The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1831 - Insane Ruling Just Cleared A Path For The Creepiest AI Use Yet

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

AI is being used to indulge the worst desires in our society. It's time for the courts to step in. Ep. 1831 - - - Today's Sponsors: Cardiff - If you've been in business for at least a year, and are pulling in $20,000 a month in revenue, apply now for up to $500,000 in same day business funding at https://Cardiff.co/WALSH. Real growth. Fast funding. Cardiff – Borrow better. Leaf Filter - Help protect your home today with LeafFilter. America’s #1 Gutter Protection System.  Schedule your free inspection today at https://leaffilter.com/WALSH for a quote that’s good for one full year. And right now, you can get up to 35% off. Grand Canyon University - Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University. Visit https://GCU.edu to learn more. Helix Sleep - Go to https://helixsleep.com/walsh for 27% off sitewide, exclusively for listeners of this show. - - - DailyWire: Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 🎆 🇺🇸 Celebrate America 250 with 3-Months of DailyWire for just $17.76 📜 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 🍿 Run Hide Fight: Infidels will premiere on The Daily Wire, Wednesday September 16th. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You might like to think that your texts or DMs are at least somewhat private when you communicate with people on social media platforms like Instagram. They're actually monitored automatically for any signs of criminal activity, particularly criminal activity that might endanger children. And that's why in October of 2023, Meta, which is the parent company of Instagram, was able to alert the feds about a 42-year-old man in Wisconsin named Stephen Anderrag. Now, Meta has been in the news lately for allowing Instagram to become a haven for child predators, as you may have seen. So they've implemented all kinds of monitoring systems and algorithm changes, agreed to settlements, et cetera. And in this case, they determined that Anderag was transmitting apparent child pornography to another user. And very quickly, the feds determined that Anderag was a software engineer with a background in AI models. They obtained a search warrant, seized all of Anderag's devices, including multiple sets.

phones and a laptop. At that point, the authorities discovered that Anderag had been entering text prompts into an AI model called stable diffusion, and the model generated thousands of explicit images depicting miners. And more specifically, Anderag had installed some third-party software on top of stable diffusion, which allowed the model to create these kinds of images. So this was not something the model would have done by itself, you know, off the shelf, as it were. Anderag was then charged with producing, distributing, and possessing child sexual abuse material or CSAM. Watch. A man from Holman, Wisconsin was arrested and charged from crimes relating to inappropriate AI generated images of children. The Wisconsin Department of Justice says 42-year-old Stephen

Anderreg used text-to-image generative AI model to create realistic images of new children. Now, that report was from two years ago. It seemed like a pretty straightforward case. that's how the DOJ presented it. But last week, somewhat unexpectedly, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of the possession charge against Anderrag, saying the First Amendment of the Constitution protects his right to possess obscene material in his own home. This ruling was based on two major Supreme Court precedents. The first precedent is that your home is a sacred space where you can be as obscene as you want. And additionally, the ruling was based on another Supreme Court precedent from 2002, which basically gave the green light to the possession of child

pornography as long as it was virtual child pornography where no child was supposedly involved. Now, of course, in 2002, computer graphics, technology general were, in general, were nowhere near as advanced as they are today. They didn't have AI generated images at all. But that distinction doesn't matter, at least according to the precedent that we have today. Several of the judges made it clear that they don't like the precedent. They want the Supreme Court to change their ruling on virtual child pornography, but they ruled that as the law stands, you can possess AI-generated child pornography as long as it's contained within the home. Quoting from the ruling, the Constitution extends special safeguards to the privacy of the home.

The Supreme Court has held that the state's power simply does not extend to mere possession by the individual in the privacy of his own home. If the First Amendment means anything, the court explained, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. So to be clear, Ander Egg still faces charges of distributing and manufacturing this material. So he's on the hook for transmitting the material and for using his computer to create them. But if this ruling stands, he won't face a possession charge. So basically, if you're in your own home, then you can legally possess this horrific,

immoral, evil material that obviously no human being should ever have, and as long as you don't send it to somebody else. Now, it needs to be pointed out here that, yes, this ruling is as incoherent as it sounds. If something is too horrible to give to someone else or to make it, then it's too horrible to possess in your own home. I mean, that seems pretty obvious. yet you should be secure in your home from any kind of unlawful government search or seizure. The government shouldn't be able to monitor what goes on inside your home whenever they want. But at the same time, the government can absolutely make it a crime to possess certain things inside your property. And this should obviously be one of them.

