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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.
People need to get more mature about images I think.
Imagine if, at the dawn of the internet, there was a big shock at all the dodgy information sources, conspiracies, cults and so on that emerged. 'We invented freedom of speech in an era of printing presses, not high-capacity assault routers!' someone might say. And it's true, there's a difference due to the speed and nature of the connection. We are bombarded with information, it can be quite overwhelming and mindbreak the weak-willed. Ziz cultists, Extinction Rebellion, retarded tiktok trends... The internet seems to have catalyzed many bad things in ways that aren't easy to counteract without squashing the whole thing.
But the answer isn't to shut down the internet, the answer is to strengthen our mental integrity, raise our willpower stat.
What is the alternate answer here? Restrict Grok from putting people in a bikini, ahegao face, milk sprayed on them? Restrict Grok, they'll just go back to civitai where this stuff has been going on for years. Men clearly desire lewd images of women.
How are you supposed to restrict this? If it's libel, then what about the time-honoured tradition of spreading false rumours about people, is that banned too? Do we all line up and go to the nanny state about how we were wrongly smeared as whiny, dumb, small-penised, ugly bitches who did something unspeakable at a party? Do we all line up in front of some ruinously slow legal system and give lawyers money to defend our reputations (they can't defend your reputation even if you win in court)? Do we have AIs surveiling every private groupchat to defend the honour of maidens? A gigantic Chinese style state surveillance apparatus to uphold the wholesomeness of the entire internet?
The best solution is for men and women to act in a more dignified and honourable way and not do any of this in the first place. That clearly isn't going to happen after decades and decades of subverting and violating just about all of the old taboos. What are taboos and censorship for if not enforcing a standard of behaviour?
Men still have the responsibility of dying in a trench for their country (now with their drone-killers filming their deaths for war propaganda), women will need to accept some downsides in a technological environment that's freed them from a lot of their unpleasant work. Picking and choosing to preserve just the taboos that overwhelmingly benefit women over men isn't a sustainable pattern in the long term.
Modern U.S. society will head straight for its grave rather than break from that pattern.
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A given chick certainly makes it easy for Grok, when chances are she has already uploaded or sent lots of skimpy photos of herself that a guy can use in the generative process to make bikini pics or porn of her. Especially when Grok's training data already contains a vast sea of other chicks who have uploaded nudes, bikini pics, porn of themselves. Minimal edits needed to render a vaguely-plausible photo or even a quite realistic one.
The usual answer: We can expand the protections afforded females by limiting the freedom and protections afforded males. We can easily find some gerrymandered reason why Grok should be neutered, why things like "revenge porn" and making AI porn should be illegal (with the de facto burden of proof being on the defendant), while things like smearing someone as a "whiny, dumb, small-penised, ugly bitch[]" falls under free speech. If a man objects, it would only serve as further proof that he is, in fact, a whiny, dumb, small-penised, ugly bitch.
A woman who calls a man a rapist in an "Are We Dating the Same Man?" social media group is speaking her Emotional Truth and Lived Experience as they at least once had sex after she had a few drinks. A man who uploads a nude of her to "Are We Dating the Same Woman?" may face prison time and/or a hefty monetary judgment, if such a group hadn't already been yeeted.
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