Wisconsin man's AI child porn possession charge dropped by U.S. appeals court

A U.S. appeals court upheld dropping a possession charge against a Wisconsin man for AI-generated child sexual abuse material, citing First Amendment protections.

U.S. appeals court dismisses AI child porn possession charge against Wisconsin man

A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court's decision to drop a child sexual abuse material (CSAM) possession charge against a Wisconsin man, ruling that AI-generated images depicting minors do not constitute a prosecutable offence under existing law, Toronto Sun Crime reports.

Steven Anderegg, of Wisconsin, was charged in May 2024 after U.S. Justice Department officials alleged he produced, distributed, and possessed obscene visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct using generative AI. He was also accused of transferring obscene material to a minor under the age of 16 via Instagram.

Authorities alleged Anderegg messaged a 15-year-old boy on the platform, describing how he had created thousands of child sexual abuse images using Stable Diffusion, an AI image generator, by converting text prompts into hyper-realistic depictions of prepubescent children engaged in sexually explicit acts.

A lower-court judge dropped the possession charge based on a prior Supreme Court ruling, prompting the Justice Department to appeal. The appeals court upheld that dismissal in a decision dated August 25, while leaving the three remaining charges — production, distribution, and transfer of obscene material to a minor — intact.

The appeals court judges ruled that the First Amendment protects an individual's right to possess obscenity in the privacy of their home. Because the images were AI-generated and involved no actual children, the court determined there were no identifiable victims, and therefore the government's interest in protecting children from exploitation did not apply.

"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," the ruling stated. "This case illuminates how this evolving technology complicates the lines drawn by the Supreme Court."

The judges pointed to a 2002 Supreme Court decision — Free Speech Coalition — in which the court ruled that law enforcement could not prosecute individuals for possessing CSAM involving fictional victims that is not deemed obscene. The appeals court acknowledged the limitations of applying that precedent to today's technology.

"Indeed, in Free Speech Coalition, the Supreme Court addressed the scope of First Amendment protections for virtual CSAM, but that was nearly 25 years ago and the image-generation technology available today was likely unimaginable back then," the ruling stated. "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."

The judges also attributed their ruling in part to the constraints imposed by that earlier Supreme Court decision, noting that the court itself — not the lower judiciary — would need to revisit those boundaries in light of technological advances.

Source: Toronto Sun Crime