I don’t know about Y’all, but sometimes I read the news and I feel like we are living in the freakin’ Twilight Zone where all kinds of horrors are being normalized.
Now, before I go any deeper into this nightmare that discusses children and AI-generated pornographic images of sexual violence, I need to issue a warning:** If you are a survivor or if you just don’t need this evil shit on your spirit, this is a perfectly good place for you to say, “Not today, Satan,” and just stop reading right now. **Because I promise you, by the end of this piece you are gonna need some brain bleach.
Last night, one of my editors texted me a news story under the following headline: Federal judge rules that AI-generated child sex abuse material is protected under the First Amendment.
WTF?!!!
My stomach dropped as I read that headline again and again and my brain kept refusing to arrange those words into a sentence. How is it possible that this combination of words, AI-generated, child sexual abuse, protected, and First Amendment, can possibly exist in a so-called civilized society that claims to care about the welfare of its most vulnerable population?
What kind of creepy fuckin’ monsters can actually fix their imagination to sit at a computer and use AI to create photorealistic images and videos of children being tortured and sexually degraded for pleasure?
And not only that, we have arrived at a moment in this country when there’s a *serious legal question *about whether possessing such images in the privacy of your home is a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT. I want to vomit after writing that last sentence, Y’all.
The news tells us that a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago that oversees cases from Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana, has ruled that the government cannot criminalize the private, in-home possession of AI-generated sexual abuse of children when no actual child’s body was used to create them. Y’all, this is basically the technological version of a very familiar disclaimer we’ve all heard: “No child was harmed in the making of this video.”
That is where the court landed, even though the judge expressed “misgivings” about reaching that result and basically said his hands were tied because he was duty-bound to follow a 25-year-old Supreme Court precedent. M’kay, so let me take a minute to explain that precedent and how the hell we got here without getting Y’all lost in the constitutional legalese
So, back in 1969 there was a Supreme Court case, Stanley v. Georgia. The cops had a warrant to search Robert Stanley’s home for evidence that he was engaged in bookmaking (illegal lottery or numbers running) and they found some 8mm dirty films in his bedroom. Georgia prosecuted him for possessing obscene material, which did not include pornographic images of children.
His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Stanley’s favor.
At first, I was shocked to see that Thurgood Marshall wrote the SCOTUS opinion that overturned Stanley’s conviction. In his opinion, he said that the yes, the government can regulate obscenity but it has no business coming inside your house to police what’s inside your head or what you read or watch in private. But then I had to pause and ask: what did Justice Marshall think he was protecting in 1969? It wasn’t child porn.
When you think about it, Marshall’s reasoning was actually civil-libertarian and understandable because it was 1969 and this was a Black man who had spent his career confronting a state that had incessantly surveilled civil-rights organizations, routinely invaded our spaces, and criminalized Black folks. So of course Marshall’s instinct was to argue that we don’t want to give the government even more power to police people’s private thoughts and the contents of their home library.
Okay, so now let’s flash forward a couple of decades to another case, *Osborne v. Ohio. *Here’s what happened. In 1984, the Columbus police found nude photos of an adolescent boy in Clyde Osborne’s home. Under state law, possessing sexually explicit images of minors was illegal. But Osborne argued that he was protected under the Stanley v. Georgia precedent. But this time the Supreme Court said no.
Why?
The Court said the Stanley case involved adults, and argued that Ohio was trying to protect children from the industry that was producing illicit material. The court also cited three forms of harm. First, it argued that the possession of child porn created demand and so punishing possession helps to destroy the marketplace of desire and eliminate the exploitation of children “at all levels in the distribution chain.”
The Court also argued that a pornographic image of a child keeps harming them even after the camera stops recording the moment. Their abuse is permanently recorded and their continued existence and circulation of the child’s violation can be seen again and again and cause ongoing psychological harm even if they are never touched again.
