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This thought occurred after Christmas this year during a few activities where family members wanted to play a game, so they pulled up a YouTube video to demonstrate how a thing is done, and it was incredibly gross.
99% of modern kids will never have the ability to be forgotten- parents post their pictures online when they're not able to give consent, including embarrassing and compromised photos. This includes YouTube videos of moms putting their daughters in compromised positions and posting them on the video site.
Such videos are easy to find- the mom often speaks, and their prepubescent girls do a seemingly-innocuous activity. Those girls will always have those videos on a stranger's hard drive at best, or at worst, end up as data used for ai generation.
I'll note that I don't have a proposed solution to this. The laws on child-porn already exist, but this content skirts the edge of acceptability. The girls are usually 10-13, and doing an innocuous activity- like playing pattycake or ring around the rosie, usually in mostly-acceptable clothing.
When you stumble on one such video, you can tell what I'm talking about. It's the camera angles.
For this reason, I come to TheMotte- have you seen the videos I'm talking about? What do you think about them, and how would you evaluate whether or not such content is okay to post online?
If you have kids, do you worry that there's some random perusing Instagram or willing to train ai on them?
After seeing these things, I can't get it out of my head, nor can I come up with a reasonable solution.
The realm of responsibility falls on the parents. Just as they're responsible for feeding and clothing their kids and deciding what school/clubs/activities to send them to, they're just as responsible for what they choose to put online. Any personal videos you want to put out that you don't want any strangers to see should be private and access heavily restricted.
People can and will sexualize anything and everything, see rule 34. This is a touchy subject but I'm not sure we can or should do more than we already do, which is banning any explicit sexual content of children and socially ostracizing those with that kind of desire. But you can't stop or control what people think, and I draw the uncomfortable line at turning those desires into actions. If they're just engaging in masturbation in the privacy of their own home, then while disgusting, isn't doing any actual harm. But if they start compiling videos to make it easier for others to see, or invite others into their fetishes, or start reaching out to the parents/child then they are engaging in actions that actually have an impact on the person, and punishment should take place here.
Did you mean the other way around? I think I would be mortified if they were directly some captured in some internet stranger's hard drive, ai generation not so much since the output is not the same as the input. Maybe you meant specifically about deepfakes, that is something I haven't come to terms with myself since I haven't given it much thought yet.
My opinions are mostly the same as yours, but there is a potential issue in that it's difficult to exist on the internet with literally no presence.
That is, pervs who never interact with children directly are still clicking on and watching certain videos that fulfill their criteria for desirable content, which boosts the metrics on those videos according to the algorithms on the website, be it Youtube or Instagram or something else. This both makes said content more visible to other people, and provides positive feedback that this is the sort of content that becomes popular. People who care about being a "successful influencer" pay attention to popular content from other people, and also popularity of their own content, and are more likely to replicate things that were successful. In a certain respect it's sort of like AI training but in other people's brains.
Therefore, an army of pervs attempting to be stealthy but still being caught by the algorithm still end up incentivizing young girls to produce less appropriate content, even if the girls themselves don't realize why said content is popular.
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