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I think there's a plausible false light (and defamation per se) claim, given that the images in this situation were being shared and would be themselves illegal for her to produce. Even for deepfakes-of-adults, false claims of sexual promiscuity would fall into these categories. There's some theoretical examples where a Falwell v. Hustler-style defense would be relevant in the case of a public figure where the deepfakes were clear parody, but that's pretty far from the typical case. But from a traditional law perspective you don't have to pull a Gorsuch to find a civil tradition against this sorta stuff.
Useless, though, since the kid who did it's judgement proof. In theory, the state law would allow six months imprisonment per act, but in practice that's really not how the juvenile court systems work, and even an adult doing this to another adult is more likely to just end up with a fine. And while both the boy generating the deepfakes and those passing it around (or even receiving it) could probably charged with federal CSAM stuff, that's such a nuclear option it's extremely unlikely anyone would seriously even threaten it here.
Which is part of why the whole thing is such a mess.
Given that teenagers have been charged with the production, possession, and distribution of CSAM for sending nudes of themselves, CSAM charges in this case don’t strike me as anything close to nuclear, assuming the police can recover the images from Snapchat. The only thing I’m not certain of is whether they actually broke any CSAM laws. Is it actually illegal to draw a photorealistic, but fake, image of a nude minor? Perhaps more to the point, given how AIs usually seem to handle NSFW requests, is it illegal to put the face of a minor on top of the body of a definitely-grown adult? I have no idea, and it’s not something I’m eager to google.
I'm mostly using "nuclear" in the sense of "the biggest available weapon, and its resulting proportionality concerns". Those style of prosecutions happen, but they're pretty uncommon, even though there's good evidence to think the chargeable conduct happens more often than anyone wants to think about.
In the US, it's a federal felony under the PROTECT Act, unless the content also has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Enforcement is pretty rare, though, since the feds don't want the law to get another challenge like Ashcroft.
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Thought experiment, what if one of the boys shows it to his creepy uncle and then snapchats it to his creepy uncle? Then creepy uncle is in possession of CSAM - even worse if he then darkwebs it to all of his other chomo friends.
Obviously, probably not going to charge the minor male with accessory, right? But this is the "break containment" mega problem for cases exactly like this. Call it "deepfake laundering"; kids unwittingly doing stuff that, in the realm of adults, would be 100% illegal.
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