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Notes -
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.
They are "victims" in the same sense as a boy who a girl spreads rumors about how he's "creepy" or, more on the nose, that he has a small or deformed penis. Which is to say, not in a way which should be actionable.
Having a fake nude made of you is way more disturbing than someone saying you’re creepy or have a small penis.
I agree that you shouldn’t go to jail for fake nudes but I do think it’s absolutely legitimate to suspend or expel boys who do this.
(apparently this line of argument has has upset people traumatized by being called creepy)
Expelling someone is an extreme act. And given my rock-bottom opinion of public school administrators, we just can't trust them to make this kind of decision.
Literally just don’t make AI porn of your female classmates? Why is everyone on this site struggling with this so much?
Because there are things that women do to men that are more inherently destructive (in the same lopsided manner as this) due to men and women being different, yet no such uproar is heard when this happens.
When one notices that, one tends to stop caring about "vulnerable women" and switch to "if you want equal rights, you can take equal lefts". Either both genders get special protection from the things [that the other gender does] that will affect them most, or neither do; to do otherwise is not justice.
We have to allow men to make AI porn of their underaged high school classmates because sometimes women do bad things too? And what are the highly destructive things you have in mind?
There's a world of space between "allowing" them to do it and expelling them from school. Much the same way there's a world of space between allowing criminals to do as they please and no-trials street executions for misdemeanors.
Also uncool reframing "not-expelling students" as "allowing bad behavior".
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