Nevertheless, depending on who you ask, this ruling is either a validation of our right to privacy, your home is your castle and so on. or it's effectively the legalization of child pornography in the United States. I mean, after all, you can imagine the difficulty prosecutors might have in the future if they need to prove that a certain image is genuine as opposed to AI generated. This decision opens up many different avenues for pedophiles to fight their convictions, and it could lead to a mass release of these degenerates all over the country. It's going to be the number one defense of every pedophile from this moment forward,

at least in the Seventh Circuit. Oh, yeah, that's not real. It's just AI, they'll say. How exactly the prosecutor is going to disprove that beyond any reasonable doubt? In some cases, it may not be as easy as it seems, and it's only going to get more difficult as the technology improves. And the same problem applies to all video evidence in court, by the way. It's a nightmare with no obvious solution. Now, first, it's important to understand that Anderag is not alone. A.I-generated child pornography is a booming industry. There are many, many more cases like this. So here's an ongoing case out of New Mexico, for example. Watch.

Police department. Search war. A police raid on a man accused of using AI to create disgusting images of children. Images so vile. We can barely describe them. No. All I had with my coffee and I did look my ticket. I don't have my lighter.

The affiant informed Mr. Gallagher that the cybertip was from Synchranos, which is a cloud service and that there were reports of child sex abuse material from his account. Mr. Gallagher stated that he did not know he had the cloud. The affiant asked Mr. Gallagher if investigators would find any images of new children on his devices. Mr. Gallagher responded, you might. Mr. Gallagher said that those images were from a long time ago and that they were mostly just AI. The affiant asked Mr. Gallagher if the images of the new children provided him with second gratification and Mr. Gallagher responded, yeah, I guess so. Mr. Gallagher said that he had not been

content for very long and that he was just lonely. Unlike Anderagher, Gallagher is accused of feeding genuine images of real-life children, which you found online, into an AI app to edit them to create CSAM. This is something you need to keep in mind when you upload family photos to websites like Facebook. You know, when you share these kinds of images with the entire world, it's very likely that a pervert is going to see them or could see them. And right now, these perverts have a lot of AI tools they can use in order to do whatever they want with those images. They can create pornography or they can make deep fakes and an attempt to blackmail you. And they can steal identities. I mean, it's something everyone has to be aware of. And this case,

as alleged by the authorities, Gallagher took innocuous photos from social media and had the AI transform them into pornography. And that might seem like a pretty significant distinction from Anderag, who, as far as we know, did not deliberately use any real photos of children when he created his AI-generated content. But you have to keep in mind that AI models, by their nature, are trained on images of actual children. That's how they work. They source an enormous amount of information, including pictures. Anyone who uses an AI model to generate an obscene picture of a child is relying on the fact that the AI has a vast database of millions of images of children to draw from. And that's true when it comes to stable diffusion, the model that Ander

Reg used. This was reported by ours technology back in 2023, quote, more than a thousand known child sexual abuse materials CSAM were found in a large open data set known as LAI-O-N-5B that was used to train popular text image generators such as stable diffusion Stanford Internet Observatory researcher David Thiel relieved, revealed rather. Our new investigation reveals that these models are trained directly on CSAM present in a public database of billions of images. The data set included known CSAM scrape from a wide array of sources, including mainstream social media websites like Reddit X, WordPress, and BlogSpot, as well as a popular adult video sites like X Hamster and X Videos, beyond verifying 1,08 instances of this kind of material in the dataset. SIO found 3,226 instances of suspected CSAM in the dataset.

