Federal judge rules AI-generated child sex abuse material is protected under First Amendment

[Unredacted]

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/natio ... 87dc0ba58f

A federal appeals judge in Wisconsin ruled on Tuesday the First Amendment protects a person’s right to privately possess child sexual abuse material created using artificial intelligence as long as the material does not depict a real person and remains in the home.

Along with his ruling, Judge John Z. Lee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit for the Western District of Wisconsin also expressed concerns that "evolving technology complicates the lines drawn" in laws and rulings on this topic.

Tuesday's decision revolved around the May 2024 arrest of Steven Anderegg. The Justice Department brought charges against him, alleging he used an AI image generator to create thousands of explicit images of minors. The DoJ also accused him of communicating with a 15-year-old boy and sending him these images.

Anderegg filed a motion to have the possession and production charges dismissed under the First Amendment. Last year, a judge in the Western District of Wisconsin agreed to dismiss the possession charge, ruling that the federal statute prohibiting a person from possessing virtual child sexual abuse material violated the First Amendment.

The other charges remain.

In his ruling upholding the appeals court's decision, Lee cited two previous Supreme Court rulings from 1969 and 2002.

In Stanley v. Georgia (1969), the ruling said people have a constitutional right to possess obscene material in the privacy of their own homes.

The other, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002), found that content that "appears to be" and "conveys the impression" of being child sexual abuse material is protected under the First Amendment.

Lee urged the Supreme Court to reconsider the issue of virtual abuse material of children in the age of AI.

"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," he wrote in his opinion. "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."

Full court ruling:

• https://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/ ... 597567:S:0