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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.
I would argue that the crime (or "crime", if you want) is distribution.
If a horny teenager creates fake nudes of their (realistically, 'his') classmates, that is creepy and sick and kinda pathetic, but should not be a crime any more than substituting the name of his crush for a protagonist in some lewd fan-fiction.
It would also be difficult to enforce laws against these things because nobody would even know that a "crime" had been committed.
However, things are very different if that teenager then goes to spread his deepfakes among common acquaintances (who are the only ones for whom these images would be different than "yet another nude person"). More gravely, he might not mention that they are deepfakes.
I would argue that American prudishness is a major driving force here. In a society where everyone went to the beach and the sauna naked, his classmates would just reply "What is the big deal? I know how Tina's boobs look." For whatever reasons, Americans are big on "purity" and slut shaming. (I guess having an OnlyFans as an 18yo would likely get you kicked from the Cheerleader team for ethical violations.)
Under that -- admittedly silly -- framework, a nude -- even a fake one -- is a direct assault on the character of the victim when shared.
Even in a more enlightened society where people don't judge people based on sluttiness, there are probably other things which would be just as damaging. For example, I would very much prefer if a deepfake video of me in full SS uniform chanting Nazi slogans would not go viral, and I would feel violated if it did.
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