And in the age of AI, stolen images of children matter. Taken in real life or scraped from the internet, they’re the raw material for generating realistic-looking child abuse material of the most extreme and disturbing kind. (If that sounds like a grim but ultimately fairly victimless crime, the Internet Watch Foundation warned in a recent report that AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children, normalising violence and increasing the risk of real-life offending.)
That some will be inflamed by piccies into doing is clearly true. That others will wank themselves into a stupor over piccies and not do is also, obviously, true. What we want to know is what is the balance? Does more piccies mean less action and more stupor?
Yes. We know this. Overall porn acts sa a substitute, not a complement. Therefore we don’t actually want to stop people AIing porn at all, rather encourage it.
Not that that’s an argument that’s likely to fly in political circles…..
AI-generated material risks fuelling sexual interest in children,
No it satisfies the interest. If the pervs were really unterested un molesting kids, then they’d do it anyway.
After I found that picture if Madeline Grant yesterday, doesn’t mean we’re all going to hang around the Spectator offices… er… Does it ?
I might but sadly, after her dalliance with Lawrence Fox, she’s married a vicar.
A friend of mine from school married a vicar. Well, vicaress, to be old fashioned.
Form a queue…
No, you’re wrong.
Pornography is a lot like other addictions, it’s additive and cumulative. Masturbation is inherently unsatisfying (why wouldn’t it be? your genes didn’t evolve to end up in a damp tissue) so porn addictions always lead to the weird stuff. Just like alcoholics can never leave it at one glass of oporto.
It’s why we have so many middle aged men who’ve wanked themselves into becoming trannies.
So no, porn doesn’t satisfy paedophiles, it makes them worse. The only cure is a bolt through the brain. The radfems and Mary Whitehouse were right all along. We shouldn’t have allowed pornography to be normalised, it’s social cancer.
When people masturbate to pornography, they’re rewiring their own brains like poor Alex in Clockwork Orange. It’s a much more insidious threat to mental health than people suspect because fnarr fnarr cocks and fannies. A *lot* of young men need Viagra due to their wanking habits rendering them impotent when given the opportunity for irl sex with a woman.
I don’t know what evidence there is for this, Steve.
Not the viagra stuff – I expect that’s a combo of a lot of IRL women not physically looking quite as good as some – some – of the porn birds do, and young blokes worrying that they won’t measure up to the expectations of what is undoubtedly a voracious new breed of fanny.
The stuff about it turning blokes into trannies and paedos, I doubt.
I don’t mind admitting that I have occasionally resorted on long foreign sojourns to one off the wrist, and it’s always, but always, been leggy brunettes, ideally aged around 25-35, with nice arses and medium-sized (real) tits, for me.
Never been remotely tempted into female clothing, nor kids (though I simply cannot understand the shaven fanny obsession, and that I do think is a bit suspect – why wouldn’t you want your woman to have one of the key signifiers that she is, indeed, a woman? It doesn’t have to look like the jungles of Belize, but it has to be there.)
People have been wanking pretty furiously since the days on Onan, and that was not AI-assisted.
Comment got et. Will try again.
Idk how you could doubt the effects of pornography on the human brain. We know advertising and propaganda change how people think, so why wouldn’t the far more immediate dopamine rewards involved in porn?
If Edward Bernays was right, and he was, Mary Whitehouse must also be right.
We are, after all, social mammals with a great deal of suggestibility.
Onan had to use his imagination, that’s qualitatively and quantitatively different to having access to hardcore pornography in high definition, 24/7, at the flick of a wrist. This is a new problem, created by technology, not an ancient problem.
Young men being unable to perform their essential biological functions is a serious psychosexual problem.
We are not that different to monkeys.
So long since I’ve seen pubes on a woman I’ve forgotten what it looks like. Like armpit hair. But there’s a good reason why they remove it. It’s more hygienic. Why I do.
Always suspect paedo tendencies in any grown man who doesn’t like a neatly trimmed bush.
No Steve . I often consider myself a moral absolutist but sometimes it just unhelpful.
There are two main issues :
Where do you draw the line ?
Is harm being done to anyone ?
In the first instance: do you condemn someone for saying “What a pretty little girl !” about a passing 6 year old ? Do you condemn someone for having impure thoughts watching the Addams Family and thinking what Christina Ricci is like in Sleepy Hollow ? Do you condemn someone who has a pinup of Sam Fox at 16, knowing full wellshe was 15 when it was taken ?
You have to define pornography too. Will we get in trouble because reading Mads Grant’s parliamentary sketches gets us all a but frisky ?
There are types of porn that can be identified and specifically banned (actual rape, beating, underage, animal and so on. Adults being paid to roger is just a commercial transaction ).
