What does it say about us, as a society, or just as _humans_, where the scale and magnitude of this problem is so great and only growing? Where and how are we failing ourselves that the sort of mental illness that percolates and drives this sort of behavior festers, amplifies, and converts into actual, illicit action?
These numbers are mind-boggling, and while I understand that a "few (extremely) bad apples" are probably responsible for an outsized amount of production, AND that AI-generated imagery is flooding the zone disproportionate to the amount of actual human children being physically harmed, it's still absolutely wild to me that we collectively are producing and consuming so much of this content, despite it being largely universally considered essentially the most abhorrent thing possible.
What would fixing this at the root cause even start to begin? How do we apply whatever combination of therapeutic intervention or further societal pressure or whatever might work to reduce the incidence of people having these urges, exploring them, feeding them, and sometimes acting on them? We see signs in every airport bathroom telling us to look for signs of trafficking. Trafficking intervention training is a huge deal in the travel industry in general. There are early intervention and detection systems for social workers and case workers.
But has anyone spent any real time looking at this from the other side: the side of the offender? I imagine there's research on the typical chain of how someone gets "onboarded" here: it probably starts with some early abuse, or if not that, early exposure or early curiosity, and then snowballs from there. I'm just thinking out loud about how large the magnitude of the problem is on the offender side if we're talking about this volume of images, and how we might be able to evaluate things from the "ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure" side of things, because damn is this depressing.
Images are interesting though. You can have a massive amount of images for only a few consumers.
I would be interested in statistics related to the percent of adults who would be considered child predators. I have zero scope on how large this issue is by percent of population.
If we're talking about 3% of everyone who is sexually attracted to children, that's one thing, but if it's .0000001% then the issue really is just the producers of content.
Does anyone here know of any studies or statistics? My basic googling hasn't really turned up anything trustworthy.
That's what I'm getting at with the "few bad apples" reference: it's _possible_ (and I'd hope) that the percentages are very small... but the insane volume of things like _grooming_ and other behaviors, to say nothing of just how many women report some form of sexual assault or abuse by the time they reach adulthood being in, what, the high 30%s?... it's not great.
As per Wikipedia there is really bad/no data on this because almost all research relies on convicted pedophiles and going around making “are you a pedo, perchance?” surveys in the general population simply does not work.
Germany has an anonymous support programme for people who feel paedophilic urges but don't wish to offend. I believe they've used that network for research, but I think it's probably quite a limited, and potentially biased, sample.
It's also worth considering just parent taking photos of the child would hit the positive on classifier. And it can be CSAM and not CSAM at the same time, because it is fine to be on the device of the parent, but it can also be stolen and distributed by maliciosu actor.
> What does it say about us, as a society, or just as _humans_, where the scale and magnitude of this problem is so great and only growing?
That the people in power have too much power and they get away with it often enough that there is actual money to be made supplying them.
I remember when the official terminology changed from "child porn" to "child sexual abuse material", and how this was meant to emphasize that it was produced by actually abusing an actual child.
That's Phoenix, it's here. Waymos commit to nominally keep the speed at the speed limit but it is _extremely noticeable_ that that's the case because literally NO ONE drives 65 on the freeways here. Everyone is at minimum at 74. It's a rite of passage in Arizona. It's not even a speeding ticket until 75. Goes back to the 70s with the feds trying to force speed limit laws or threatening to revoke highway funding. Arizona said "fine, but it's not a speeding ticket. it's 'misuse of a finite resource.'"
So you'll see the Waymos kind of puttering along at 65 as everyone zooms around them. They DO say they'll occasionally exceed speeds when it's safer to do so, but it's obvious they don't want a narrative of them being speed demons and flying around exceeding the speed limit.
FullStory just tried to pull this with their renewal. We had a mult-year contract that started with a two-page order form, on which the words "renewal" or "cancellation" never once appear. During negotiations, it was never discussed that the plan would renew, or that there was a cancellation window. Instead, buried at the very bottom of the form (which they send via CongaSign, and wasn't clickable or obvious), was a line about their subscription agreement being linked to their terms and conditions page. On THAT page, they mention the plan will auto renew and must be cancelled with 60 days notice.
We cancelled at T-45 or so days before renewal, having determined it wasn't a fit for our client anymore, and they insisted "well, actually, you've renewed anyway!" which, no, we haven't. Absolutely absurd to try to "clickwrap" buried renewal terms in a 20+ page T&C/privacy document rather than as a material point of fact on the actual order form being executed.
Feels like the height of absurdity to try to bully your client into forcing them to use your services against their will when they still gave ample notice that they were cancelling and when there was no material loss to the business, but it's always felt like their revenue team has been unhinged in general: exploding offers, insane terms, super high-pressure sales... part of the reason we left them in the first place.
100F days are fine, cakewalks, even, especially with misters + shade. We had 70+ days of 110°F two years ago, and over 20 days 115°F+. They are not the same. Those days are unbearable nightmare fuel, and worse, they turn into insanely miserable nights where the low temperature rarely dips below 95°. It is absolutely awful, dry or not.
It's truly the perfect detective game. There are so many original ideas brought to life here: the blending of a single frame of a scene, rendered in 1-bit 3D, that you can navigate around to forensically examine... coupled with the incredible voiceover work, such that the audio itself becomes a huge clue (listening for accents to try to determine origin!), and just... how layered and fantastical the story itself is, and the Memento-style reverse reveal.
Absolutely LOVE this game. Lucas Pope is brilliant.
If you're going to be forced, Clockwork Orange-style, to endure unwanted ads on your TV, you might as well just get the whole thing for free, right? That's what Telly does: https://www.telly.com/
For me, it worth it to spend marginally more to not have to deal with _any_ of that, but I get the appeal.
I knew a lot of this, and had a good idea of how bad this whole thing was but... damn, how comprehensively horrible a parade of bad, multi-decade decisions this is turning out to be.
If anything represents the logical conclusion of that tired fallacy, it'll be actually autonomous, "thinking" drones which make the targeting decisions and execution decisions on their own, not based on any direct, human-led orders, but derived from second-order effects of their neural net. At a certain point, it's not going to matter who launched the drones, or even who wrote the software that runs on the drones. If we're letting the drones decide things, it'll just be up to the drones, and I don't love our chances making our case to them.
These numbers are mind-boggling, and while I understand that a "few (extremely) bad apples" are probably responsible for an outsized amount of production, AND that AI-generated imagery is flooding the zone disproportionate to the amount of actual human children being physically harmed, it's still absolutely wild to me that we collectively are producing and consuming so much of this content, despite it being largely universally considered essentially the most abhorrent thing possible.
What would fixing this at the root cause even start to begin? How do we apply whatever combination of therapeutic intervention or further societal pressure or whatever might work to reduce the incidence of people having these urges, exploring them, feeding them, and sometimes acting on them? We see signs in every airport bathroom telling us to look for signs of trafficking. Trafficking intervention training is a huge deal in the travel industry in general. There are early intervention and detection systems for social workers and case workers.
But has anyone spent any real time looking at this from the other side: the side of the offender? I imagine there's research on the typical chain of how someone gets "onboarded" here: it probably starts with some early abuse, or if not that, early exposure or early curiosity, and then snowballs from there. I'm just thinking out loud about how large the magnitude of the problem is on the offender side if we're talking about this volume of images, and how we might be able to evaluate things from the "ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure" side of things, because damn is this depressing.
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