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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.

It's in the schools incentive to deny, deflect, and cover up anything bad that might be happening in the school. On the other hand it's in the police's incentive to hunt down people and put them behind bars, whether justified or not. We know that schools often cover up straight up rapes and beatings and pretend nothing is wrong.

As to whether or not ai nudes should be illegal, I'm not against classifying deepfakes of real underage people as illegal.

Grok allegedly generated pornographic images of a couple minor girls.

"any content that sexualizes or exploits a child for the viewer’s benefit."

Of course as an ai company owner I would want to avoid generating this kind of content, this seems quite vague. An image of a kid playing can be normal, but it can also be csam if the photographer was thinking secual thoughts? In my imo csam should only count content where actual abuse happened or for actual pronographic content.

From what I'm aware of the gork story, the gork put them in underwear and swimwear, without including any direct explicit content.

I tried manipulating an image of my butt crack earlier today, to imagine someone climbing down it. In any case, Grok wouldn't comply. It's not some wild west of content generation (though it doesn't respect manipulation of celebs, as long as it's SFW).