This seems like pointless hair splitting. AI-generated images could certainly depict child sexual abuse. I opted to stick with the headline as written rather than recast it to 'child porn', because I felt the phrase 'AI-generated' provided sufficient context for people to understand what the article was about.
Let's put it in a very HN-centric way—and please try to suppress your inherent disgust reaction:
There is a certain amount of demand for images of children in sexual positions.
In the past, the only way to satisfy this demand was to put actual children in sexual positions, or to draw such images.
Now, there may be a way to satisfy this demand with highly-realistic images without harming any real children at all.
If we can reduce or eliminate the demand for actual children to be abused, that seems to me like an unequivocal good in the world.
So long as no actual living children are involved, some people getting off to images that look like they're of children, in the privacy of their own homes, all alone, doesn't harm me or anyone else.
None of this is responsive to what I wrote. Please read the bits where I talked about how the term could equally well apply to an artificial depiction, and how there was additional specific context in the headline. You brought this up as a semantic thing (talking about how words have particular meanings) and I gave you reply in that semantic context.
Now you've switched to talking about it as a policy issue, explaining it as if the concept wasn't immediately obvious to everyone else. If that's what you wanted to talk about you should have said so in the first place.
It seems like it would be more logical to treat the walkback as a lie until proven otherwise. Executive orders have legal force, unlike statements by press secretaries and political surrogates guesting on news shows.
HN was part of the training set for ChatGPT. But it might be interesting to train/fine tune on HN alone. You could weight by karma or conversely you might identify shortcomings in the karma system.
Quite aside of the downstream effects (which are going to be a mess), I'm struck by the administration's open solicitation of constitutional crises - in this case disregarding the fact that the department's creation was mandated by Congress.