Teal's report warned that both figures are inherently a significant undercount due to researchers' limited ability to detect and flag all the CSAM in the datasets. The report also predicted that the repercussions of stable diffusions 1.5's training process will be with us for some time to come. So in practice, it's reasonable to say that every AI generated image of a child one way or another involved an actual child at some point in the process. An AI simply cannot make a realistic image of a child if it's never seen an actual child. But in many of these cases, judges are saying that their hands are tied. In cases of AI generated child pornography, that's what they're claiming. Here's one more case from Indianapolis, watch. Now, Marion County judge

has found a man accused of creating child pornography not guilty, not because he didn't do it, but because the way he did it is beyond Indiana state law. Our Russ McQaid examines how artificial intelligence is challenging law enforcement in their quest to protect Hoosier children. Last year we told you about the arrest of a man charged with 10 counts of child exploitation and child pornography. Because he was found not guilty, we can't tell you his name, but we can tell you what he was accused of and why a judge thinks that state lawmakers need to tighten up their laws when it comes to artificially created AI pornography. This probable cause affidavit alleges, quote,

two images located on the man's phone depicted minor females. With use of an AI mirror program, he transformed the images to depict female teenagers to be nude. Now, these are rulings that have clear ramifications for our culture, our politics, many other ongoing debates that we're seeing. And it's become very common for someone to invoke the right to privacy and shut down debate across a wide range of issues. So we need to resolve some fundamental questions about what the Constitution says and what it does not say. We also need to identify the red lines that we simply won't cross as a society. Now, this is hard to do because unless you are homeschooled, then you've been through a school system.

system that in all likelihood has been relentlessly lying to you. So some of these questions become more difficult than they should be. One of the main lies you'll hear is that in reality, there are no difficult choices to be made when it comes to our legal rights. Barack Obama was fond of reading lines like, we reject us false the choice between our safety and our ideals. That was from his first inaugural speech, but he mentioned it many times afterwards. It was always a vapid statement, but people seemed to think it was profound. The truth is, whether we like it or not, there are indeed choices to be made when it comes to balancing safety and ideals, the safety of our children and our ideals. These are choices that everyone

makes every single day. We see it everywhere. For instance, the presumption of innocence is an ideal. We don't want to treat people as criminals without any evidence. But sometimes, say, when people want to board an airplane, we have to balance that ideal with security. And by the same token, we have to recognize that no right, including the right to freedom of speech, the right to privacy, is absolute in every single case. And, you know, before you jump down my throat, yes, I'm aware of, you know, Orwell wrote a book called 1984. I'm aware of Ben Franklin once said those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety. That's a handy quote. But it's also just a quote. You know,

and for that matter, Franklin was careful to mention essential liberty and temporary safety, which pretty clearly is a way of sort of kicking the can down the road, or at least qualifying it, what liberties are essential exactly? And what if we can obtain permanent safety in a certain or something close to it in a certain area of life? Well, Ben Franklin didn't say because he wanted us to figure it out. But the founders, including Franklin, did have a very clear preference for national security over some vaguely defined right to privacy at the individual level. And this is important to understand because almost no one says it anymore. The constitutional right to privacy is an invention of the extremely left-wing Supreme Court in the 50s and 60s,

which wanted to invent a constitutional right to birth control and abortion. So it's fake. There is no generalized right to privacy at all beyond the text of the Fourth Amendment. Now, until the 1960s, there wasn't a single Supreme Court decision that recognized any right to privacy outside of the Fourth Amendment. because these words do not appear anywhere in the actual document. And this explains why when they were running the country, the founders did not go to particularly great lengths to enshrine anyone's privacy as a God-given right,

at least once they were outside their home, certainly. I mean, look up the Collection Act of 1789, which was passed by the first Congress in 1789. This is a law that allowed the authorities to enter any ship or vessel to search for goods that might be concealed. they could search both American and foreign ships. The only requirement was that the authorities have reason to suspect that taxable goods were on board somewhere. If they wanted to search a home or business, the authorities needed a warrant.

