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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.
If anything, this technology pretty much decreases victimization via two means:
If AI nudes become widespread and indistinguishable from real ones (and they're close), the danger/penalty/threat of blackmail/etc. of having real nudes leaked becomes basically zero. (Given how much many if not most women who would be the kinds to be targeted by deepfake nudes in my experience love sending out actual nudes cavalierly and are only stopped from doing so by concerns about exposure, I believe, if they could think one step ahead of inventing a new form of victimhood to decry in the NYT about this technology, they'd be tithing 10% to its developers.)
AI "CSAM" (reverse the first two letters and you have my opinion about this modern newspeak term and its relation to the perfectly fine term CP that didn't need any replacement) holds the potential to completely destroy any markets in or sharing of actual CP, again if it's indistinguishable from it. If it's indistinguishable, then even people who specifically only want the real thing will have to give up, because even they won't be able to tell the difference. It'd be like flooding a drug market with a 100x cheaper to produce version that's indistinguishable from the real thing. You would put the dealers of the original stuff straight out of business, even if there were still a demand for their product on authenticity grounds, because that demand for authenticity can't be satisfied if nobody can determine authenticity.
But this just further reveals the character of the modern woke system of American "law and order" (and those are definitely scare quotes). It's not about actually improving the world, protecting anyone, or anyone's safety; it's about punishing people for being morally impure as considered by the privileged classes.
Pursuant to my second point, with a modest government investment in AI models specifically for the purpose and agentic AIs to spread it around the usual chains of CP distribution, the US government could probably end or at least curtail by 97-98% or so (casual estimation) the genuinely criminal distribution of actual CP by drowning it in mostly if not entirely indistinguishable AI forgeries. No living, breathing, sentient child (or again at least 97-98% less) would ever have to be sex trafficked or exposed by the production of such material again. Those who have already would, much sooner than would occur naturally, have the memories of it buried under hundreds of pounds of dirt of digital disinformation. (It is worth noting that every time somebody is caught with CP featuring a person known to the US government, that person has an opportunity to get payout from the confiscated assets etc. of the convicted, with the most famous "CP stars" sometimes making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of this. So, perversely enough, they may not like this change. Presumably most would be relieved however.)
They can't/won't do this though. Why not? Why because the people who are inclined to like CP might still like the new, AI-generated stuff, or might even think some of it is real, and still masturbate to it. Their filthy little perverted minds will still be free to get off with impunity (if not better than before with a state-of-the-art government AI pumping out content catering to their every fantasy for them), and that's the real crime here, their corrupt pleasure and satisfaction, even if it harms none, not what happens to real flesh-and-blood children or anybody else.
And it's the same with kids generating nudes of their schoolmates. There's no actual analysis or consideration of the boundaries of freedom of expression, private fantasizing, the balance of rights between people, etc. involved. They're dirty little "incel chuds" or some equivalent, as proven by the fact that they've done something to offend a female, and that's it. (And of course the likely general unattractiveness of the nerdy guys who have adopted AI technology for fake nudification this early is a major factor. If it had been only attractive guys found with this technology, there would be no NYT article. As usual and again, it's not about principles, it's about the fact that, as the famous graph shows, many if not most women are statistically illiterate (or at least in this particular area) and thus consider 80% of men to be below average and therefore unworthy of the baseline of respect and consideration. Thus the fact that these men have sexual urges at all is an abomination to women, something to be policed as forcibly as is necessary (unless money can be made from them on OF).)
There is a civilizational fence here that you probably don't want to tear down cavalierly.
In particular, it's feasible (perhaps it would not come to pass) that:
Failure of your imagination to supply a steel man to your opposition.
This is not a brave statement, but I'm gonna double down on "sexual urges that are focused on a 5 year old are abominable" and maybe "and should be to individuals of all sexes"
Interesting post. The conclusion of the argument is that the state has a legitimate duty to forcibly ban media that corrupt morals, when the harm is sufficiently clear and severe, and/or supported by existing legal precedent. This might also apply to other kinds of media that are now legal and common, and plausibly to all porn. At a minimum, it suggests that written material or drawings that depict things that would be illegal to film with real actors should also be illegal to write or draw. The key questions are not the abstract principles (which I think are obvious), but the criteria for drawing the lines, the burdens of proof in play, and the question of which agencies are empowered to make the decisions.
Thoughts?
I don't think is an accurate characterization of my view. And I certainly don't endorse your conclusion as to either writing or as to pornography in general.
I'll triple down on "sexual urges focused on a 5YO are indeed abominable" with the addition of "and one can simply end the discussion of CP right there".
I wasn't characterizing your view, but what follows from your argument if it is valid. It seems to me that the argument you put forward to support your view is an equally strong argument for a view you oppose.
As a matter of fact, I think that normalizing premarital sex is a grave social problem. As far as I know, no society has ever embraced the following three norms simultaneously and survived: (1) sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable, (2) homosexuality is morally acceptable, (3) male and female sex roles ought to be respected equally. For example, the Romans accepted (1) and (2) but not (3). I advocate for (2) and (3) but not (1). I think the basic reason (1), (2), and (3) are not compatible is that young men would become addicted to having sex with each other and, not necessarily lose interest in women, but not be very motivated to navigate the challenges of obtaining and sustaining opposite-sex relationships. Sound familiar?
Our own society is moving toward accepting (1), (2) and (3) together, but this is a recent development, and at the same time our society is dying before our eyes, so I do not count the current, unstable situation as a data point because it is a dramatic departure from our recent history as a culture. To give you an idea how fast these norms are changing, leading Democrats (e.g. both Clintons, Biden, Obama) opposed gay marriage until around 2012 -- and in the early 1960's, 86% of married women said when polled that it was not OK for a woman to have sex with her fiancé before marriage [Charles Murray (2012): Coming Apart, p. 154].
I doubt that a society can survive that accepts (1), (2), and (3) -- though if one has ever existed it would prove me wrong (maybe someone knows an example?). So that experiment hasn't been run with success to my knowledge. On the other hand, the experiment of socially accepting child sex has been run many times (in modern Afghanistan, ancient Rome, the Sambia tribe, et. al.) and those societies continued to exist for generations. I'm definitely not advocating that, but I am saying the empirical evidence for the maladaptivity of (1), (2), and (3) is stronger.
In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?
Can you give us some examples of societies that have failed because they accepted all 3 of these things at the same time?
I don't know of any society has embraced them together.
Well there you have it. Jesus dude, could you construct a more convoluted argument? Literally throwing darts at a non-existent enemy.
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