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Federal Judge: Child Sex Abuse Images Are OK As Long As They’re Made With AI

The judge appears to have been hedged in by years of bad Supreme Court precedent allowing virtual child sexual abuse material.

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Editor’s note: This article discusses a court case dealing with possession and distribution of sexually explicit images.

A federal judge ruled this week that possession of images depicting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), otherwise known as child pornography, is protected by the First Amendment so long as the images are created with artificial intelligence (AI) and do not depict real people.

Seventh Circuit Appeals Judge John Z. Lee issued the ruling in a case where defendant Steven Anderegg was charged with producing, distributing, and possessing thousands of photorealistic AI child sex abuse images, as well as sending the materials to a young boy. The 13,000-plus images, many of which depicted nude, prepubescent children touching their genitals and being involved in sexual intercourse with men.

While Lee’s ruling upheld a district court dismissal of the possession charge, it appeared to include an implicit request for the Supreme Court to review its precedent on the matter, which was made well prior to advancements in AI.

“We now live in an age where GenAI models can render images depicting the abuse of virtual children that are virtually indistinguishable from those depicting the abuse of actual children,” Lee wrote. “Given the relentless advancement in artificial intelligence models, we have some concerns about the lines these cases draw, but we are not free to redraw them ourselves.”

Lee noted the controlling precedent in Stanley v. Georgia, a 1969 unanimous Warren Court opinion written by Justice Thurgood Marshall claiming private possession of obscene materials was protected by the First Amendment, and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, where a 6-3 court in 2002 effectively allowed virtual child pornography. Those cases,........

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