@KarlHeinzHasliP @cygnathreadbare @cstross
That's only a problem if you're using it that way, the problem is that it's good at the other way.
The reason CSAM is banned is that we, as a society, think that sexually abusing children is bad and we know enough about markets to understand that demand for this material will cause people to produce it.
The reason for banning the fake kind is more complex. The bans on fictional images (ones that weren't created with child abuse) are because it's easy to get caught with CSAM and say 'oh, these aren't real photos, they were made by this great artist / tool / whatever'. And then the prosecutors need to trace the provenance and prove that, no, really, children were abused to create this.
The fact that you can do manga -> photorealistic transitions is not a problem, it's just another way that you can generate illegal material. If you do, and you are caught, there are already legal penalties. And the simple solution to this is: don't.
The problem is that people can take things that were produced by abusing real children and run the model in the other direction to get manga. And then they can claim that it was drawn by a human artist and no children were actually harmed. And now we're back in the same situation that we were with photorealistic child-abuse 'art'. And that may lead to the Spanish decision being reversed. And you can then run a model in the manga -> photorealistic direction on demand, leaving no trace of the fact that you were looking at something that's close to the original image.
'We built a machine for laundering CSAM' is very on-brand for 2026 techbros.