But under this law, the authorities could search a ship top to bottom based on a mere hunch. And the next year, an even broader law was passed, allowing for, quote, all collectors, naval officers, surveyors, inspectors, to go on board of ships or vessels in any part of the United States or within four leagues of the coast thereof, if bound to the United States for the purposes of demanding the manifest and of examining and searching the said ships or vessels and the said officers respectively shall have free access to the cabin and every other part of a ship or vessel. And by the way, these kinds of searches were not limited to ships arriving at ports of entry. Consider the tax on whiskey that was imposed in 1791, which was also passed by the First Congress and signed by Washington. The law permitted officers

to enter, quote, houses, storehouses, warehouses, buildings, and places that have been registered as distilleries at all times in the daytime upon request. No warrant was needed. There was a rebellion over this tax and how it was enforced, but in the end, the law survived. If you run a business, you already know that opportunities rarely arrive on a convenience schedule. A customer might suddenly place a much larger order than usual. A piece of equipment might need to be replaced. You might find the perfect person to hire or have the chance to expand at exactly the right moment. The problem is traditional financing doesn't always move at the same speed that your business does. If you want bank level rates without bank level delays, need to check out cardiff.co slash Walsh. Cardiff provides

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Minimum purchase required. Restrictions apply to your representative for warranty. and promotion details. So no, the founders did not believe that you have some absolute right to avoid searches or seizures when you're outside your home, quite the opposite.

When you engage in an activity that the government has an interest in regulating, whether you're traveling to a port or selling whiskey, Ben Franklin would have no problem with the authorities searching your stuff without a warrant. That's because, again, the right to privacy

as such did not exist. It hadn't been invented yet by activist courts looking to legitimize baby murder and other atrocities. You know, in the Roe decision, the Supreme Court found in the Constitution a right to abortion, even though abortion has never mentioned anywhere in the document, nor did any of the framers even hint that they had a prenatal homicide in mind when they wrote it, obviously. The court recognized this obstacle, so it inferred a right to abortion from the right to privacy found in the 14th Amendment. The only problem, of course, is that the 14th Amendment doesn't say anything about a right to privacy.

the phrase right to privacy appears nowhere in the Bill of Rights at all. And even if it did, of course, it would require a galactic leap of logic to get from, I have a right to privacy to I have a right to directly kill this biological human life. So the court founded its right to abortion, which is not enumerated on another right that is not enumerated, and which even if it were enumerated, still would not logically apply to abortion. Now, Roe, of course, has been overturned, but the general right to privacy fiction remains. And, you know, when I say fiction, the point is not that we should have no privacy or that the government has the magical right to invade our privacy whenever it wants.

Obviously, neither of those are the case, or should be the case anyway. The point is that the right to privacy is not some sort of absolute legal principle. It can't be. Just because you're doing something in private doesn't necessarily make it okay or legal. A great majority of the crimes people commit every single day are committed by someone, at least attempting to be, at some level, secretive or private about it. enforcing laws and arresting criminals will always involve an invasion of privacy. And so privacy cannot be sacrosanct. It is conditional. And the Constitution already recognized that and laid out some of the conditions, which is why by the Fourth Amendment, you don't have a right to be free from search and seizure, but from unreasonable search and seizure. Well, what counts as unreasonable? You know, that's a qualifier that's been debated for like 230 years and will be debated for another 230 years if we're still around.

There's really no way around it. Because the only way around it is to dispense with the qualifiers and declare that you either have an absolute unquestioned right to privacy in all cases or no right to privacy in any case at all. And neither of those extremes are workable or rational. So that takes us back to the case of Stephen Anderrag and other pedophiles who are using AI to create child pornography. Ander Egg was being charged for conduct inside his own home, which is different from being out in public. Treated differently legally often. The home is entitled to far more protections than anywhere else in terms of privacy. But once again, that cannot be absolute.

