Hello everyone!

I wanted to start this off by saying thank you so much to each and every one of you who has helped this petition cross the 50 signatures milestone! That is huge, and I think its a big sign that this petition actually resonates with a lot of people. Especially parents - I have found parents to be one of my largest demographics and I have to say I really appreciate that, and I think that makes sense ultimately. Not that regular folks can't or don't care about children - but something about becoming a parent really changes how you see the world - your children are your everything, and you would do anything you can to make the world a better, safer place for them. And I think most parents extend that unconditional love to other people's children too, as I and many others believe we should all watch out for each other's children. They are our future, they are our hope, they are the sweetest and most innocent and most sacred among us. And these issues I am talking about, this really dark and disturbing subject matter - It is really such a bigger and more widespread issue than most people realize. And I don't just mean AI generated CP, I mean just classic pedophilia/grooming/predatory behavior in general.

There are so, so many people (mostly men I would say) that simply do not care about the age of consent. Like... at all. It means nothing to them. There are a lot of people who are so totally driven by lust, inner desire, and their id as Sigmund Freud called it, that the idea of whether or not someone is 15 or 18 holds no bearing on them. They simply don't see it as wrong. They let their primal urges take the wheel rather than leading with logic, reason, compassion, and empathy. And to be honest, this specific phenomenon is a big reason why we have so many problems in the world in general, not just pedophilia, but violence, and greed, and anger, and jealousy, and so forth. But I digress. This petition is about predatory behavior, and specifically that kind of behavior as it pertains to AI, so that is where I will keep the focus.

Sigmund Freud describes the id as the "instinctual, primal part, focused on immediate gratification and pleasure." So many people lack self-awareness, lack any kind of critical thought unfortunately. Psychology Today estimates that approximately 30-50% of people do not have a constant, or even frequent, inner monologue. While many people experience an ongoing inner voice or dialogue, a significant portion of the population does not, or does so infrequently. Psychology Today says some individuals may process information using visual imagery instead of internal words. 

Isn't that terrifying? When you are driving in your car, on the way home from work, or in the checkout line in the store, or talking with people online, or sitting next to someone at a movie theater, statistically anywhere from a third to even half of those people have no present, internal thoughts keeping them grounded. The engine is running but there is no one behind the wheel. They are kind of just out there "doing". And I think we have all met people like that. So that leads me into kind of what I wanted to discuss today.

As for the focal point of this update, I wanted to talk about a recent headline that has been swirling around the news, and its something I think is really worth talking about. This is also kind of a cultural phenomenon that has occurred many, many times before this instance - but since this is the most recent, I will talk about this one. Basically what I am alluding to is the scenario where a young, attractive, popular celebrity (usually female) is closing in on their 18th birthday. A lot of the times you will see these sick, perverted people online posting countdown clocks, counting down the time until she is "legal". And then its some sort of big celebration for these people, essentially they are now openly and publicly allowed to voice their attraction to this individual without fear of repercussion. So what exactly is this implying? Well, to me, this is saying that these people have, likely for several years, been attracted to a minor and felt that keeping it hush-hush was in their best interest. They followed this celebrity while they were 15, then 16, then 17, and so on...

So the recent example I wanted to cite was a singer named "Lil Tay". I am not familiar with her work at all, but I know that she is very popular, and this same situation was happening to her as she closed in on her 18th birthday (she has been famous for several years now, since she was actually pretty young, like 9 or 10). Well, the minute she turned 18, at 12:01 am on her birth day, she released her OnlyFans account. If you are unfamiliar with OnlyFans, it is basically a social media app that lets you post pictures (generally explicit, adult content) locked behind a paywall, and anyone can do it, so it essentially has turned a ton of people, especially struggling younger women, into amateur adult film stars for pennies on the dollar. Well in this case, apparently Lil Tay had "pre-orders" for this lined up for a very long time in advance. And at 12:01am, a minute into her 18th birthday, her OnlyFans went up live with adult content of her. I am assuming sexually-charged images, maybe videos, I am not sure. But I also raise the question of "Is it truly possible she created all of that within 1 minute of being 18? Or are these photos taken from previous days of her as a 17 year old?"

Well, within 3 hours she broke some kind of OnlyFans record and raised over $1 million dollars.

Think about how deplorable that is for a second. 

