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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.
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.
Where's the harm in teenage boys faking nudes of a 13 year old girl without her knowledge or consent, indeed very much against her consent?
Well gosh gee whiz, why on earth are women such picky, fussy, hypergamous trollops who don't want to marry just plain ordinary guys? No wonder we need to force these women into marrying normal men who think nudes of 13 year old girls are just fine! Why is anyone getting het-up about this? Men like nubile women, young means fertile, and if she's old enough to bleed she's old enough to breed, right?
The boys are just doing what boys do! Boys are gonna be interested in girls of their own age! Boys will be looking at porn, and porn is fine and normal and in fact is good for society since it reduces rape and sex offending crimes (citation needed, of course!)
I know, I know: Amadan is going to hammer me for using sarcasm. But how else am I to react to "how is the girl harmed by this?" unless I get really angry and abusive, in which case I'm still going to get the mod hammer.
So, back in high school, someone made a fake photo of me and posted it in a classroom. It wasn't a nude, but it was political, depicting me as Stalin, as I was an outspoken socialist. I was outraged ("the photoshop is not even accurate! I'm a TROTSKYIST!"), and it definitely hurt my feelings and hurt me socially. Pretty clear case of bullying, but, in retrospect, it was pretty hilarious and a useful learning experience. Should that kid have been punished?
I don't think so, and I suspect you don't either (though I'm curious if my suspicion is right). Which shifts the question to, what is the difference between a nonsexual representation and a sexual one? I think, to many people who don't see harm, harm categorically isn't something that can be done with an image or words--sticks and stones can break my bones etc. If people start physically attacking someone, or destroying their property, in response, there is harm, but the harm originates from the physical act, not the instigating image. The introduction of a sexual element doesn't change this. (I'm speaking here in terms of conceptual framework, not legal definitions.)
That doesn't mean that the school shouldn't do anything about the boys--schools can and should regulate behavior above and beyond the minimal standard of harm. But the idea that actual physical violence should be punished less than images and words is weird to me, especially when school administrators had no actual evidence of the images.
The difference is that a video of you as Stalin is obviously a joke. Do you think you would have felt the same if instead they showed a video of you masturbating on a television in the classroom?
I would have felt very differently: I would have cared much less, quite honestly. "Oh, someone's a weirdo, anyone whose opinion of me changes because of it isn't worth caring about." And I'm not sure that making the AI-generated nude clearly a fake joke (giving her purple skin or whatever) would change anyone's opinions. I think the crux of the matter is that it's a sexual image, and we cordon off sexuality as requiring unique, almost spiritual protections around it.
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