There's a reason you're not allowed to possess a nuclear bomb in your home or dead body. Even in your own home, the right to privacy is not absolute. which was my position, which you've probably deduced by now, is that we should absolutely, of course, ban AI from making this stuff and arrest anyone who consumes it. Pretty simple. Might not be easy to enforce in every case because of how widespread this technology is, but it's simple. It's a simple thing. Now, even if you can somehow prove that the AI model AI model didn't rely on any actual pictures of children, which you know, you can't. It doesn't matter. Nor does it matter if some pedophile is merely possessing this material in his own home where he

supposedly wasn't hurting anyone else. This logic, the idea that, you know, if it doesn't hurt anyone, then it's fine, has infested our culture and conservatism more generally for decades. And in every single case, or in a great majority of cases, it makes society worse for everybody. You know, gay marriage, marijuana, medically assisted suicide, sports betting, abortion, no fault divorce. Again, and again, we've been told to relax, you know, it doesn't actually affect anyone else. But it turns out that when you endorse deviant and immoral behavior in an individual context, then before long, you see the consequences everywhere. You can't go two blocks in New York without smelling pot. Women in Massachusetts are now rallying around a woman who executed her

children one by one. Teenagers with mental health problems are getting put down in Canada, so that the state can harvest their organs. Gambling has ruined sports in about 20 different ways to the point that we now have live betting odds displayed prominently on screen. Women are more miserable, more medicated than ever. All of these downstream consequences are felt by everyone in society, not just the people who get the abortions or take the drugs or whatever else. And we've ended up in this place because of this non-existent failing moral framework

that says that something is automatically okay as long as no one else is directly actively harmed by it. And oftentimes when they say no one's directly actively harmed by it, they actually are. Abortion, there's another person being actively harmed, even before you get to the societal harm, obviously. Now, along the same lines, AI-generated sexually explicit images of children harm society more broadly and the nation as a whole.

And that is precisely the kind of harm that the government must prevent. Any society where perverts can gorge themselves legally on hours of this kind of stuff is obviously a society no healthy person wants to live in. We would all be the victims of it. Not to mention all the research showing that indulging a compulsion only makes the compulsion stronger, which means real human children are put at greater risk. Here's just one study from researchers in Montreal. It says, quote, this study analyzed the evidence. evolution over time of the activity of consumers of child sexual exploitation material. To this end,

images and metadata were extracted from the hard drives of 40 individuals convicted of possession of child pornography and analyzed. The most prevalent pattern was a progressive decrease in the age of the person depicted and a progressive increase in the severity of the sexual acts. So in other words, over time, the children in this material became younger and the context became even more explicit. They get some exposure to this stuff, and then their compulsion becomes more severe and even more depraved. Then there's this study from the Journal of Family Violence in 2009, known as the Butner study. They interviewed people who had been convicted of possessing child pornography, but hadn't been charged with actually abusing a child in person.

What the researchers discovered is that many of these people had also abused children in real life. They simply hadn't been discovered by investigators yet. Quote, our finding showed the internet offenders in our sample were significant. more likely than not to have abused a child via a hands-on act. They also indicated that the offenders who abused children were likely to have offended against multiple victims that the incidence of crossover by gender and age is high. So this is one of the dangers posed by all forms of child pornography, whether it's AI generator or not. Very often, it's not simply an online crime, as evil as that crime already is. It's a precursor to real life sexual assault.

you know, sometimes here it argued in defense of AI child porn or other supposedly fictional depictions of child abuse, you'll sometimes hear it argued that, well, you know, this might be a way to actually prevent child abuse because it gives the perverts an allegedly safe outlet. Well, even if that were true, the stuff should still be banned. No such outlet should exist. And anyone who needs that sort of outlet should simply be imprisoned at a minimum, at a minimum. But it turns out that this whole outlet idea is a psychological misnomer. You don't tamp down a compulsion or keep it contained and under control by indulging it. The more it's indulged, the stronger it grows. And that's true of any compulsion. And it's certainly true of this, which is the worst compulsion a person can have. So put simply, there's no compelling reason at all to allow people to use AI this way. You know, does anyone have a God-given right to generate horrific sexual images with AI?

Obviously not. Does anyone have a God-given right to use AI at all for anything? No. Does it help society or the country in any way for people to be doing this? Obviously not. Is it grotesque and evil and bad? Obviously it is. Therefore, it should be banned.

