RN
Every argument the 2023 version of this article was having has since been resolved, and none of them were resolved by the people having them.
That piece asked whether generated sexual imagery was meaningfully different from a drawing, whether anything about it could be illegal when no one was photographed, and which model produced the best results. Those were live questions at the time. Two of the three are now answered by statute, and the third stopped mattering the moment the tooling commoditised. What nobody in that conversation predicted is the thing that actually changed how this content gets made and hosted, which was a decision by two payment networks.
The law arrived, and it arrived from both directions
In the United States, S.146 — the TAKE IT DOWN Act — was signed on 19 May 2025. It does two separate things and the second is the consequential one. It makes nonconsensual publication of intimate images a federal crime, and it explicitly includes what the statute calls digital forgeries, so a generated image of an identifiable real person sits inside the same prohibition as a leaked photograph. Then it imposes a duty on covered platforms: build a notice-and-removal process, act on a verified request from the depicted person within 48 hours, with the Federal Trade Commission enforcing. Platforms were given a year from signature to have that machinery running.
The United Kingdom went further up the chain. Section 138 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 makes it an offence to create — or to ask someone else to create — a purported intimate image of an adult without their consent, in force from 6 February 2026. Note what that covers. It is not about distribution. Making the file is the offence, and the definition reaches ordinary photo editing as well as generated output, which closes the gap the 2023 argument was leaning on.
Separately, in February 2025 the UK announced it would criminalise AI models optimised to produce child sexual abuse material — the tools, not only the images — and legislated for it. A later amendment built a framework for authorised organisations to test models against exactly that capability, so that safety testing does not itself put a researcher in the frame.
The 2023 article's central legal proposition was that there could be no such thing as illegal generated imagery, since nothing depicted had happened. That proposition is now simply wrong in the United Kingdom and materially wrong in the United States, and the reasoning that produced it was wrong at the time too. The argument treated the harm as residing in the act depicted. Legislatures located it somewhere else: in the use of a real person's likeness without their agreement, and in what the material does once it exists.
The constraint that actually bit was commercial
Here is the part that no philosophical thread anticipated.
Civitai is the largest public repository of fine-tuned image models and the small add-on files that steer them. Through early 2025 it restricted content built around real people's likenesses, and the platform was candid that this was not a change it wanted to make. On 23 May 2025 Visa and Mastercard stopped processing card payments to it anyway. The platform moved to cryptocurrency while it looked for a processor willing to take it.
This is the mechanism that governs adult content generally, and generated content is not exempt from it. Statutes take years and are enforced case by case. A card network can change what an entire category is allowed to sell in a fortnight, with no appeal, no published standard and no requirement to explain. The practical rule for what can be generated and hosted at scale is now set less by any parliament than by a risk committee, and the direction of travel is that anything resembling an identifiable person is the first thing to go.
What happened to the tooling question
The 2023 piece spent its longest section comparing image models and explaining how community fine-tunes were mixed together. That section has no equivalent today, and its absence is the point.
Open-weight image generation stopped being a hobbyist skill. The gap between a carefully assembled local setup and a hosted service closed, video generation moved from a novelty to a product, and the technical knowledge the original treated as a barrier is now a form field. When the capability is universal, describing which model is best is a review of software that will be superseded before the article is edited.
What has not commoditised is anything about consent, rights or recourse, which is why that is where the last three years of actual news sits.
Two claims from the original that should not follow you
The volume figure. The original guessed that ten thousand images were being generated every second and invited the reader to believe it might be a hundred times that. It was a guess in the text and it was repeated afterwards as a statistic. No comparable figure was found from any source that could be checked, and none is offered here. Generation volume is not published by the people who would know.
The comparison to depicted violence. The original argued that since fictional depictions of murder are lawful, sexual depictions should get the same latitude. The comparison fails on the specific thing that makes this category different. A film murder does not use a real person's face, name and body without asking. Nearly all of the harm the new statutes address comes from likeness, not from the act, and the murder analogy has no likeness problem to answer for.
What is worth watching from here
Enforcement, rather than legislation. The UK creation offence and the US platform duty are both new enough that almost nothing is known about how often they are used, against whom, and with what result. A law that criminalises making a file is only as meaningful as the ability to find out who made it.
Also worth watching: whether card networks formalise anything. Right now the most powerful content rule in the field is unwritten, which is bad for everyone including the platforms trying to comply with it.
If you want to see what the category looks like as a product rather than as a legal question, the AI porn sites and AI porn generator sites indexes cover it. This article deliberately names no tool and recommends none — the original's recommendation was a paid placement, and in a field where the last three years of change have been legal rather than technical, a tool list is the least durable thing anyone could write.