The Court also drew on research showing that pornographic material helped perps seduce and groom new child victims into sexual activity. So in other words, the Court was trying to tell folks back in the 90s to not just look at a singular moment of production. Look at the whole damn ecosystem surrounding the image! Consider everything. The production. The possession. The market demand and circulation. Consider the child victim’s ongoing trauma. Think about how the accessibility of these images can lead to more child exploitation and even its potential normalization.
Now come forward to 2002. There’s another Supreme Court decision, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.
In this case, the Court struck down portions of a federal law that prohibited “virtual” child pornography. These are computer-generated sexual images that depict children but weren’t produced by sexually abusing real children. And we heard warnings that child porn could be used to groom kids and feed a sexual marketplace. Once again, we were warned that the circulation of this material could make it harder to prosecute real child porn cases because the perps could claim the children were computer-generated.** **But the Court still ruled that those potential harms were too indirect to justify such a sweeping restriction on protected speech.
Okay, Y’all got all that history straight?
Now, it’s 2026. Enter AI and United States v. Anderegg.
A software engineer named Steven Anderegg, installed Stable Diffusion on his personal laptop and used carefully engineered prompts to manufacture hundreds of photorealistic sexual images of prepubescent children having sex with adults. He then used an Instagram account to send them to a real minor. Meta reported him to the authorities and he was charged with producing and distributing porn and transferring it to a minor.
But this sick m’fker challenged the possession charge. And guess what? He won! He won, Y’all.
How the hell was this possible?
Because we had nearly 60 sixty years of Supreme Court precedent that created a bizarre-ass legal equation: You have a right to possess dirty material in the privacy of your home. And yes, despite the fact that actual child pornography can be criminalized when real children’s bodies were abused to make it, SCOTUS has said virtual child porn is different because no actual child was abused during its creation.
And here we are today, with the Seventh Circuit acknowledging that today’s AI technology can create images of sexually abused children that are “virtually indistinguishable” from images documenting the abuse of actual children. We know this technology can manufacture an unlimited supply of synthetic children whose entire reason for existing is to be sexually violated for pleasure, but we can’t do shit about it because SCOTUS tied our hands and only SCOTUS can redraw the lines to keep up with the technology.
Take a deep breath with me and let’s set aside the law for a sec. I need Y’all to imagine some nightmare scenarios about the potential consequences of this evil shit.
Let’s imagine . . .
Say you post a photo of your five-year-old son or daughter smiling and excited for their first day of kindergarten. And some creepy demon 3600 miles away from you is scrolling the app and takes a screenshot of that innocent photo. And then he or she feeds your child’s sweet face into some AI software and gives it all kinds of fucked up prompts.
Thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .
And then BOOM, a short while later, there are not photorealistic images of YOUR child being sexually abused. No, your child was never physically touched. But tell me, mama, daddy . . . Was your child harmed?
Now, imagine your child is now 16 years old. Somehow a classmate gets the video. And that classmate shares it with one person. And now that video is circulating through then entire school. The video gets sent to your child! Your child sees that shit and knows the body isn’t hers, isn’t his. But the face, the face is unmistakeably theirs.
Tell me, mama, tell me daddy . . . is your child harmed now?
Listen, I need Y’all to understand that this isn’t some hypothetical technology because the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says real children are already being victimized through AI-generated sexual imagery with actual “nudify” apps, and known victims of child sexual abuse material are being revictimized by having existing images manipulated into new abusive content. They reported that between 2024 and 2025, more than 275 direct victims of generative-AI CSAM were identified, and law enforcement agencies are having their resources drained trying to investigate these cases.
Let’s imagine that you are a detective looking at thousands of images on a hard drive you’ve seized during a search. You see a child crying and screaming while being violated. Now you gotta sit there, squinting your eyes, and ask: Is this child real? Is this child synthetic? Is this child’s face real and the body synthetic? Is this whole damn image artificial? Or is some evil-ass monster out there telling you that it is AI-generated while somewhere, right now, a real child needs to be rescued? Or am I gonna be spending endless hours searching for a child that does not exist?
