It's only illegal if the law is actually enforced. Thankfully, due to MeToo, revenge porn gets way more of a response from the law than it did.

That is not currently the case in any meaningful way with image generators being used to make CSAM, which is why it's important that the companies themselves be held liable. Grok still lets you do this if you buy a sub. Copilot lets you do this and Microsoft knows it, per recent leaks from their prompt reviewers. Meta runs ads for CSAM on Facebook.

In this case, multiple tech companies are knowingly enabling these crimes without a peep from the law to stop them. (At least in the US.)

Yeah, this is nothing like certain drawings or "this fictional character is 15", AI image generators construct this shit from images of actual children. Anyone attempting to defend this only wants to use arts as a shield for exploitation of actual, living kids

Artificial CSAM is constructed from real CSAM,

I would not be that sure. 30 years ago it was possible to create photorealistics images with renderes (ok, you needed days of rendering probably)

It was possible to create fake xxx images combining the image of the face of a person (famous actor/actress, common guy/girl) with a body from a image scanned from a xxx magazine in a way that it looks like an original image (there were entire subgroups on Usenet dedicated to this).

I bet any decent AI image creator could now do way better than what was done by hand 30 years ago.

to the point that real CSAM victims have sued people who generated material resembling the victim.

Also nothing new. Do you know the origin of the "Every protagonists of this story is a finctional charaters and [blah, blah blah]" you see at the end of every movie ? Basically same problem you cite.

No, it's not necessarily constructed from real CSAM. It can be constructed from real photos of children and real porn.

Anyway, when saying that someone should be jailed, you should consider all the main possibilities.

EDIT: And when you have real porn with adults, hentai with supposed adults and anime with children, that might be good enough to generate something that's technically like generated CSAM, even if the quality might not be too good. Anyway, I'm not very well-versed on quality of CSAM.

You mean like the right to not have your likeness fed into an algorithm and assembled into pornographic content without your consent?

What you are describing here is just a sexual fantasy.
It could be debatable that someone cannot imagine to have sex with the hot actress of the day (or the hot colleague) or to create a fake nude image of her to fantasize on, without harming in any way the object of his fantasy.

Or does having your image laundered by an LLM somehow magically make that ok?

It depends. How do you consider a personal sexual fantasy involving other people ?

That said, since the problem is the CSAM image in itself, as it should be, punish who create and distribute the images (like the real ones), not the platform/tool used to create them.
Else you should also punish who build the camera used to take the real images, don't you think ? (btw, you would never be able to punish someone who draw a CSAM image and keep it for itself, like you would be never be able to punish who create a fake image of the hot actress and keep it for itself, without violating his privacy)

Why necessarily "your likeness"? And honestly yes, everyone has the right to draw whatever they want, just presenting it as real or using for bullying campaigns should be a crime.

Because those are crossing someone's personal borders, while doing something that doesn't concern them at all - is not.