No Stupid Questions

I'm only going to answer the first part of your question, not the AI/generated part.

No one really chooses what or who they're attracted to; it kind of just happens to you. For example, you might be watching a TV show and someone gets lightly, comically spanked... and suddenly a light bulb goes off above your head and you think, "whoa, that might actually be kinda fun." People are wired in ways we don't understand to want things we don't even know we want.

To that extent, pedophiles are themselves victims of their own desires; there's no "logic" behind it. It's simply an urge they experience.

Of course that doesn't make succumbing to this urge excusable, and any children who are impacted are of course victims and the pedophiles, predators. But no one is training pedophiles in pedophile camp. It's just humans being human, unfortunately.

I see people here attempting to equate it with a natural attraction and or a fetish. We all have internet access and can look it up. It is in the DSM-5 and ICD-10 both pedophilia and pedophilic disorder. Especially, in this more advanced age of medicine, science and society. If it was natural I believe the corrections would’ve been made and or strongly advocated for, it’s not. What is advocated is using terminology correctly, encouraging those that experience this to feel comfortable to tell their truth and seek help. I believe some of you guys comments are very dangerous and some of the upvotes and downvotes are concerning and makes it difficult to distinguish if you are in support of protecting children. The point is please don’t just blanket label it and compare it to things that aren’t harmful, illegal and consensual.

There are multiple parts to your question. I'm going to try to break it down.

First, there's a difference between a pedophile and a child molester. Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children, but it does not, by itself, require the person to take action. A child molester is a person that sexually assaults children. It's the difference between being heterosexual, and being a rapist; you can be straight and still be entirely celibate.

Child molesters may not be sexually attracted to children at all; some might be, but people that commit rape aren't usually doing it solely for sexual gratification, although sex is definitely part of it.

We don't know how common pedophilia is because of how heavily stigmatized it is.

You don't understand how a person could be sexually attracted to children; the simplest way to explain it is to ask if you can understand how a man can be sexually attracted to another man. IIRC, most research indicates that pedophilia probably is a sexual orientation, much like being straight, gay, or bisexual is (except that there is no moral or ethical way for a pedophile to have a sexual or romantic relationship with a child; that is always both predatory and criminal). Do pedophile child molesters believe that they're having a relationship? Some of them, yes. They're able to delude themselves into believing that the child wants the attention and sex (really sexual assault), when they're--probably--the one that has groomed the child in the first place.

I cannot understand the attraction to kids. Even teens.

I can. When I was a child, I was sexually attracted to my peers. 14yo kids are having sex with each other, so clearly they're attracted to each other. As an adult, I can see women in their 20s as being sexually attractive, while still having zero interest in them (y'all seem really young, and not in a good way, if y'know what I mean). Sexual maturity isn't a magical thing that happens when you hit 18 (or whatever the age of consent is where you live); it's a sliding scale.

Should AI generated CSAM and CP be treated the same as a real person since it promotes the same issues?

I don't think that you can make a person into a pedophile, any more than you can make a person gay. A person either is, or isn't, a pedophile, and CG CSAM isn't going to change that. So the question is, does CG CSAM make it more likely that a pedophile will end up sexually abusing a child? My intuition says that it will not, in the same way that the proliferation of pornography has not made sexual assault of adults more common. (Some research indicates that the availability of pornography has decreased rates of sexual assault.) Child pornography is illegal--in part--because it cannot be produced without causing real harm to children. CG CSAM doesn't cause real harm to any person though; unless there's evidence that it increases the rates of child sexual abuse, I don't think that the squick factor is a reasonable basis for banning it. OTOH, adult pornography has generally led to a relaxation of sexual mores and norms--which I believe is a generally positive thing--and it's possible that CG CSAM would normalize child sexual abuse sufficiently that libertarians would be able to severely weaken age of consent and statutory rape laws. I don't really know, TBH; I'd want to see more research rather than reflexively banning it.

Don't try to understand it. You aren't going to get a good answer. It's a horrible mental illness level of sexual preference.

Anything can be sexualized with enough impulse and experiences. Everyone's got some weird dark fetish shit. Some of it's illegal in practice. Normal people bury that shit or only discuss it in therapy. While talking it out so they can hopefully never think about it again.

I'm sure there's different answers to this just like "why are there serial killers?". Just be glad it confuses you.

