Not (necessarily) with real naked children. With kids with clothes, adults with clothes, and naked adults.
It's not hard for the AI to transpose from a clothed child to a naked one, it's basically the same thing as switching your gender or making you look old
Its still fucked up, because it starts with shit like this before moving into real world encounters. Over time the predators brain will see it as a new normal and will want to escalate.
Depends on the country. Some only criminalize depictions where children were exploited or harmed, so the cartoon stuff might get a pass despite being nasty. AI images I'd imagine it might be hard to prove they aren't real children and at that point might be treated like a robbery with a fake weapon or selling fake drugs (still chargeable as the real thing in most places)
"Roughly 80 percent of respondents" to a poll posted in a dark web forum with 3,000 members said that "they had used or intended to use AI tools to create child sexual abuse images,"