Marketplace wrote about Texas drafting special laws to prohibit child pornography that’s supposedly worrying anime/manga fans, but one of the interviewees here is a business that’s unqualified for comment:
As artificial intelligence tools have rapidly improved in recent years, so have the quality and realistic nature of the images and videos they can be used to generate. But child protection advocates warn those tools are also being used in criminal or dangerous ways — to create child pornography. Texas just put a new law on the books aimed at criminalizing the use of AI tools in this way. But a potential side effect of this attempt to protect Texas kids has some free speech advocates and Texas businesses worried about the impact.
“(Texas Senate Bill 20) prohibits the possession or access or creation of essentially, child pornography, but that also includes images created by AI or computers or even cartoon images,” said Steven Collis, who teaches first amendment law at the University of Texas at Austin. The bill, which Governor Greg Abbott signed into law over the weekend, makes such an offense a state felony.
“That reference to a cartoon or animation is what got a lot of people in the comics community concerned,” said Jeff Trexler, interim director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “Specifically in anime and manga, because they’ve often been targeted for their, for some mangas and some animals, representations of characters that appear to be minors, often not minors, but have that appearance of minors.”
Let me get this straight. A company that’s been advocating for forcing content unsuitable for minors into school libraries is claiming to speak for comicdom? Sigh. I’m sorry, but anybody who’s going to defend indoctrination and exposing children to products that aren’t suitable for minors has no business making this argument. The CBDLF is long outmoded, and nobody in comicdom needs such a service to represent their legal issues.
And there are characters in manga that, not only look like minors, they were created/written as minors. It could even be those characterized as 13-14 years old. So I think Mr. Trexler would do well to cite specific examples before lecturing everybody, and besides, manga does have its share of stories that are embarrassments, morally or otherwise.
Originally published here
Avi Green
Avi Green was born in Pennsylvania, and moved to Israel at the age of 9. His first comic was the Fantastic Four. He considers himself a conservative-style version of Clark Kent, and his blog the Four Color Media Monitor is where he says "if we're going to try and stop the misuse of our favorite comics and their protagonists by the companies that write and publish them, we've got to see what both the printed and online comics news is doing wrong." His blog focuses on both the good and the bad, the newspaper media and the online websites. Unabashedly. Unapologetically. Scanning the media for what's being done right and what's being done wrong. Follow him on X @AviGreen1
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