Former Boston Red Sox/Florida Gators pitcher arrested in Florida in an underage sex sting

If something is too good to be true...then you gotta go for it. Because how often are you going to get an opportunity like that?

 

Not entrapment or undercover, but here's another category of prosecutions we're about to see more of...on Drudge today.

MSN

Federal prosecutors have charged a Wisconsin man for allegedly using a popular artificial intelligence image generator to create thousands of explicit images of children, marking what is potentially the first federal charge of creating child sexual abuse material applied to images produced entirely through AI.

In a statement Monday afternoon, the Justice Department said it has charged Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, Wis., with using the AI image generator Stable Diffusion to create over 13,000 fake images of minors, many of which depicted fully or partially nude children touching their genitals or engaging in sexual intercourse with men.

A Justice Department official told The Washington Post it was the first case the department was aware of involving a person suspected of using AI to fully generate child sexual abuse material, known as CSAM. The images did not show real children and were made by typing strings of text into an image generator, underscoring what Justice officials have long argued: that a 2003 law banning photorealistic fake and obscene images applies to AI.

 

This is a crazy thing to contemplate. The main argument against child porn is that its exploitative and harmful of actual children - but what if they arent actual people? No one was harmed, and maybe its a way for these people to do their thing without harming anyone. I just dont know, it makes my brain hurt.

 

The DOJ link in that article says they also charged him with sending explicit material to a 15 year old. I wonder whether it might be a bit of a test case and whether they would have brought a stand-alone charge for the AI generated pics which didn't involve any actual minors?

 

I don't it's that hard or requires any "goading" to get these guys in internet stings. Back the AOL chatroom days, when I was a teen myself, we used to mess with people. All you had to do was go to a chatroom and type something like "16/f/Tampa" (meaning "16 year old female in Tampa") and you'd get bombarded with instant messages from guys ...

 

To follow up on what you wrote here, my memory may be wrong, but I thought the Court had ruled back in the day that depictions of fictional minors (which could include movies such as Lolita, Romeo and Juliet, etc.) were protected speech? I wonder if the argument now with AI is that the images look so real as to make the fake ones indistinguishable from the real ones - thus frustrating efforts to identify and punish cases where there are actual children being victimized?

 

I’m sure, but that’s not all that risky. Meeting up in person is a bigger leap and takes things from fantasy to reality. The goading part is required there for most people with some basic sense of risk assessment.

 

Looks like he got a bunch of stings around that right eye.