There were so many people out there lining up to see this barely legal 18 year old girl that she made over $1 million dollars within a few hours of launching it. And by my guess, a vast majority of the people who paid for that kind of trash have been attracted to her long before she was 18. So what does that tell you? We have an absolute, catastrophic, apocalyptic epidemic of closeted predators running rampant around the world. And there is so little that any of us can do about it until they reveal themselves. Because we can't know what they are thinking until they act on it. And we can't police "thoughtcrime", its not Orwell's "1984", its not illegal for them to have these thoughts, however perverse and disgusting and reprehensible. So there is nothing we can do about it until they either act out their desires on a real physical child, or turn to something we can track like child p***.

And so this loops me back into the purpose of this petition. I believe that in the age of AI, the way things are moving, these people will have a significantly easier time getting access to the kind of material that feeds their desires. Last update I shared a post from the Internet Watch Forum describing how we are only probably a year or so off from having full, feature-length, AI generated CP. And just judging by how impressive and convincing some of the AI memes and things like that I see online are, I would give a ball-park estimate that we are only a few years off AI being virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. So that means these predators will have full, uncensored access to this stuff if they can manage to do it in secret. And they won't have to kidnap children to do it, they can hide at playgrounds and take pictures of kids - your kids - whoever they find attractive that day, then go home and use their AI to generate videos of your children doing whatever they fancy that day. 

Folks, this is not hyperbole. This is not fear-mongering. I promise you, this is actually going to happen and we really aren't that far away from it. Like, not far away at all. As in, this can probably already be done right now to a lesser extent, that's how advanced this technology is. Think about where we will be in a few years.

This is why I started this petition. Because this absolutely scares the shit out of me, and if you love and care about children, this should scare you too.

All they need is samples of your child's voice from a Facebook video you posted, and they can now replicate an AI copy of your child and speak to them and say/do whatever they want. This is not fear-mongering. Think about the people who signed up for Lil Tay's OnlyFans ^ the millions of people who did so and it meant nothing to them. These people do not care about you, they do not care about your child, they don't respect laws, or rules, or morals, or ethics, they have nothing to lose, they only care about self-serving their twisted desires and receiving immediate gratification. 

The concept of morality means nothing to these people; they exist purely to consume anything and everything they can, and satiate the bottomless pit that lives where their soul should be.

And so I say to you, good people reading these - please, we need so desperately to spread this message as far as the eye can see. We need normal, sane people like you to understand this risk and petition our lawmakers and AI companies to do more. If nothing is done, it is going to get so much worse before it starts getting better. Let's not wait for AI Child Robots to come out before we start acting. Let's act now. Let's get preventative measures in place, and extremely strict laws in place, so that exploitation of AI children is treated each and every bit as harshly as exploitation of real, human children. While yes, there is a difference, one is still a slippery slope to the other. Someone exploiting AI children means that person so desperately wants to act this out on a real child - but can't, and they know that, and so they are turning to something fake to fulfill their sick fantasies. But I say again, children are NOT fantasies. They are not toys. They are not objects for adult's amusement.

If we cannot come together as a society and agree that children are the absolute most precious thing among us, and we must punish anyone who seeks to hurt them, then we are truly lost and civilization as we know it is dead.

So I will end with this. One of my favorite quotes of all time, by none other than the legendary J.R.R. Tolkien.

“Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good.”

Children are made by the forces of good. They are made of love, and innocence, and kindness. Some of you may be religious, and so you know that they are made in God's image and blessed with his purity and light. This evil that we fight against, this predatory AI, it cannot create a child of its own. Never believe, even for a second, that an AI child is an entirely new creation. It is a twisted amalgamation of bits and pieces of other children. That's how AI works, that's how it creates pictures of faces, and cars, and trees. It uses existing pictures and extrapolates what things "should" look like, and fills in the blanks. It doesn't create anything "new". It twists and contorts, and in the case of children, destroys. By nature it destroys the purity of what it means to be child-like. It is a bastardization of the most beautiful thing we have in our world. And this is why I feel so strongly about it and feel that it must be fought and opposed every chance we get.

If you have read this far, I wanted to thank you so much for everything. If you did actually read all the way to the bottom, that would be cool if you emailed me to let me know, I am curious how many people actually read these (and who). If you want to reach out to me directly anyways, shoot me over an email to mthibodeau1999@gmail.com and I would be happy to discuss any of this further with you :-)

Take care everyone! Thank you for all that you have done for me. Thank you for signing my petition and helping us get to 50 signatures! Next stop is 100, and then we are really cooking! Have a great rest of your day!