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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   23791 thread views

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.

Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her.

Which is it? Either it's an image of her, or it's an AI generated image.

It seems like as a society we're going to have to learn how to distinguish photos of actual people and AI generated images that are amalgamations of many different people. Just like literature always had thinly-veiled fictional accounts of recognizable people we're going have synthetic images that resemble real people.

Which is it? Either it's an image of her, or it's an AI generated image.

Disingenuous, unless you think the concept of, say, drawing a picture of Taylor Swift is incoherent. You can generally tell whether a picture is of Taylor Swift, and among people who know her the same is presumably true of this girl.

I don't see how having an AI do it instead of a human changes anything morally relevant; at the very least you need to make the case that it does. You seem to just assume it as a default, but I see no reason for doing this.

Disingenuous, unless you think the concept of, say, drawing a picture of Taylor Swift is incoherent. You can generally tell whether a picture is of Taylor Swift, and among people who know her the same is presumably true of this girl.

Sure. Just like Devil Wears Prada is a fictional work that is nevertheless unmistakably about Anna Wintour.

Drawing a picture of Taylor Swift isn't a photograph. It's is not a depiction of something that really happened. You can draw a picture of Taylor Swift wearing a swastika-emblazoned sombrero while she drowns a puppy. Also fictional.

Just like Devil Wears Prada is a fictional work that is nevertheless unmistakably about Anna Wintour.

This seems totally different because no one could mistake it for real footage of Anna Wintour, whereas the whole reason the AI-generated image controversy is a thing now is that there is no longer any (easy) way to tell if an image is fake or not.

So on this theory if these images had a visible watermark (or other signifier) saying “AI GENERATED” then all the controversy would be extinguished?

Not really, as watermarks don't mean all that much, and don't prevent a realistic-seeming image of a real person from being lodged in viewers' minds.

If it was a cartoon version of a nude and therefore manifestly not real, there would be reduced controversy (though there'd still be some, especially if a large corporation assisted in helping a boy create it).

I'm having a real time figuring out what your mental model is here.

Wouldn't TDWP also cause a realistic-seeming image of a real person in the viewers' mind that is nevertheless fictional?

Putting images in people's heads is one aspect of the injury done. In the case of particularly life-like sexual images, it may make people look at someone differently, even if they don't want to. Deceiving people about whether someone actually posed for the pics is another aspect. Injuries compound.

I don't see the need to have a quickly describable mental model here, as there are overlapping questions of harm, consent, reputation and victimisation at play in this story and making all the relevant distinctions would require an essay.

To your question though, I do indeed think that "putting unfavorable images in people's heads" in fiction such as in The Devil Wears Prada (I haven't seen it) may be injurious. It may also be satire, or a truthful depiction (and these categories aren't mutually exclusive).

Whether that's bad luck for the target or deserving of punishment/damages depends on a host of details.

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This seems totally different because no one could mistake it for real footage of Anna Wintour, whereas the whole reason the AI-generated image controversy is a thing now is that there is no longer any (easy) way to tell if an image is fake or not.

Yeah, perhaps our culture will get to a point where a nude image of someone will be assumed to be fake. In which case creating a fake nude image of someone won't particularly harm them and therefore won't be treated as a serious wrong.

At a minimum, cultural (and legal) norms are going to have to catch up with these technological advances.

At a minimum, cultural (and legal) norms are going to have to catch up with these technological advances.

Rape was "worse than murder" crime because genetic testing, pregnancy testing and contraception did not exist. It still is, because of norms did not update.

Rape was "worse than murder" crime because genetic testing, pregnancy testing and contraception did not exist. It still is, because of norms did not update.

I see your point, but I'm not sure I agree. Arguably the potential sentences for murder are, generally speaking, more severe. I agree that people often get more upset about rape, but part of this is because rape is perceived as a crime that men commit on women.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose a man tortures and kills a random woman without raping her in any way. Would it have been perceived as worse if he had only raped her?

Last time I read about case of real rape when a soldier raped a woman killing her husband's first. Femininsts were be like how it again tells how mysogynistic our society is. To my knowledge, when "socioeconomic factors" lead to woman being murdered, few people are worried.

The very case that original post is about fake images of nudity and not about fake images of murders, is telling.

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Indeed. Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" was both not about the founder of Scientology and yea, it was obviously about him.

I don’t know about you, but I’m happy to call this an image of Henry VIII, even though it’s an artist-generated image and not a photograph.

Sure, artists rendition. And no one was beating artists up for unauthorized portraiture.

I feel like if that was an unflattering nude portrait of Henry VIII there would be issues.

But a flattering one would be ... fine?

People were most definitely beating up artists for portraiture of powerful individuals that displayed them in ways the powerful individuals didn't want to be seen. Same thing here, except that it's a minor girl.

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