The other point relates to the first. If I have a collection of Christina Ricci, Chloe Grace Moretz or even Shirley Bloody Temple films and they get me going, whom am I hurting here ? As long as I dont go out molesting curly haired girls or buying videos of actual paedophilia, where is the problem ?
There are two main issues :
Where do you draw the line ?
Anybody found having downloaded CP, anyone who admits to a sexual interest in children, anyone convicted of sexual assault against a child.
That should be sufficiently narrow to avoid hanging people for thinking Sam Fox was fit.
Is harm being done to anyone ?
Not enough harm is being done to nonces. That’s the problem. Allowing them to live is a moral failure, a failure of responsibility on our part. Huw Edwards should be strung up by the balls, publicly.
Those nonces who adopted and then raped a baby to death – what possible moral or ethical argument can you have for forcing the taxpayer to keep them alive?
You have to define pornography too.
No I don’t. I know it when I see it.
The real line is post-puberty. If a girl is ovulating, she is now, sexually a woman.
Everything else is sociological. Jerry Lee Lewis legally married his 13 year old cousin in Mississippi. Today the age of consent in Mississippi is 16. What caused that change? It’s not that humans are much different to how they were in the 1950s. It’s just the expectations of what girls do has changed, to be beyond just having families. It’s why chav girls are shagging around and getting knocked up, because that’s their expectation.
It’s why no-one used to care about 16 year old page 3 girls. We were in a time when girls that age left school and started looking for a husband, generally. Kids grew up earlier, generally. They had Saturday jobs, they could smoke at 16, pubs and shops didn’t have any sort of ID card thing. The general thinking nowadays is that you’re an adult at 18.
“You have to define pornography too. Will we get in trouble because reading Mads Grant’s parliamentary sketches gets us all a but frisky ?”
Dr Who assistants were always young women to give Dads something nice to look at.
You keep claiming this, but I am not convinced. We have the widest access to pornography in the history of mankind but rape in the UK has risen catastrophically over the past 20 years:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-offences-in-england-and-wales/?srsltid=AfmBOora6_Tk75MGLZVlsmbu-D9v6XLxk_UXggT0PTa9y3TtOSAYK1yx
Yes, there have been *ahem* demographic changes but unless the new diversity is committing the vast majority of rapes, there are other factors involved.
I would also point out that there is plenty of data showing that porn-addled teenage boys sexually intimidate and assault girls far more today than 10/20/30 years ago.
https://rapecrisis.org.uk/news/ofsted-confirms-sexual-harassment-is-normalised-in-schools/
The AI summation to the call: “worstall porn is a substitute not a complement” is:
That is, people argue other points, not this one.
More of my argument:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/18/david-cameron-gets-google-and-microsoft-to-ban-child-pornography-from-the-search-engines/
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2011/06/30/the-freakonomics-of-smut-does-it-actually-cause-rape/1411211
https://timworstall.substack.com/p/we-should-probably-legalise-child
“criminologists and child protection advocates heavily debate the ethics and broader societal impacts of this conclusion….”
More accurate version: “criminologists and child protection advocates scramble for more power and recognition.“
Unbanning stuff makes less crime, therefore less work for criminologists.
My version of that is the Mandy Rice-Davis one – “they would say that, wouldn’t they”.
Probably a lot of things in play.
Clearly the diversity is at it.
But also I agree that stupid young boys raised by single mothers probably can’t accept that the fourteen year old girl who looks like a grown woman and wears her skirt barely covering her arse doesn’t want to give them blow jobs in the school bogs.
I also think a lot of false reporting goes on, and probably a fair bit of not-reporting.
I think a possible solution is to keep porn available but give rapists (properly convicted, this is not for 30-year-old no witness cases, or he-said-she-said stuff) the option of five years + castration, or banishment to South Georgia until such time as you forget all about women.
Women who make demonstrably false complaints should be similarly banished, of course.
I’m told that most western porn depicts western women, thoroughly enjoying themselves with young men they just met following the briefest of attempted seduction by the man (of all kinds of hue) – it’s straight in to the action. Now this may well be fuelling the assumption among newcomers that western women are delighted to drop their knickers within 90 seconds, and indeed suggesting it is all you need to do.
You’re told, eh?
It would be rude, not to say racist, not to.
Cases reported to the police are unreliable because of changes in willingness to report crimes (the #MeToo trend went viral about then), police practices in recording them (Operation Yewtree started just before then), and definitions. A more reliable source is the Crime Survey for England and Wales which estimates figures by asking a random sample of the public whether they have experienced a crime.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffencesprevalenceandtrendsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025#sexual-offences-from-the-crime-survey-for-england-and-wales
See the light blue line in figure 2 for the long-term trend.
“unless the new diversity is committing the vast majority of rapes”
But it is.
