast as possible to tens of thousands of users, with dozens of agents processing multiple steps and reasoning to accomplish a task. One person making one image doesn't need much.

While the SaaS options definitely need to get better at detecting and blocking usage like CSAM... those services are by no means required. You can do this on any gaming system made in the last 5 years easily, and older if you're willing to wait longer for the result.

Okay, but can we not get local models banned, please? This is what openai and company are gonna use to say we have to pay them if we want AI.

You're an idiot.

And you don't understand how image generation works. Which is typical of the people who defend it.

I personally don’t care if it was produced artificially or not. These sick fucks need to be imprisoned and thrown in gen pop.

If it's produced artificially, then he hasn't done any ill to a living person. He has polluted the Web, but in doing that has reduced the demand for non-artificial CSAM. It's like "posting goatse in Facebook" level of crime at best.

And you are calling for him to be imprisoned for being a "sick fuck", that is, for thought crime caused by mental illness.

Other than the latter being a circumstance, thought crimes are not a thing for any decent person, AFAIR.

Otherwise I'd want for sick fucks like you not understanding that a crime is a violation of someone else's rights to be preventively imprisoned. That at least fits said condition.

Harmful about law, useful about facts of life one like that generating a picture doesn't involve abusing a child, so it's not child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Yes, I do feel threatened by people who think it's just to punish consuming generated material. That's because of pretty "normal" porn. Is watching (and spreading) something about BSDM similar to sexual abuse materials (about adults)? Is generated porn sexual exploitation material, if porn is in some future outlawed as such with real punishments? Is it, if the dataset is polluted with cases of slavery and rape? If it's not, then is it legal in such a potential future?

If you do that to CSAM, try applying the same logic to normal porn and plenty of other things which are for some people sick, but legal because nobody suffers.

The problem with generated CSAM is that it normalizes sick things, well, that's still a crime an order of magnitude less than spreading a record of real rape. Seems obvious.

Banning open source is never a useful option

It's like "posting goatse in Facebook" level of crime at best.

Wtf no, this is far worse! Goatse, afaik, was photographed and published consensually. Artificial CSAM is constructed from real CSAM, to the point that real CSAM victims have sued people who generated material resembling the victim.

Is this meaningfully enforced though? I agree that accuracy about what the law says is important, but laws are being unevenly enforced, making them, by definition, privileges. Just because the government calls it a law doesn't mean it functions as one in the practical sense, which is what matters most.

Reading the article we are commenting on about the arrest of a CSAM generator

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024

Its called regulation. You know, that thing we don't have for guns in the us?

I usually dont judge peoples hobbies, but DAMN 🤣

Yeah, this is nothing like certain drawings or "this fictional character is 15", AI image generators construct this shit from images of actual children. Anyone attempting to defend this only wants to use arts as a shield for exploitation of actual, living kids

My drivers license photo makes me look like Ike from the most recent episode of South Park after he is rescued from the backrooms of Sephora.

"Making AI porn from photos on driver’s licenses" Given the quality usually of such photos it's almost an achievement.

Otherwise I'd want for sick fucks like you not understanding that a crime is a violation of someone else's rights...

You mean like the right to not have your likeness fed into an algorithm and assembled into pornographic content without your consent? Or does having your image laundered by an LLM somehow magically make that ok?

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Wouldn't the full color photo be in the database not just what they print on license?

No, it's not necessarily constructed from real CSAM. It can be constructed from real photos of children and real porn.

Anyway, when saying that someone should be jailed, you should consider all the main possibilities.

EDIT: And when you have real porn with adults, hentai with supposed adults and anime with children, that might be good enough to generate something that's technically like generated CSAM, even if the quality might not be too good. Anyway, I'm not very well-versed on quality of CSAM.

Why necessarily "your likeness"? And honestly yes, everyone has the right to draw whatever they want, just presenting it as real or using for bullying campaigns should be a crime.

Because those are crossing someone's personal borders, while doing something that doesn't concern them at all - is not.

Right, so punish every company that make a product.
After all a company who make knives do not put any safeguards in place to avoid one of their knife if used to kill someone.
Or a telcom do not put any safeguards in place to avoid someone use a phone line to harass someonelse.
Or a car company since they do not put any safeguard in place to avoid that one of their car is used for a robbery.

Or [any company] since they do not put any safeguard in place to avoid that one of their product is used to [commit a crime]

Sounds better ?

Artificial CSAM is constructed from real CSAM,

I would not be that sure. 30 years ago it was possible to create photorealistics images with renderes (ok, you needed days of rendering probably)

It was possible to create fake xxx images combining the image of the face of a person (famous actor/actress, common guy/girl) with a body from a image scanned from a xxx magazine in a way that it looks like an original image (there were entire subgroups on Usenet dedicated to this).

I bet any decent AI image creator could now do way better than what was done by hand 30 years ago.

to the point that real CSAM victims have sued people who generated material resembling the victim.

Also nothing new. Do you know the origin of the "Every protagonists of this story is a finctional charaters and [blah, blah blah]" you see at the end of every movie ? Basically same problem you cite.

You mean like the right to not have your likeness fed into an algorithm and assembled into pornographic content without your consent?

What you are describing here is just a sexual fantasy.
It could be debatable that someone cannot imagine to have sex with the hot actress of the day (or the hot colleague) or to create a fake nude image of her to fantasize on, without harming in any way the object of his fantasy.

Or does having your image laundered by an LLM somehow magically make that ok?

It depends. How do you consider a personal sexual fantasy involving other people ?

That said, since the problem is the CSAM image in itself, as it should be, punish who create and distribute the images (like the real ones), not the platform/tool used to create them.
Else you should also punish who build the camera used to take the real images, don't you think ? (btw, you would never be able to punish someone who draw a CSAM image and keep it for itself, like you would be never be able to punish who create a fake image of the hot actress and keep it for itself, without violating his privacy)

They just busted a senior law enforcement official for this btw we are commenting on a post about an article about it. I doubt they were using a frontier API

Thank you for the added info, and I totally get that there are workarounds for more diligent predators.

That doesn't change the fact that the frontier AI companies knowingly making this easy and accessible for sick people is still unacceptable and real accountability is necessary.