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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13492 thread views

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.

From a legal standpoint, what is the theory for the 'harm' caused in this instance. And to whom?

Liability of any kind usually rests on the idea that someone's interests were injured and in need of redress.

We are able to statutorily 'create' interests (the Americans with Disabilities Act did this, for instance) but I think we'd smack into 1A issues trying to make it completely illegal to post manipulated images of people who... are already posting images of themselves online.

Most obvious angle is copyright/IP, but they're still sorting that out for AI works.

I'd kinda love for them to go at it from the obscenity angle. Because that would also suggest that the women posting thirst traps are doing something wrong too.

I had some thoughts about this back when that DignifAI thing was doing the rounds:

Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent.

I thought DignifAI had legs, but of course the gooners demand the opposite service.

I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent.

Reputational harm is covered under libel/slander/defamation laws, but does require other people to actually believe the falsehoods that someone published.

So exactly how much modification would it take before its no longer 'believable.' If they stylize it as a different artstyle?

I keep pointing out that with AI, whatever guidelines you put in place, the AI can tiptoe RIGHT up to them and stick a single pixel over the line.

Ultimately this is also why I don't see how Onlyfans continues to exist as a business model for flesh-and-blood women after this year.

Reputational harm is covered under libel/slander/defamation laws, but does require other people to actually believe the falsehoods that someone published.

That's technically not a requirement for defamation per se, but I don't know enough about defamation law to say whether or not this counts as per se defamation. I do believe that legislatures could define it as defamation per se by statute if they wanted to though.

defamation per se still requires that there be an "accusation," which means in this case, you'd have to prove that the kids were claiming these AI generated images were real pictures, not fakes. It's no different than if they had drawn lewd pictures of her.

I imagine that unless it was an obvious parody or fake, or that the boys were explicitly telling their friends that they were AI generated and not real etc., most courts would presume that the images were being presented as real.

And once again, I'm not sure if it'd survive 1A scrutiny.

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