I have to disagree (but won't downvote!)

AI porn is creepy. In multiple ways!

But it's also a natural evolution of what we've been doing as a species since before we were a species.

Does imagining a different partner while having sex or masturbating count? I would imagine most people would say, "no".

How about if somebody draws a crude stick figure of somebody they met on the street? Unless you're Randall Munroe, this is probably harmless too.

Now a highly skilled portrait artist paints a near replica of somebody he knows, but has never seen in the nude. They never mention their friend by name, but the output is lifelike and unmistakably them.

Maybe a digital artist finds a few social media pictures of a person and decided to test drive Krita and manipulates them into appearing nude.

Or, and this happened to me quite recently, you find your porn doppelganger. My spouse found mine and it ruined her alone time. And they really did look just like me! Taking that a step further, is it illegal to find somebody's doppelganger and to dress them up so that they look more like their double?

Like you, I don't want people like this in my life. But it feels like this is one of those slippery slopes that turns out to be an actual slippery slope.

You can't make it illegal without some serious downstream effects.

If you did, the servers will just get hosted in an Eastern European country that is happy to lulwat at American warrants.

I don't have any answers, just more Devil's advocate-esque questions. If there was a way to make it illegal without any collateral damage, I'd be proudly behind you leading the charge. I just can't imagine a situation where it wouldn't get abused, a'la the DMCA.

Let's not forget that these AI aren't limited by age. Like fuck am I gonna be out here defending tech that would turn my kid into CSAM. Fucking disgusting.

As someone who personally wouldn't care at all if someone made AI porn of me and masturbated to it, I am incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that someone who doesn't like me may have the option to generate AI porn of me having sex with a child. Now there's fake "proof" I'm a pedophile, and I get my life ruined for sex I never had, for violation of consent I never actually committed. Even if I'm vindicated in court, I might still be convicted in the court of public opinion. And people could post faked porn of me and send it to companies to try to say "Evergreen5970 is promiscuous, don't hire them." Not all of us have the luxury of being able to pick and choose between companies depending on whether they match our values, some of us have to take what they can get and sometimes that would include companies that would judge you for taking nude photos of yourself. It would feel especially bad given I'm a virgin by choice who has never taken nudes let alone sent them. Punished for something I didn't do.

Not everyone is going to restrict their use to their private wank sessions, to making a real image of the stuff they probably already envision in their imagination. Some will do their best to make its results public with the full intention of using it to do harm.

And once faking abuse with AI porn becomes well-known, it might discredit actual photographic/video proof of CSAM happening. Humans get fooled by whether an AI-generated image was taken by a human or generated by AI, and AI doesn't detect AI-generated images with a perfect accuracy rate. So the question becomes "how can we trust any image anymore?" Not to mention the ability to generate new CSAM with AI. Some more mainstream AI models might try to tweak algorithms to prevent people from generating any porn involving minors, but there'll probably always be some floating around with those guardrails turned off.

I'm also very wary of dismissing other peoples' discomfort just because I don't share it. I'm still worried for people who would care about someone making AI porn of them even if it was just to masturbate with and kept private.