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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   23971 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.

Notably, the girl was expelled (for a single term) for organising a public and violent beating of the boy:

She hit him a second time. Then, the principal said, the girl asked aloud: “Why am I the only one doing this?” Two classmates hit the boy, the principal said, before the 13-year-old climbed over a seat and punched and stomped on him.

Having an AI-generated picture which pretends to be you is legitimately hurtful, but fists and boots are pretty damn hurtful too.

“She’s already been out of school enough,” one of the girl’s attorneys, Matt Ory, told the board on Nov. 5. “She is a victim.

“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”

Martin, the superintendent, countered: “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”

Which seems like a pretty good way of summing it up, although it doesn't fly in public.

Which seems like a pretty good way of summing it up, although it doesn't fly in public.

We have no trouble saying that to male victims of DV if they so much as raise their voice against their female abuser. It only doesn't fly in public when applied to the demographic that is only allowed to be viewed as a victim.

I was being descriptive. The fuller quote is:

“She’s already been out of school enough,” one of the girl’s attorneys, Matt Ory, told the board on Nov. 5. “She is a victim.

“She,” he repeated, “is a victim.”

Martin, the superintendent, countered: “Sometimes in life we can be both victims and perpetrators.”

But the board was swayed. One member, Henry Lafont, said: “There are a lot of things in that video that I don’t like. But I’m also trying to put into perspective what she went through all day.” They allowed her to return to campus immediately. Her first day back at school was Nov. 7, although she will remain on probation until Jan. 29.

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