A Florida man is facing 20 counts of obscenity for allegedly creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography.

A Florida man is facing 20 counts of obscenity for allegedly creating and distributing AI-generated child pornography, highlighting the danger and ubiquity of generative AI being used for nefarious reasons.

Phillip Michael McCorkle was arrested last week while he was working at a movie theater in Vero Beach, Florida, according to TV station CBS 12 News. A crew from the TV station captured the arrest, which made for dramatic video footage due to law enforcement leading away the uniform-wearing McCorkle from the theater in handcuffs.

  • beepnoise@piefed.socialEnglish
    1337·
    3 months ago

    Honestly, I don’t care if it is AI/not real, I’m glad that the man was arrested. He needs some serious help for sexualising kids.

    • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
      702·
      3 months ago

      You and I both know he’s not going to get it. I have a kinda sympathy for ppl attracted to kids but refuse to act on it. They clearly know it’s not normal and recognize the absolute life destroying damage they can cause if they act on it. That being said there’s not many places you can go to seek treatment. Any institutions that advertised treatment would have ppl outside with pitchforks and torches.

      Before anyone tries to claim I’m pro pedo you can fuck right off. I just wish it was possible for ppl who are attracted to kids and not out touching them to get some kind of therapy and medication to make them normal (or destroy their sex drive) before something terrible happens.

      • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        2913·
        3 months ago

        to get some kind of therapy and medication to make them normal

        Hi, Psychologist here. Does society have strong evidence that therapeutic interventions are reducing rates of, say, the most common disorders of anxiety and depression? Considering that the rates of these are going up, I don’t think we can assume there’s a hugely successful therapy to help those attracted to CSA images to change. Psychology is not a very good science principally because it offers few extremely effective answers in the real world.

        In terms of medication androgen antagonists are generally used. This is because lowering testosterone generally leads to a lower sex drive. Here is an article about those drugs, including an offender who asked for them: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/01/what-should-we-do-about-paedophiles

        TW: the article contains discussion of whether offenders are even psychologically disordered, when set within a historical cultural context of child-marriage. This paragraph is two above the illustration of people trapped within concentric circular walls, and starts “In the 2013 edition …”.

        Collis began to research the treatment and decided that it was essential to his rehabilitation. He believes he was born a paedophile, and that his attraction to children is unchangeable. “I did NOT wake up one morning and decide my sexual preference. I am sexually attracted to little girls and have absolutely no interest in sex with adults. I’ve only ever done stuff with adults in order to fit in with what’s ‘normal’.” For Collis, therefore, it became a question of how to control this desire and render himself incapable of reoffending.

        […]

        Many experts support Aaron Collis’s self-assessment, that paedophilia is an unchangeable sexual preference. In a 2012 paper, Seto examined three criteria – age of onset, sexual and romantic behaviour, and stability over time. In a number of studies, a significant proportion of paedophiles admitted to first experiencing attraction towards children before they had reached adulthood themselves. Many described their feelings for children as being driven by emotional need as well as sexual desire. As for stability over time, most clinicians agreed that paedophilia had “a lifelong course”: a true paedophile will always be attracted to children. “I am certainly of the view,” Seto told me, “that paedophilia can be thought of as a sexual orientation.”

        Brain-imaging studies have supported this idea. James Cantor, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, has examined hundreds of MRI scans of the brains of paedophiles, and found that they are statistically more likely to be left-handed, shorter than average, and have a significantly lower density of white matter, the brain’s connective tissue. “The point that’s important for society is that paedophilia is in the brain at all, and that the person didn’t choose it,” Cantor told me. “As far as we can tell, they were born with it.” (Not that this, he emphasised, should excuse their crimes.)

        […]

        Clinical reality is a little more complicated. “There’s no pretence that the treatment is somehow going to cure them of paedophilia,” Grubin told me. “I think there is an acceptance now that you are not going to be able to change very easily the direction of someone’s arousal.” Grubin estimates that medication is only suitable for about 5% of sex offenders – those who are sexually preoccupied to the extent that they cannot think about anything else, and are not able to control their sexual urges. As Sarah Skett from the NHS put it: “The meds only take you so far. The evidence is clear that the best treatment for sex offending is psychologically based. What the medication does is help people have a little bit of control, which then allows them to access that treatment.”

         

        Some research on success rates:

        Prematurely terminating treatment was a strong indicator of committing a new sexual offense. Of interest was the general improvement of success rates over each successive 5-year period for many types of offenders. Unfortunately, failure rates remained comparatively high for rapists (20%) and homosexual pedophiles (16%), regardless of when they were treated over the 25-year period. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11961909/]

        Within the observation period, the general recidivism and sexual recidivism rates were 33.1% and 16.5%, respectively, and the sexual contact recidivism rate was 4.7%. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306624X231165416 - this paper says that suppressing the sex drive with medication was the most successful treatment]

        Men with deviant sexual behavior, or paraphilia, are usually treated with psychotherapy, antidepressant drugs, progestins, and antiandrogens, but these treatments are often ineffective. Selective inhibition of pituitary–gonadal function with a long-acting agonist analogue of gonadotropin-releasing hormone may abolish the deviant sexual behavior by reducing testosterone secretion. [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199802123380702 - this paper supports that lowering testosterone works best]

        • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
          15·
          3 months ago

          Thank you for such a well laid out response and the research to back it up. I rarely see people approaching the subjects of pedophilia, and how best to treat pedophiles, rationally and analytically.