Pornography is a complete head fuck to teenagers, it ruins their understanding of “sex” because porn is the opposite of sex, loveless mechanical fucking and mental illness inducing paraphilias. It’s a serious problem that every teenager in the land has access to hardcore pornography on their phones.
This is nothing like finding a damp copy of Razzle in the bushes circa 1986. Sometimes it’s hard for us older folks who grew up with normality to fully appreciate just how fucking bad things are for young people in our society now.
“What we want to know is what is the balance? Does more piccies mean less action and more stupor?”
The problem is that the amount of people interested in such things is not necessarily a fixed amount. If it was then yes, its a simple binary test. But if the amount of potential kiddie fiddlers is a variable number, then flooding the market with AI created CP might result in a bigger market for CP overall, and more people who decide to act out the online fantasies IRL, even though the % who act drops.
There’s also the issue that if the market is flooded with (legal?) AI CP then hiding the real stuff will become very much easier.
That’s a good argument against, but that then makes me wonder what the most practical approach is. If interest is that elastic or latent (I can believe it, but don’t know), AI is quite likely to stoke it. It’s not clear to me that AI guardrails get more effective as the models get more powerful, and the infrastructure for creating or tweaking the models gets more commonplace, cheaper.
Do you get a better return on police budgets chasing the AI-first nonces that *may* escalate to IRL, or by getting good at catching and prosecuting the ones that actually do? Is an effective threat of severe punishment better at stopping *IRL* abuse than ‘catching them early’?
My pet theory is that we’ve lost a lot of natural frictions that were acting as transaction costs preventing a lot of awful crap. You don’t need much self-control if it’s bloody expensive/risky to do the thing you want. Social media being an obvious example: anonymous yelling is cheap and quite effective, and safer than trying the same in your local pub.
Your concern is in that same vein, I think.
No idea how to solve, but I suspect the answer is much deeper, and harder to direct, than merely reaching for the policeman’s baton again. Something, something social fabric, fragmentation, something.
AI models are becoming open source. That means that you can get a powerful PC, train a model on your content, and then generate it locally. Even if the model has a guard rail, it just takes one person to figure out the code that does that, and it’s gone.
And my guess is that that’s what the nonces will do, because no-one will ever find you if you generate your own and don’t share it.
“then flooding the market with AI created CP might result in a bigger market for CP overall”
I’m still lusting after Marion Cotillard around the time from Taxi to Inception (23-35), even though there’s plenty of pedo bait K-Pop out there.
There’s probably no more increase in taste, it’s just that replication and distribution got much faster and cheaper. What did pedos do before that? Probably watched Grange Hill or Joe Le Taxi on Top of the Pops, in the same way that normal men would knock one out to Miss World.
Well, the Graun may get worked up about taking pictures of children, but it’s strangely at odds with it’s fellow socialists at the BBBC. When the management found out that Huw Edward’s pedo ring was producing the very worst kiddie porn they gave him a £50,000 raise to bring his pension up to a nice round £400,000 a year for the rest of his life. The judge obviously got some videos too, because his sentence of “Don’t get caught doing it again for two years” didn’t seem unduly harsh…
“Meta’s smartglasses mean any child can be covertly filmed”
There are far cheaper spy cameras that you can buy than Meta sunglasses already.
With the smartglasses you have to look directly at children.
A decent tablet in a fixed position with zoom on can do a better job while you can pretend to be a Novelist, or….
If it’s AI generated kiddies, there’s already enough material around to create *any* kid, from any ethnicity. You don’t need photo’s, you need some time and a decent AI design suite..
If anyone wants his fantasy AI jollies with a *specific* kid, they’re already well into Predator territory. And if caught should meet mr. Lamppost on short order, quite publicly. Pour encourager les autres..
There’s some types of Predator you *can’t* allow to let live in a society, and kiddie fiddlers are one type of them.
It’s just that peeps in general are too squeemish to follow a simple rule of fist to its logical conclusion.
sorry double post
@ Western Bloke
I suppose the point with the shades is that you can be wearing them and people won’t necessarily twig.
It’s not just shades, either. I know that at some of our more sensitive military HQs visitors have had their spectacles checked for quite some time now.
I bet this extends to all sorts of sensitive public and private sector locations.
And it is hard to tell, especially given that the tech is in its infancy. I’m pretty sure this pair of ocean-going cunts didn’t realise they were being filmed.
You can already get watches, tie pins etc.
Sounds suspicious; when did you last see anyone wearing a tie pin?
Correlation/ Causation etc, but isn’t there a distinct curve between importing diversity into certain areas & a massive increase in sexual harassment /assault see Sweden, Yorkshire, Minnesota.
Pattern recognition.
