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New York Times’ The Daily podcast ran an episode Real Teenagers, Fake Nudes: The Rise of Deepfakes in American Schools. The premise is contained in the title — AI image generation apps can remove the clothing from photos, and teenage boys are using these en masse to make faked nude images of their classmates.
The overt message that the NYT hits repeatedly in the piece is that the girls in question are victims and that the boys have committed a crime. It’s stated repeated, implicitly and explicitly, without any justification. At one point a police officer opines that the images are CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (By the way, never trust a police officer to tell you the law; it’s not their area of expertise.)
No, no, just all of it no. There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.
This is the moral equivalent of weirdos 40 years ago who would cut the heads off photos and paste them on pornographic images. Creepy? Yes! Deserving of social shunning? You betcha! But not a crime. Everyone in these girls’ lives who is catastrophizing this is doing them psychological harm.
Whether or not they’re victims in a strict legal sense the girls are clearly victims here.
More generally I feel like men wildly underestimate how bad it can feel to be the object of unwanted, intrusive sexual desire/advances due to “men be horny” type attitudes. I spent most of my life rolling my eyes and thinking “how bad can it be to be DESIRED” but over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong. And this was the mildest stuff imaginable. Having my peers make (even fake) nudes of me would be insanely, ridiculously disturbing and cause legitimate anguish.
Agreed that unwanted sexual advances can be frightening and quite unpleasant. But this is not that. If I construct porn in your likeness in private and you never learn about it, you can't be a victim. It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls. No doubt the girls in the story experienced suffering, but you and I don't see eye to eye on whether they should have any recourse beyond social shaming. They're victims in only the loosest literary sense of the word.
I mean sure but in practice this only comes to light when they’re discovered or distributed which does harm the girls. And I think “creation + distribution” is worse than “distribution” alone if for no other reason than it speaks to a more culpable mens rea and greater capacity to reoffend.
I don’t think the boys should go to jail but I do think they should be suspended or probably expelled.
If instead of photo-realistic AI generation it was anime would you think the same?
If instead of AI it was hand drawn by one of the boys in the style of , 'I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.'? Is this better, worse or the same?
The degree of realism and personalization intuitively matters a lot so without any other context the AI thing seems worse. But as with many things like this often the real answer is that context matters and fact finders on the ground are better at determining that than we are on some random online forum. It also seems like a sort of a bad faith waste of time to try to legalistically determine which side of the line some particular way of sexually harassing high school girls falls on.
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But this porn will be shared. "Check out this picture of Alice I've found!" "Lol, is this Jamal? You sick fuck! Can you make one where she's rimming an old dude? No, wait, can you make the dude be our science teacher?"
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