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obitions. That's why you have the concept of banning things. It's for precisely those kinds of things. There's no real argument to not ban it. Now, people will argue that, well, you know, we have violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and they allow you to do horrible things as well, like shoot police officers. Although I'll note that they don't allow you to murder children, much less sexually assault them. And yes, it's clearly a, you know, a net negative for society, I would say, to have millions of children, you know, murdering police officers in a game for fun, but there are two important distinctions to draw here. First, Grand Theft Auto has a narrative, at least superficially. The games have a story that you're working through. And even when you take a detour to commit an act of domestic terrorism in the game,

you're still playing as one of the characters from that narrative. And secondly, and more to the point, and this is really all that should need to be said, is you have to draw lines somewhere. Obviously, we all agree that there have to be lines. And if we can't draw the line here, then where exactly do you draw them? And this is where I disagree with a lot of commentators on the common good conservatism debate. You know, it's a question of whether the government should only protect individual liberty

or does it have a role in protecting the general welfare of its people and to some extent promoting public virtue. And I would say the government does have an obligation in the latter respect to protect the general welfare. If you're an individual liberty conservative, then you have no argument, really, or only a weak one for banning AI-generated child pornography. If you believe the government should be protecting the general welfare of the people, on the other hand, then it's not even a question. Like, obviously this should be banned.

But the government, for the most part, has been totally powerless against this evil. The attitude seems to be that, you know, AI exists and will do whatever it wants. And there's nothing we can do to stop any of it. So why even try? Obviously, there's plenty of AI alarmism on the other side. And we've talked about that previously. There are various factions that want to shut down AI for political reasons or because it gets clicks or because they're paid by China or whatever. But the AI defeatism, right, the attitude that, well, we can't and shouldn't even try to do anything to regulate AI at all,

even in these really extreme cases like AI child pornography, that is just as extreme in the other direction and it's kind of hysterical in its own way because it also seems to say that AI is like this mystical unstoppable force and we're utterly powerless in its grasp. There's nothing we could do at all. No laws could have any effect. I find that to also be hysterical.

It's a technology. That's what it is. It's not magic. And so we don't need to treat it like evil sorcery, but we also shouldn't treat it as some sort of God that cannot be in any way controlled, and we shouldn't even try. And also the idea that we can't possibly regulate

anything that takes place in the home or even on public streets, again, is an extreme. It's a kind of hysteria. These are positions that on the surface appear to be pro-liberty, anti-authoritarian, even patriotic, but in fact, you know, the idea that we shouldn't regulate AI at all or anything like that. But in fact, they are the antithesis of what the founders and the Constitution stood for. They represent a breathtaking miscalculation about the severity of the threats we face and that our children face. No, we shouldn't give up any essential liberty in exchange for temporary safety.

Franklin was right about that. but the right to possess AI child porn on our computers is not an essential liberty. When we deny that a civilized society necessarily involves tradeoffs, when we buy into Obama's tripe about false choices, then we invite collapse at the civilizational level. Some lines need to be drawn. And if we can't draw the line at this, then we can't draw any line anywhere for any reason. As the saying goes, our constitution is not a suicide pact. before our children are made to endure any more of these horrors,

it's incumbent on the courts, to stop pretending that it is. I'll do with the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed. All of my years of public life, I have never profited from public service. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. For more than five decades, from Iran-Contra to Monica Lewinsky to Russia Gate, every political scandal has been measured against one, the Watergate affair.

But what if Richard Nixon was telling the truth? What if Watergate isn't what it seems? What if hundreds of thousands of pages of sworn testimony, memoirs, and newly released government documents tell a different story than the one you learned in school? I know America. In 1972, Nixon won the biggest electoral landslide in modern American history with grand plans. to remake the federal government. Two years later, he was out of office.

You were taught that Nixon's men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters to spy on his political opponents. You were taught that when he found out, Nixon covered it up, and that the cover-up was worse than the crime. You were taught that two heroic Washington Post reporters, guided by a righteous FBI whistleblower,

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