          It’s understandable considering the harm they can cause to society that most can only ever view them as nothing more or less than monsters, and indeed, those that are incapable of comprehending the harm they cause and empathizing with those they could potentially cause or have caused harm to, are IMHO some of the more loathsome individuals.

          That said, I think too often people are willing to paint others whose proclivities are so alien and antithetical to our own as not only monsters, but monsters that aren’t worth understanding with any degree of nuance, that we ultimately do ourselves and future generations a disservice by not at least attempting to address the issue at hand in the hopes that the most harmful parts of our collective psyche are treated palliatively to the best of our ability.

          Your annotated sources indicate that there is not nearly as clear a path forward as detractors to the “pedophiles are simply monsters and there’s no reason to look into their motives further” would like to believe, while also, by the nature of the existence of the attempted treatments themselves, points out that there is more work to be done to hopefully find a more lasting and successful rate of treatment.

          Like many of the psychological ailments plagueing societies today, you cannot simply kill and imprison the problem away. That is always a short term (albeit at times temporarily effective) solution. The solution to the problem of how to greatly reduce the occurrence of pedophilia will ultimately require more of this kind of research and will require more analysis and study towards achieving such ends.

          Again, I thank you for your nuanced post, and commend you for taking your nuanced stance as well.

          • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            6·
            3 months ago

            For people actually abusing? Spot on, most of the time.

            For non-offending paedos? Nah… a horrible affliction.

          • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
            21·
            3 months ago

            Not always. There are people with brain injuries who suddenly develop an attraction towards kids and it’s not really due to power dynamics or anything else.

        • LustyArgonian@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          3 months ago

          I don’t understand why we haven’t used inhalable oxytocin as an experimental drug for people attracted to children and animals. It seems intuitive- children and animals generate oxytocin for humans automatically, and it’s possible some people need a stronger stimulus to release oxytocin or may not have a lot of oxytocin endogenously. Oxytocin can be compounded at a pharmacy and has been used successfully for social anxiety.

      • treefrog@lemm.ee
        42·
        3 months ago

        Depending on the state, yes actually.

        I did time in a medium security facility that also did sex offender treatment (I was there on drug charges). I still have friends that went through that program.

        The men who were actually invested in getting better, got better. The ones invested in staying well, are still well.

          • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            520·
            3 months ago

            You don’t think that reducing testosterone and therefore sex drive will change offending rates? That is contrary to research which has reliably found that this is the best therapy, in terms of effectiveness on recidivism.

            • macniel@feddit.org
              221·
              3 months ago

              That guy didn’t even commit anything just having AI imagery depicting children.

              That guy has a mental problem that you can’t only treat by chemical castration. He needs more than that.

              • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                514·
                3 months ago

                That does not change the fact that chemical castration is the most successful treatment we have to stop CSA recidivism at present.

                 

                That guy didn’t even commit anything just having AI imagery depicting children.

                Possessing and distributing images that sexually objectify children may be a crime, even if generated by AI.

            • Farid@startrek.website
              10·
              3 months ago

              Cutting off their testicles and straight up executing them would also reduce the offending rates. Even more effectively than chemical castration, I’m sure. But we wouldn’t be calling that helping the offender, would we? And the comment above was specifically talking about helping them.
              What we have now is more of a best middle ground between the amount of damage caused to the patient and safety guarantees for the society. We obviously prioritize safety for the society, but we should be striving for less damage to the patient, too.

              • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                34·
                3 months ago

                …we should be striving for less damage to the patient, too.

                Can you make someone just not sexually interested in something they find arousing? As far as I know, conversion therapy for non-heterosexual people doesn’t have good success rates. Also, those therapies also tended to involve some form of harm, from what I’ve heard.

                • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
                  4·
                  3 months ago

                  It’s not about making someone want something, less, but helping them to never act on those needs.

                  Computer generated imagery could in theory be helpful, so the itch gets scratched without creating victims and criminals.

                  I’d call that a win-win in terms of societal well being, as also less funds are wasted on police work, jailing a perpetrator, and therapy for victim.

                  • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                    14·
                    3 months ago

                    Computer generated imagery could in theory be helpful, so the itch gets scratched

                    The Freudian concept of catharsis has been debunked many, many times. Does rape go down when freely available internet porn go up? That’s a rhetorical question, goodbye.

                • Farid@startrek.website
                  4·
                  3 months ago

                  Can you make someone just not sexually interested in something they find arousing?

                  No, I can’t. Doesn’t mean that we (as a society) shouldn’t be working on finding ways to do it or finding alternative solutions. And it’s necessary to acknowledge that what we have now is not good enough.

                  those therapies also tended to involve some form of harm

                  They probably did. But nobody here is claiming those were good or helping the patients either.