I'm not asking about legal definitions, I'm wondering why you might consider one less serious. In terms of the victim's awareness of what's happening and the distress caused, I'd have thought they were equally nasty. To be precise, I'm only talking about digitally altered images, not those of actual physical abuse.
I think the effect on a child becoming aware their image has been used would be much worse to be honest.
And the behaviours that it is fuelling in one case is porn, by and large, and in the other case is not.
This isn't to condone either you understand, it is simply that as a society we are rightly less tolerant of sexualising children than we are of adults.
Also, if there is an argument for banning an AI engine until such time as it either does neither of these things or can accurately determine the age of a subject in a photograph, then the argument of preventing abusive images of children is much much stronger and less likely to be shouted down by men who want to make their own nonconsensual porn In the name of free speech.
