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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.
Your logic suggests that you'd have no objection if a 13 year old girl published nudes with knowledge and consent.
Is that true?
Is consent the defining factor here?
I just want something on record.
I would mostly agree with this. Its just another example in the long list of examples why the consent standard when applied to sexuality and sexual interactions is more or less useless.
I don't think it is useless, but man, people do not seem to really know what they mean when they say "consent." Worse still, they don't really know what they mean when they say they "consent" to some activity.
Sex in particular, the emotional valence of the moment, and the intensity, can shift by the minute. Then, reassessed after the act, someone may decide that some particular part of it they 'agreed' to in the moment was actually a violation.
That is one of the main problems with consent as a standard. It does not hold up under any of the hard cases.
And with sex IN PARTICULAR, there is no reasonable way to go back and assess whether it was validly given or not or whether the lines were crossed. I noticed this issue in law school. "Wait, how the f@&k do you establish evidence for lack of consent when it all happens behind closed doors?"
Unless you film the whole interaction and that opens up the whole can of worms that we're discussing.
Yes, which is why intelligently-designed laws around sex sidestep the issue.
Let's look at the sex laws described in Deuteronomy and the social dynamics it encourages downstream of those things- remembering that this is at a time when asking people to deny their human instincts of immediate revenge was far lot more novel (and a lot more difficult due to lack of State capacity) than it is today, so we can say that these are laws/accommodations/compromises that are made because human biological instinct ultimately runs more along these lines than any modern view.
The relevant TL;DR here is:
If she actively cried rape, but in a place nobody could reasonably hear, she is assumed to have been raped by default and the judgment (of death) falls solely on the man. This protects the woman- if she actually values the life of the man, she won't run off somewhere this can't be detected (and because the penalty for rape and murder are otherwise the same, there's no other incentive for the man not to just kill her)[1].
If she didn't actively cry rape in a place someone could hear, then judgment falls on both (forced to marry if woman was unmarried, and death for both if married or engaged). This ensures consent [to having participated in the violation, also [0]] cannot be revoked after the fact, which protects men, and also ensures that- if they both did want this- the woman is bound to/invested in total secrecy for the same reason the man is. It also protects men from cuckoldry in an age where sex always results in babies[2], but this is more a "make sure our warriors don't burn down society by refusing to fight and instead throwing open the gates" thing.
Now, because modern society is objectively stacked in favor of women (and this observation is a point towards this interpretation), we observe that we still have the strictures of the first (that protect women) but without the benefits of the second (that protect men). That is why we push further and further into "consent can be revoked at any time"- that's simply what we should expect from female gender politics and the associated ignorance (intentional or otherwise) of the inherent moral hazard that being able to retroactively cry rape enables.
In a society that's objectively stacked in favor of men, by contrast, we should observe that the second case dominates. It looks a little different when this happens; there tend to be a lot of mistresses, wives divorcing left with nothing, fathers disowning their children, old women intentionally locked out from self-sufficiency, casual ass-slapping, and all the other things Boomer women (and their [progressive] daughters) complain about the 50s and 60s for featuring.
[0] Feminists get angry about "has to marry the rapist", but ignores that all sex [outside marriage] can trivially be called rape for the same reasons it's so easy today (and the community at that time would agree; there's no reason a woman would ever have sex for pleasure- something traditionalists and progressives agree on, as it's dishonorable). So the law here is "virginity is part of a woman's inherent value [normal men and women agree on this point completely provided contraceptives don't exist]; you break it, you buy it, and the woman is in charge of saying you broke it retroactively and at any time" (which is what progressives want to be able to do).
[1] If I recall correctly- and you'll have to correct me on this point- the US still has a version of this law (where it's some separate sex crime charge if either participant leaves their state of residence- in fact I'm pretty sure the mere suggestion of such is a crime).
[2] Traditionalists in particular will harp on and on about this because their instincts are incompatible with the technology that makes this so, but what that argument actually means is that the father of the family shouldn't be expected to lay down his life and toil to advance children that aren't his. This is an argument that doesn't directly apply to women, so women naturally assert this dynamic doesn't exist... until the young men refuse to fight an enemy that promises better terms for young men. (And yes, the lack of enemies in the West means women will further not see a need to co-operate until it's too late.)
But see, that's what consent is: it's simply a codification of who is assumed to have automatically cried rape. This is how "children can't consent" can even be a coherent sentence, because on dictionary reading it's nonsense. This case is also the steelman for having this law- traditionalists and progressives are actively harmed by the existence of sex in general so it's understandable- but naturally, most of the fight in this case is over who gets to be "a child" -> "who automatically cried rape".
Naturally, because young women (13+; both trads and progs call this "child" for property rights and anti-sexual-competition reasons respectively, but biology doesn't agree with their assessment) are sexual competition for women but not men, women will push as hard as they can to make sure the definition of "children"/"automatically-considered-raped-for-sympathetic-reasons" is as wide as possible. And I'd say "anyone who claims to be, at any time, ever" is pretty fucking wide already- the fact they semi-seriously want to set the age to 25 is proof they won't ever be satisfied with that.
Of course, setting it to "infinite" is just Deuteronomic law through the back door, and that's not going to happen as long as there are enough liberals (or liberal-sympathetic) who want to fuck more than one young woman. Hence the stalemate.
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