A mother and her 14-year-old daughter are advocating for better protections for victims after AI-generated nude images of the teen and other female classmates were circulated at a high school in New Jersey.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, officials are investigating an incident involving a teenage boy who allegedly used artificial intelligence to create and distribute similar images of other students – also teen girls - that attend a high school in suburban Seattle, Washington.
The disturbing cases have put a spotlight yet again on explicit AI-generated material that overwhelmingly harms women and children and is booming online at an unprecedented rate. According to an analysis by independent researcher Genevieve Oh that was shared with The Associated Press, more than 143,000 new deepfake videos were posted online this year, which surpasses every other year combined.
I don’t know what a reasonable"protection" looks like here: the only thing foresee is 14 year old boys getting felonies, but no one being protected.
Right, there are plenty of reactive measures available but the only proactive measures are either restricting availability of the source photos used or restricting use of the deep fake tools used. Everything beyond that is trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
At some point, communities and social circles need to be able to moderate themselves.
Disseminating nudes of peers should be grounds for ostracizing, but it really depends on the quality of people around you.
That doesn’t work. It’s nothing but an inconvenience to not talk to your neighbors or those around you. They’d just get even worse and make even worse friends online.
Ostracization doesn’t work. Ever. Period. If they’re bad enough, banishment works. Ostracization is just literally ignoring the problem.
Are we seriously going to try and use someone’s photos for dumb shit like this? Cone on, people just want something to wank to or someone to call over to have sex with, who the hell would actually do this?
Even if you don’t want to consider it CSAM, it is, at the very least, sexual harassment. The kids making and circulating these pictures and videos should be facing consequences. And the fear of consequences does offer some degree of protection at least.
It looks like pretty severe sexual harassment at best. Unfortunately the people I think are most likely to do it are teenagers with poor self control who don’t realize the severity.
I think if schools can implement appropriate restorative responses and education on the harm done that could be much more effective than decaigan punishments after the fact.
Should a teenager face consequences for drawing a picture of their classmate naked? What if they do it well? How is this at all different?
If they distribute the drawing, yes. And the difference is that a drawing is immediately recognisable as a drawing, but an AI generated image or video isn’t necessarily easily recognisable as not being real, so the social consequences for the person depicted can be much worse.
Methinks this problem is gonna get out of fucking hand. Welcome to the future, it sucks.
AI is out of the bag for all the good and bad it will do. Nothing will be safe on the internet, and hasn’t been for a long time now. Either we will get government monitored AI results or use AI to combat misuse of AI. Either way isn’t preventative. The next wild west frontier is upon us, and it’s full of bandits in hiding.
Maybe it is just me, but its why I think this is a bigger issue than just Hollywood.
The rights to famous people’s “images” are bought and sold all the time.
I would argue that the entire concept should be made illegal. Others can only use your image with your explicit permission and your image cannot be “owned” by anyone but yourself.
The fact that making a law like this isn’t a priority means this will get worse because we already have a society and laws that don’t respect our rights to control of our own image.
A law like this would also remove all the questions about youth and sex and instead make it a case of misuse of someone else’s image. In this case it could even be considered defamation for altering the image to make it seem like it was real. They defamed her by making it seem like she took nude photos of herself to spread around.
There are genuine reasons not to give people sole authority over their image though. “Oh that’s a picture of me genuinely doing something bad, you can’t publish that!”
Like, we still need to be able to have a public conversation about (especially political) public figures and their actions as photographed
Seems like a typical copyright issue. The copyright owner has a monopoly on the intellectual property, but there are (genuine reasons) fair use exceptions (for journalism, satire, academic, backup, etc.)
Reminder that the stated reason for copyrights to exist say all, per the US Constitution, is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Anything that occurs naturally falls outside the original rationale. We’ve experienced a huge expansion of the concept of intellectual property since then, but as far as I can tell there has never been a consensus on what purpose intellectual property rights are supposed to serve beyond the original conception.
