Lolicon, while vile and repulsive, is not a matter for law enforcement since it does not involve harm to actual children, and criminalizing any cartoons - regardless of what they depict - sets an extremely dangerous precedent with massive potential for abuse. If you're criminalizing cartoon depictions of sexual situations involving children, then you're potentially opening up the door for certain episodes of
South Park to be criminalized. On top of that, there is absolutely no way to objectively measure the age of a cartoon character. Not to mention, the US Supreme Court has already ruled on this, and Texas's bill will inevitably be struck down as unconstitutional:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/law-jan-june02-scotus_04-16
Photorealistic AI-generated imagery is a much more complicated matter, however. As far as the law is concerned, it should definitely depend on what the AI model is using. If it's using real-life children as the template, then that's not the same as if it's using completely fake imagery with entirely fictional, nonexistent children. The latter is still absolutely disgusting, of course, but it doesn't involve real harm to real children. Using real children as a template for fake CP, however, does obviously harm real children. I definitely should have gone into more detail about what the AI is trained on in
the article.
