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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13715 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.

AI-generated nudes of minors meet the legal definition of child pornography.

“child pornography” means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where— [...] such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct.

If the Supreme Court ruled that sharing AI-generated deepfakes of actually existing 14-year-olds is protected speech, there would be a constitutional amendment. The general public will not stand for this, regardless of what weird tech-libertarians think.

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002)

They basically just re-passed the same law struck down here, and have been avoiding scrutiny by only charging people who were already incentivized to plea bargain. Apparently the idea is that if the law is around for a long time before it gets seriously challenged again (in a virtual child porn case not involving anything else), the courts will forget all about Ashcroft and convict. Might work.

Tbf, the PROTECT Act stapled on a Miller test. They're still trying to bypass the 'prevailing community standards' bit, but compared to the pre-Ashcroft version that just pretended the Miller test didn't matter, it's a much wider retreat than, for example, US v. Lopez.

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