Yeah I’m not stipulating a law where you can’t be held accountable for actions. Any actions you take as an individual are things you do that impact your image, of which you are in control. People using photographic evidence to prove you have done them is not a misuse of your image.
Making fake images whole cloth is.
The question of whether this technology will make such evidence untrustworthy is another conversation that sadly I don’t have enough time for right this moment.
If you have a picture of someone doing something bad you really should be talking to law enforcement not Faceboot. If it isnt so bad that it is criminal I wonder why it is your concern?
It’s not just “taking it to law enforcement”, it’s a freedom of the press issue.
That sounds pretty dystopian to me. Wouldn’t that make filming in public basically illegal?
In Germany it is illegal to make photos or videos of people who are identifieable (faces are seen or closeups) without asking for permission first. With exception of public events, as long as you do not focus on individuals. It doesn’t feel dystopian at all, to be honest. I’d rather have it that way than ending up on someone’s stupid vlog or whatever.
It is for actors, since you would be handing over the right to your likeness to studios for AI to reproduce for eternity.
It was one of the main issues for the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Well at least they’re getting paid for it. But someone could copy your likeness for free
The tools used to make these images can largely be ignored, as can the vast majority of what AI creates of people. Fake nudes and photos have been possible for a long time now. The biggest way we deal with them is to go after large distributors of that content.
When it comes to younger people, the penalty should be pretty heavy for doing this. But it’s the same as distributing real images of people. Photos that you don’t own. I don’t see how this is any different or how we treat it any differently than that.
I agree with your defamation point. People in general and even young people should be able to go after bullies or these image distributors for damages.
I think this is a giant mess that is going to upturn a lot of what we think about society but the answer isn’t to ban the tools or to make it illegal to use the tools however you want. The solution is the same as the ones we’ve created, just with more sensitivity.
Many years ago I mentioned this on reddit. Complaining how photographers can just take pictures of you or your property and do what they want with it. Of course the group mind attacked me.
Problem just seems to get worse by the year.
That’s because your proposal would make photography de facto illegal, because getting the rights to everyone and everything that appears in a photograph would be virtually impossible. Hell, most other kinds of visual art would be essentially illegal as well. There would be hardly anything but abstract art.
Bullshit.
Taking a photo of yourself or your family at a public landmark? Legal.
Taking a photo of yourself or your family at a celebration? Legal.
Zooming in on the local Catholic school to get a shot of some 12 year olds and putting it on the internet? Illegal.
We need to stop pretending that photography isn’t a thing and that there is zero expectation of privacy if someone can violate it. This is crap we see with police using infrared cameras to get around the need for warrants and the crap we see of people using drones to stalk. You have the right to be left the fuck alone and if someone wants to creep on teens well sorry you are out of luck.
Maybe I’m just naive of how many protections we’re actually granted but shouldn’t this already fall under CP/CSAM legislation in nearly every country?
If you make a picture today of someone based on how they looked 10 years ago, we say it’s depicting that person as the age they were 10 years ago. How is what age they are today relevant?
You mean the real person being depicted? So this wouldn’t apply to fake people?
Australia too. Hentai showing underage people is illegal here. From my understanding it’s all a little grey depending on the state and whether the laws are enforced, but if it’s about victimisation the law will be pretty clear.
Yes, underage people can be charged.
https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2019/01/teen-sexting-is-child-porn/
Edit: Of course this is actual pictures, not generated.
There might be an upside to all this, though maybe not for these girls: with enough of this people will eventually just stop believing any nude pictures “leaked” are real, which will be a great thing for people who had real nude pictures leaked - which, once on the Internet, are pretty hard to stop spreading - because other people will just presume they’re deepfakes.
Mind you, it would be a lot better if people in general culturally evolved beyond being preachy monkeys who pass judgment on others because they’ve been photographed in their birthday-suit, but that’s clearly asking too much so I guess simply people assuming all such things are deepfakes until proven otherwise is at least better than the status quo.
