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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.
I don't know about legal harm, but my ideal solution to this would be "The girl who punched the asshole boy gets a finger-wagging, and the boy gets told he had it coming and stop being a little shit."
Obviously, that's too old school and common sense for a school to do.
Photoshopping a woman's face onto a pornographic image has long been understood to be a shitty thing to do and possibly actionable. But AI-generated real-person-porn is probably just something society is going to have to get used to.
In a world where social shame was still effective it'd be a pretty damning to do it and would probably result in ostracization. Not clear what one has to do to 'compensate' for the situation though.
Similar to being a peeping tom, or a subway groper or anything else that intrudes on people's strongest held social boundaries, even when the harm inflicted is de minimus.
But the problem is that shame would also kick in for stuff like a young girl hyping up her debut on Onlyfans once she turns 18 (link is mostly SFW but you'll see some thirst trapping). The puritanical ethics required here would condemn both the voyeuristic act and the exhibitionist act.
Its rather schizophrenic that there's basically unlimited tolerance for (adult) women to produce pornographic content of themselves, but shame is still heaped upon the consumers, as if these weren't both inseparably linked and necessary components of the "empowerment" equation here.
Like I said before, worst of all worlds.
I've already said that I am pro-slut shaming.
That said, there's a difference between someone willingly posting their nudes and someone not doing that. I think the OnlyFans girl would have a harder case to make about being harmed by someone generating AI porn of her, versus a girl whom you think should just accept that all women are being punished for the OnlyFans girls.
There's a difference but I get confused about the secular reasons for why its meaningful.
Sex and nudity is supposedly no big deal, especially if you're attending a pride parade, but it absolutely IS a big deal when its someone's nudes hitting the internet, evidently. Shame, embarrassment, I dunno, it seems just taken as a given that it demeans the subject to be exposed in such a way. But if they publish those exact same images themselves, it is not demeaning?
There was a minor hullabaloo when I was in college involving 'Slutwalks' making it acceptable for women to wear skimpy clothes in public. And the "Free the Nipple" movement which, among other things, tried to make it acceptable for female nipples to appear on, e.g., instagram.
But then what I noticed is that almost no women (well, no attractive women) used this newfound power to actually go around in public topless or scantily clad, or post topless shots to IG. THEN came OF where they could monetize it and things REALLY got locked down.
So culturally we're told sex and nudity aren't a big deal, don't be prudes. But ECONOMICALLY, people (mostly males) spend billions upon billions of dollars to acquire sex and view nude women. So the only distinction I can really grasp is "am I getting paid for this or not." Which applies to many things, granted.
But where does that leave us?
Which is why the difference is meaningful in the first place. The sharing of intimate images is something women in general want to be paid for, so obviously doing that without permission is bad; meanwhile the other sex stuff doesn't have anything to do with that, so it is OK, and it works as a "haha, ur a prude" trap for people who can't or won't understand the former dynamic is all that matters.
It's not any more complicated than that.
Yeah, but she also wants to completely dodge the reputation that comes with trading her sexuality for money.
And of course, there's still often a guy in the picture actually arranging for her to sell this stuff. In this case, OF clearly profits far and above what all but their top-performing producers do. And its owned by a dude.
I'm not even denying that there's a fundamental transactional nature to all this stuff, even if you're in it for marriage and kids... its just that its now literally reduced to a commodity that gets haggled over, and people who 'have' to pay for it are viewed as losers, whilst anyone who is successful at getting attractive women to give it up without explicitly paying is either extremely crafty or is inherently high status.
Let me repeat that: sex is a commodity which can be purchased at various price points depending on the quality, so its not hard to acquire in the abstract, but being able to acquire it without spending money somehow makes you a God amongst men. Our old-school ape-wiring seems somewhat at odds with our later 'homo economicus' upgrades.
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