And in the age of AI
Gamecock is still waiting for the ‘age of AI.’
stolen images of children matter
Wut? The only source of child pix is stolen ones?
Photo editing has been around for years. It has FA to do with AI.
Child pix are ubiquitous.
WTF is Gaby Himself talking about?
Can’t people take pictures of kids with their phones?
This all forebrain trying to override the hindbrain. Pedos, and by modern extension ephebos, are icky, and that’s that.
Yeah but are they committing a crime ?
Thoughts and deeds and all that.
Should it be a crime to create images for one’s own delectation ?
As long as they are not of real people, not disseminated nor sold and it keeps the creep off the streets. Is there a problem with it ?
We should execute men who have a sexual interest in children.
Not for their thoughts, but because they can’t be reformed. Just kill them all.
That includes self-described “ebolaphiles”, who are just pedos with a dictionary.
How did we get rid of highwaymen? We hanged them all. Let’s get rid of pedos, it’s social hygiene.
“That includes self-described “ebolaphiles”, who are just pedos with a dictionary.”
There’s nothing unnatural about ephebophilia. The age of consent of was 12 in 1861. Not much has changed about human biology since then. The only reason we raised the age of consent to 16 is about society wanting girls to have an education.
Laws against pornography and prostitution under the age of 18 are for the same reason.
There’s nothing unnatural about ephebophilia.
Ooh, I don’t care. String em up.
If a man tells you he’s an ebolaphile, he’s a paedo. No exceptions. Men who are not sex offenders don’t call themselves ebolaphiles, and don’t sniff around 12 year old girls.
Executions, vigorously prosecuted, will heal our society. It’s an important shared experience the public misses badly. It’s cathartic. Nothing could be more natural than hanging criminals and antisocial perverts.
They can enjoy their human rights in Hell.
Steve,
See my comment at the top, where you reply to my first post.
You’re recalling a time when men could legally shag willing 12 year olds.
And yet, Victorians didn’t go around shagging 12 year olds, if they knew what was good for them. I’m recalling a time when we, as a society, were serious about getting rid of our problems.
So, the Islamic Rape Gangs. Why aren’t they dead yet? Because good men do nothing.
Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 and yet the age of consent wasn’t raised from 12 up to 13 until 1875. (The Offences against the Person Act 1875.) It was raised again to 16 in 1885. So it depends which Victorians you’re referring to. For 38 years they did.
I remember when it wasn’t just the depiction of sex that was restricted in films but also violence. It was claimed it was desensitising, and watching violent films would cause young men to become more violent. That’s something you might more easily assess. Does watching John Wick make you want to *actually* run round the streets *actually* executing people? Or do you find you can easily separate fantasy from reality?
Does *enjoying* watching violent films and horror films and revenge thrillers make you a bad person?
I think you make a very important point there. The normalisation of violence in popular films. The normalisation of dominance by violence. And you wonder why so many stabbings.
Remove drug gangs, and I doubt stabbings have increased at all.
They were thought to have done rather a lot of it. Certainly many Victorians believed that it was common.
The age of consent was 12 until 1875, when it was raised … to 13.
It was raised to 16 in 1885, but that Bill was rejected four times by the Commons before it was passed, amidst allegations that numerous MPs were busy shagging under-aged girls themselves, and were worried about their position if it became illegal.
The public debate over the Bill saw a lot of exposes of child prostitution, including the infamous series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, for one of which a journalist bought a 13 year old girl for a fiver, to show how easy it was.
There was also a House of Lords Select Committee report, but it doesn’t seem to be available online.
Steve
I think everyone else has the correct data.
But I do like your sentiments!!!
Steve. It’s something I discovered. Most of the commenters on here will be ebophiles. Probably including you. I’ve dealt with British men looking for prossies. Overwhelmingly they seek girls resemble their daughter’s/grand daughter’s schoolfriends. It’s not something I understand. I prefer women. But perhaps that’s because I’ve always had easy access to women.* I don’t fantasize, I do.
*Why easy. Possibly because I left home very early. 17. So didn’t go through that period many men do when the company of females is restricted. Half the world is female. To me, they’re primarily people & secondarily female. I don’t view every passing woman as a potential lay. And if you treat them like that, they’re very much easier to get on with. I think I prefer the company of women to men. There isn’t the constant dominance games.
Does it occur to you that men (whether British or not is, I suspect, irrelevant) who use prostitutes may not be wholly typical of the general population? And since the evolutionary purpose* of the sex drive is to increase procreation, it shouldn’t surprise us that males are attracted to nubile females.
* Yes, we can’t really attribute ‘purpose’ to evolution, but it’s a useful shortcut in description
You do not need to scrape images of children – the AI companies did that for you already. Barn doors, missing horses, and so on.