As much as i'm leery of connecting abstractions for the sake of bad laws, your example is a bit reductionist. After all, the people who created things like Stuxnet (ironically, a government-created worm) were really just assembling code characters in a certain interesting way.

You could even stretch the idea further to say that someone making a bomb is merely mixing certain perfectly legal chemicals just so...

> Writing down 1’s and 0’s in certain permutations, is ‘evil’ and ‘should be illegal?

I think the parent was making the point that creating and distributing simulated child pornography should be. The medium that is used to reproduce the image is irrelevant. Real digital images are also made of 1s and 0s.

True, but ‘creating and distributing’ some physical paper or pdf filled with 1 and 0, is the actual action. Just blank white rectangles with lots of lines and ovals on it, being shuffled around.

Even in the extreme case, where it really does contain images in binary format, there is only the latent potential of that being transformed into something objectionable, several steps removed.

If this was the accepted norm everywhere, then practically every adult in the US would be guilty of some latent potential crime, after several degrees of separation.

e.g. even though lunatics use knives in mass stabbing sprees, we don’t assign blame to those selling knives or knife making equipment in stores where the lunatic happened to have gone shopping.

I don't follow the point you're trying to make. We are talking about the output of an image generation model, right?

If we are talking about a physical book containing 1s and 0s that represent CSAM, I'd ask how you encoded the image to get the binary representation...

That is the point, once it’s been transformed into 1’s and 0’s and distributed for the first time, it’s all random intermediaries handling it.

Intermediaries who likely cannot recognize it and won’t think twice about reproducing it, even if later on it does get transformed back.

What the original impetus for creating and distributing it is irrelevant to anyone subsequently encountering it.

To continue the knife analogy, even if the knife factory was also in fact owned by some maniac, the salespersons in the retail stores still not assigned blame even if they promote the knives.

The salespersons are just random middle men who couldn’t possibly have been expected to personally investigate the actual background or provenance behind what they’re handling.

Sorry, you lost me. If the knives were illegal, the salespeople would held responsible. We aren't going to agree, no matter how clever the analogy, so I'll leave you here.

Huh? Some types of knives are illegal in certain jurisdictions… and I haven’t heard of anyone blaming them for not opening and verifying every knife box that passes through.