tl;dr United States government rules it may be legal to possess CSAM (Child Pornography) if it's AI generated
Dawg, last week the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals made a decision which will unironically change the way CSAM (Child Pornography) is handled in the United States.
Under United States v. Anderegg, Anderegg was charged with distribution and possession of Child Pornography. Anderegg used Stable Diffusion AI to generate hyper-realistic depictions of children having sex.
While charged with CSAM, Anderegg appealed the decision and argued it was not possession of CSAM because the "children" in the images were not "real" children. Rather, Anderegg and his attorneys argued that it is not illegal to possess obscene material which does not harm anyone.
The courts official ruling: By 1969 ruling of Stanley v. Georgia, you are protected by the United States First Amendment to privately possess obscene material in one's home. Hence, because the images are completely computer generated, and no actual child was used to create the pornography, the United States government cannot constitutionally criminalize someone's private possession of those obscene images in their home under this statute