At the end of the day, I vehemently reject the argument that “no real child was harmed in the production of this material.” Because children are harmed by the * ecosystem*. As an historian, I have studied the history of child pornography and what I have learned over the years is that images circulate inside cultures, they create a marketplace of sexual desire, they help construct people’s fantasies, and they assign meanings to certain bodies. The AI technology may be new, but America has been here before.
In my forthcoming book, * Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children*, which is about to drop on October 6, I have a whole chapter on the history of racialized pedophilic pornography and its intersection with the lynching of Black children. There was a whole racist and sexualized visual culture surrounding Black childhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. White artists and publishing companies produced colorful picture postcards and other commercial imagery of Black children being pornified.
Here’s a journal article I wrote about how white consumers bought, mailed, collected and laughed at images of Black children engaged in oral sex, anal sex, dendrophilia (sex with trees), zoophilia (sex with animals), coprophilia/scat (sexual fixation with feces), urophilia/urophagia (sexual fixation with urine), fetishistic spanking, voyeurism, masturbation, prostitution, and sexual humiliation. These were all hardcore explicit pornographic themes projected onto Black children in an earlier visual medium that was a new technology at the time.
And while that sick shit was circulating in the marketplace and being trafficked through the country’s mail system, pediatric journals were subjecting Black children’s bodies to invasive racial scrutiny. White doctors were examining Black children’s genitals and describing them in lurid detail. You can see doctors writing commentary about how Black boys had oversized genitals and Black girls had “abnormally thick and resistant” hymens. All this to construct a racist argument that Black children were prematurely sexual and dangerous sexual threats, not worth protecting from sexual violation, and should be sterilized, or lynched.
Meanwhile, beyond the doctor’s office and the postcard rack at a train depot or store, white mobs were lynching Black children, castrating Black youth, and passing their genitals around sadistic crowds in handkerchiefs and preserving them in jars as enjoyable keepsakes.
So don’t tell me that technology is not separate from these worlds because visual representation and commodification teaches people whose bodies are available for violation, what kinds of violence are imaginable, and which kinds of atrocities can be transformed into ordinary culture. The racist pedophilic postcards I just told you about continue to circulate to this day under the labels “Black Americana” and “Black Memorabilia.” The sexual violation of Black children became so normalized that it eventually became valuable historical ephemera that you can purchase on ebay and other vintage sites.
The technology has changed but the human appetite for domination, especially of children, has not. ** Think about those late 19th and early 20th century pedophilic drawings of Black children who were frozen in somebody’s sick imagination and racist vision and economy of pleasure. Now, think about all the sexually abused children being generated by AI at infinite scale, downloaded and filed in machines. **
Now, I want you to think about your son or your daughter.
Picture them.
Imagine that like those pornified children of the past and those who are being generated by AI, could never age. Can’t escape this visual predation. Can’t say no. Can’t ever reclaim ownership over their body. Imagine that you could never rescue your child or do anything to protect them from some perp’s, or even millions of perp’s pedophilic gaze. And all the while, the country’s legal apparatus is being feckless AF and treating all this commodified evil material like the damage won’t remain inside the picture, and like it is all some just interesting First Amendment puzzle they can’t urgently solve.
But hey, this is America. I’m not surprised that this country keeps asking whether a “real” child was harmed in the production of pornography. I’m not surprised that we’re a country that keeps mass producing child porn and trying to convince itself that the harm ends at the edge of the frame while denying that people first learn how to abuse children in their imagination, pictures, jokes, and the marketplace.
I’ve learned from the archives that this is a country that has never truly given a genuine damn about children despite how much it lies to itself. All these dirty pictures, the one of yore and the ones being generated by computers, actually reveals the truth about what this country is willing to do to a child.
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