They do. The likenesses of actual, real children are an extension of their person, and typically they can’t consent to the production and distribution of sexualized portrayals of that likeness.
This argument/line of reasoning cannot be extended to materials which depict nonexistent children, since those are not actually ‘persons’ with rights and liberties. Some like to conflate the two, arguing that the sexualization of even fictional children harms real children, but this isn’t true.
People have drawn a line between a fiction and reality, and spaces which allow virtual/fictional depictions are very much vigilant against depictions that are based on or implicate the rights (and likenesses) of actual minors in any way.
I don’t think it does, I think it’s exactly the type of precedent we need because it specifically focuses on the likenesses of actual, real-world children, by way of direct appropriation of their identifiable likenesses and characteristics which are intrinsic to their actual, physical person.
With AI, though, the “line” is never quite so clear.
The image I posted above wasn’t based on any specific child. But it was based on hundreds or thousands of images of real children on the web who resembled the instructions I provided to the AI and which the AI accessed to create that image. Any time an AI creates an image of a fictional person, it will use images of real people as its reference.
Hypothetically, supposing someone found an image of a real child on the web, then used reverse image search to find a hundred more images of real children which resembled that one. Then they used that collection of a hundred images to train their AI to spit out images which weren’t exactly based on any one of those real-life minors, but at the same time, sort of based on all of them. Would that cross the “line?” How about if only ten such images were used to train this hypothetical AI? How about five? Two?
So if a MAP went to a web site and downloaded what by all appearance was a pen-and-ink, X-rated manga image, and they then got convicted on the basis that the image was originally of a real-life, fully-clothed child, AI-manipulated to appear naked and engaged in sexually explicit conduct, and as a final step, processed to appear like a manga-style drawing, you’d consider that “the type of precedent we need?”
