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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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How about a different kind of AI culture war? I speak of course of non-consensual pornography generation. The most outrageous article I read about this recently was probably this AP article: Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled. The girl in question is 13 and she started a fight on a school bus with one of the boys later charged with a crime for sharing the images.

The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.

Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.

“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.

Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.

When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who’d been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.

It turns out that finding apps that advertise this kind of functionality is not hard. In fact, part of the reason I bring this up is it seems this capability is integrated into one of the largest AIs: Grok. There's been some controversy on X over the last couple days after Grok allegedly generated pornographic images of a couple minor girls. Additionally the bot's "media" tab was disabled, allegedly due to the discovery lots of people were using the bot to make pornographic edits of other people's pictures. Though the media tab is gone I did not find it very hard to get Grok to link me its own posts with these kinds of edits.

There is, I think understandably, a lot of controversy going around about this. It's not that it was previously impossible to make this kind of content but the fidelity and availability was much more limited and certainly required more technical skill. Being something you can do without even leaving your favorite social media app seems like something of a game changer.

Frankly I am unsure where to go with this as a policy matter. Should someone be liable for this? Criminal or civil? Who? Just the generating user? The tool that does the generating? As a general matter I have some intuitions about AI conduct being tortious but difficulty locating who should be liable.

She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.

Well duh? The article itself says they didn't have any hard evidence, is she expecting the school to take action against this boy because it's who she and her friends "suspect" created the images without any hard evidence?

It's disgusting and awful behavior by whoever made them, but unless you've got some real evidence (and I'd even take one of the friends of the accused boy saying that the boy did it as stronger evidence than what the article presents) then I don't see what you could expect the school to do here. And even though it's nasty and disgusting behavior, starting a physical fight over it is going to get the person fighting in trouble until schools get rid of their retarded zero tolerance policies. I spent plenty of time in detention for fighting back, it's retarded policy but at least schools still seem to be consistent in their retardation.

is she expecting the school to take action against this boy because it's who she and her friends "suspect" created the images without any hard evidence?

Based on other things I've seen elsewhere, probably.

The First Amendment protects free speech from infringement by the Federal Government, the Fifth guarantees due process in the courts, and so on. The principal is not a Fed and their office is not a court, so obviously the constitution does not apply. Do one little rhetorical slip, and suddenly the entire idea of due process is not a valid counterargument to your preferred methods of meting out punishments (anywhere short of a genuine Court of Law, at least).

This is so remarkably and verifiably wrong. The principal of a public school is a State employee. The bill of rights is incorporated against the states by the 14A. The courts have for decades said that students don't categorically lose those rights in school. This is all stuff you can just look up.

This is so remarkably and verifiably wrong.

Yup. Doesn't stop people from making that argument, either explicitly or by omission.

“Your tears say more than real evidence ever could.”

More seriously, to me, the part that struck the most discordant note was this:

She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her.

Which almost makes it sound like she wanted to keep going to school with the boy. If I were in the school district’s position, the last thing I’d do is ship them both off to the same location.

The impression I get from the rest of the article is not just the boy avoided school discipline immediately but even after having been charged with a crime for his actions. Maybe that's wrong, the boy goes unidentified and the school claims it also can't provide any information. Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.

Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.

It should be noted that police are much, much better at acquiring evidence than schools, and it's likely they didn't hand all their evidence over to the school.

The article says they charged two of the boys that were sharing the images, it's not clear to me at all that either of those two boys were the one who had originally created the images.

Edit: the article also seems to be saying that the two boys who were actually charged went to a different school than the girl entirely, but it really didn't make any of that clear.