I imagine there’s some kind of vampiric quality to it. Kids are full of youth and innocence: things we are all constantly losing to time. Especially if someone’s own childhood was robbed from them, I think they will carry around a void they desperately want to fill but never can, because of course abusing a child doesn’t bring these things back to you. Still, many child abuse victims go on to abuse other children later in life, and this may be their drive: to seek the thing they lost. It’s beyond sad. Abusing children is straight up disgusting and terrible, but the convoluted desperation that causes people to do it is truly horrifying in a stranger-than-any-fiction kind of way.

I'm only going to tackle the tech side of this...

How difficult would it be for AI photo apps to filter out words, so someone cannot make anyone naked?

Easy. The most popular apps all filter for keywords, and I know that at least some then check the output against certain blacklisted criteria to make sure it hasn't let something slip through.

But...

Anyone can host their own version and disable these features, allowing them to generate whatever they want, in the exactly same way that anyone can write their own story containing whatever they want. All you need is the determination to do it, and some modicum of ability.

People have been been creating dodgy doctored photos long before computers. When Photoshop came out, it became easier, and with AI it's easier still. The current laws about creating and distributing indecent images still apply to these new images though.

There are two parts to this problem.

For kids who haven't hit puberty, there is a diagnosable pedophilia disorder. This is mostly genetics. (I'm pretty sure I've met an alpaca that was a pedophile once.) The molester's brain is wired wrong. Nothing to do about that. IMHO, they deserve pity as long as they keep their hands off the children.

For teenagers, the attraction is the power dynamic. Teens have a rather distorted view on what is attractive, and they tend to be naive and easily manipulated. On top of this, almost all teenagers have next to no impulse control, and many will make very very bad decisions (even knowing that the decision is bad) if doing so might result in some form of dopamine hit via sex/adrenaline rush/video games/peer approval/etc. Adults that seek out teenagers for sexual relationships are bad people who chose to be a groomer. There is no genetic component to being a groomer, and they don't deserve pity.

Btw, I can flesh out my claim about the alpaca if you want, but it will have to have a tw for adorable fluffy animals suffering a horrifically slow and painful death.

Should AI generated CSAM and CP be treated the same as a real person since it promotes the same issues?

That's where things get difficult. An episode of Law & Order: SVU tried to tackle this question a long time ago (but with Photoshopped fake CSAM) and the answer was a resounding "I dunno."

On the one hand, it's disgusting, deplorable, etc. On the other, a fake image means no one was victimized for it.

Does the content further radicalize these people, creating further risk of them victimizing a child, or does it sate their desires, helping to prevent them from victimizing a child? These questions are incredibly difficult to actually answer, and no answer can ever really be definitive, as you can't really predict how any one person might react.

To me there is a clear difference between children, and teens say 16+. It is both morally wrong and unnatural to be attracted to prepubescent children, and this is pedophilia. But basically, by definition puberty makes people become sexually attractive, and it's natural for adults to be attracted. Still morally wrong to act on those attractions unless you're in about the same stage of puberty or early adulthood. That's when we rely on a strong moral code and laws in society to protect youngsters who have recently gone through puberty. And hopefully even after the laws no longer apply, we have enough societal pressure to strongly discourage wide age gaps between sexual partners.

Pedophilic disorder is characterized by recurring, intense sexually arousing fantasies, urges, or behavior involving children (usually 13 years old or younger).

At the end of the day, art is just pixels on a flat surface. Determining whether a depicted individual is under age where it's not obvious sets a dangerous precedent. Is the picture 17 or 18? Who knows.

But the problem is that people have been sexualising people like Emma Watson since she first appeared on screen. That's not okay and rather than sending AI art underground I think society needs to change to normalise education about sex, reproduction and genitalia and address the social issues to treat pedophilia like the disease that it is.

Meanwhile pedophile names are being written about publicly, risking mob violence and further isolation. Not to mention in the US theres a lot of negative attention being put on women's reproduction, childrens sex ed and genitalia and a push to make the whole lot illegal and taboo. Not to mention people teaching their kids pet names for their parts, "uncle Ben touched my heehaw" sounds a lot different to "uncle Ben touched my penis".

Society is a problem, the US particularly is going in the wrong direction on many aspects of sex education.

I'm not entirely sure about this but as far as I know is there also a genetic Component to it.

AI generated CSAM and CP should be treated the same, because you can't generate anything without first having trained the model on the kind of content you want to generate.

Pedophilia is bad.

AI CSAM should absolutely be treated as such. The model has been trained on images of real human children. I’m not sure where the issue comes from I would imagine power. Id need to check peer reviewed work from those in the field but I honestly can’t stomach it.