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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?
Yes. Consent and agency are necessary considerations in plenty of moral decisions/outcomes, sexuality included. It seems intuitive to me that the proactive decision to publish sexual content is a vastly different experience than having someone do it under your nose. Money need not apply.
A few (admittedly imperfect) analogies involving consent to illustrate my point:
In all these cases, the former option is fine when done at one's own volition, but become a problem when another actor steps in. There are almost certainly philosophical papers that provide the premise-by-premise reasoning for this sort of argument, but hopefully you get the picture.
In a way, the body, particularly the sexualized body, is something of a possession. It can be given and taken away, shown and hidden. In some sense, it is a commodity that we have "ownership" of and many consider it the sacred domain of the individual. Sexual acts are high stakes, which is why it is so terrible when they are done against one's will and why it is considered a statement when someone takes bold public action with their body, for better or worse. You could argue that it is demeaning to publish sexual content under some sort of moralist (i.e. public sexuality is inherently debasing) or consequentialist (i.e. public sexuality leads to negative behavioral outcomes), but these arguments are complementary rather than overriding to ideas of agency and consent, in my opinion.
Well I'm gonna have to drill down deeper as to your logic here, which I can accept as facially valid.
What is actually 'removed' when the image is published?
Similar with the secret, a breach of trust is a breach of trust, but unless you signed an NDA that expressly laid out how to calculate damages, then your remedy is "never trust that person again."
Vs. losing a kidney or having your money taken, where you can absolutely point to the thing that you lost and demand recompense for.
I would not be arguing this if we were talking about actual physical rape of a person, which is clearly a violation of a concept of 'bodily autonomy,' I think taking a photograph of someone/something is inherently less of a violation.
Publishing a photo is a step beyond, I can absolutely grant, but kind of as I alluded to before, the only actual dividing line I see between whether its a demeaning violation or not isn't in how the viewers receive and react to the image, but whether the original subject will get any money from its publication, not that they have lost something that was in their possession.
Like, consider a situation where a woman takes a nude photo, then fat fingers it and accidentally sends it to the wrong dude. Then, mortified, she demands that he delete it and excoriates him if he comments on it approvingly. Or comments on it at all.
Is HE in the wrong if he views and enjoys this image that wasn't intended for his consumption? Or is SHE in the wrong for sending unsolicited pornography to an unwitting recipient? Is he obligated to delete it? What's the difference? Once it has been sent, how is she harmed by it arriving to the wrong person?
Because I think if we take your express logic to any extreme, it also becomes objectionable to imagine someone naked, especially if you derive pleasure from it.
The examples I provided are not 1:1 analogues to sexuality but moreso illustrations of consent in practice. I don't believe there needs to be specific recompense in these situations for the interference of an outside actor to affect consent. In the case of a secret, you're correct that the victim has little to do other than not trust the person again. I think that's tangential, though: the secret-spreader has still committed a violation of some sort. The release of sexual explicit photos is similar. All that can be done is have them taken down, but it would be hard to argue that some principle of consent/agency wasn't violated in spite of this lack of direct recourse.
Taking a photo of someone is less of a violation than rape, sure, but a lesser violation is still a violation. Petty theft is less of a violation than grand larceny, and they're both prosecuted.
I'm not sure I totally follow your point about money. If I'm restating you correctly, you're saying that modern ideas about the acceptability of these things hinge on whether or not the woman gets paid, not the reaction of the viewer. My response to that would be: who cares about what the viewer thinks? Money is a useful moral fiat that people bend their preferences for all the time: they're employed. If someone forced me to work, that would be loathsome, but I do it for money. It is "reasonable" that many women bend their sexuality in this way, even if I find it socially problematic. I don't think it's somehow hypocritical or irrational for money to play a role in moderating peoples moral preferences. There's decades of social psychology research to support that idea. I'm not sure what your ideal outcome in that scenario would be.
The situation you paint is a bit too specific for me to argue in detail but overall I would say: if the woman sends an image accidentally and requests it be removed, doing so is basic common courtesy and respects her right to privacy. Of course, there is no mechanism whereby the recipient is obligated to do so, but it seems straightforward to me that he should do it. Perhaps in an appeal to the social contract, perhaps in respect for her autonomy - I can't argue it in great depth right now but I think you understand my point. He shouldn't be shamed if he finds it attractive - that's arguably involuntary - but doing anything to further exacerbate the uncomfortable situation is clearly morally dubious.
Yes, it is objectionable in my view to imagine someone naked without their consent. It's not a tremendous violation because it has minimal social consequences and effectively doesn't exist unless it's talked about, so I would never consider legislating it or even shaming anyone for doing it on occasion. We are human and we fantasize. That said, if I heard that someone was imagining the women passing them on the street as naked all day, I'd think less of them - a mental gooner is still a gooner. It's a matter of degree.
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