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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   24143 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.

Just the generating user? The tool that does the generating?

I think 'tool' is not a good word in this context, because it covers many different things.

The classic way to create fake nudes would be non-AI Photoshop (or GIMP). It does not know anything about nudes, you will have to find a suitable body picture to paste the face onto yourself. This is analogous to a kitchen knife as a tool for violence.

AI image generation is a very different ballpark. Basically you can just upload a picture of your victim and click the undress button, I imagine. This is analogous to a squad of marines being a tool for violence.

I am under no illusion that we can rid the world of the undressing AIs. A smart kid can still download some deepfake software and create his nudes that way (or even fall back to Photoshop). But I am also sure that OpenAI, Anthrophic and Google will at least have tried to build in safeguards so that their image generation systems will not undress minors. By contrast, Grok's attitude seems to be 'it is fine unless you undress Elon Musk'. I see no reason to allow them to do this.

Of course, I also have zero sympathy for kids trading nudes of their classmates. While I am generally skeptical of the concept of computer-generated CSAM (because hentai seems a victimless crime, whatever the bra size), I have no problem with treating undressing-AI images of real minors as CSAM. As I expect some kids will learn shortly, distribution of CSAM is generally a serious charge, and no of the mitigating circumstances for sexting kids sending consensual nudes apply. We have mostly managed to train 15yo boys to not violently rape girls (in part due to legal consequences), and I am hopeful that we can also train them not to pass deepfakes of their classmates as well.

By contrast, Grok's attitude seems to be 'it is fine unless you undress Elon Musk'.

probably more like: portray him with perfect body. (I didn't check this!)

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