Schools and lawmakers are grappling with how to address a new form of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately targets girls.
Schools and lawmakers are grappling with how to address a new form of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately targets girls.
Yes, finding out that your peers have been sharing deep fake pornography of you is absolutely fine and a normal thing for young girls to go through in school. No girls have ever killed themselves because of this exact sort of thing, surely. This definitely will not add in any way to the way women and girls are made to feel entirely disgustingly dehumanized by every man or boy in their lives. Groups of men and boys reducing them and their bodies down to vivid sexual fantasies that they can quickly generate photo realistic images of.
If the person in the image is underaged then it should be classified as child pornography. If the woman who’s photo is being used hasnt consented to this then it should be classified as sexual exploitation.
Women and girls have faced degrees of this kind of sexual exploitation by men and boys since the latter half of the 20th century. But this is a severe escalation in that behavior. It should be illegal to do this and it should be prosecuted when and where it is found to occur.
It’s bullying with a sexual element. The fact that it uses AI or deepfakes is secondary, just as it was secondary when it was photoshop, just as it was secondary when it was cutting out photos. It’s always about using it bully someone.
This is different because it’s easier. It’s not really different because it (can be) more realistic, because it was never about being realistic, otherwise blatantly unrealistic images wouldn’t have been used to do it. Indeed, the fact that it can be realistic will help blunt the impact of the leaking of real nudes.
It’s sexually objectifying the bodies of girls and turning them into shared sexual fantasies their male peers are engaging in. It is ABSOLUTELY different because it is more realistic. We are talking about entire deep fake porngraphy production and distribution groups IN THEIR OWN SCHOOLS. The amount of teenage boys cutting pictures out and photoshopping them was nowhere near as common as this is fast becoming and it was NOT the same as seeing a naked body algorithmically derived to appear as realistic as possible.
Can you stop trying to find a silver lining in the sexual exploitation of teenage girls? You clearly don’t understand the kinds of long term psychological harm that is caused by being exploited in this way. It was also exploitative and also fucked up when it was in photoshop, this many orders of magnitude more sophisticated and accessible.
Youre also wrong that this is about bullying. Its an introduction to girls being tools for male sexual gratification. It’s LITERALLY commodifiying teenage girls as sexual experiences and then sharing them in groups together. It’s criminal. The consent of the individual has been entirely erased. Dehumanization in its most direct form. It should be against the law and it should be prosecuted very seriously wherever it is found to occur.
Can you please use words by their meaning?
Also I’ll have to be blunt, but - every human has their own sexuality, with their own level of “drive”, so to say, and their dreams.
And it’s absolutely normal to dream of other people. Including sexually. Including those who don’t like you. Not only men do that, too. There are no thought crimes.
So talking about that being easier or harder you are not making any argument at all.
However. As I said elsewhere, the actions that really harm people should be classified legally and addressed. Like sharing such stuff. But not as making child pornography because it’s not, and not like sexual exploitation because it’s not.
It’s just that your few posts I’ve seen in this thread seem to say that certain kinds of thought should be illegal, and that’s absolute bullshit. And laws shouldn’t be made based on such emotions.
I don’t know where you’re getting this “thought crime” stuff. They’re talking about boys distributing deepfake nudes of their classmates. They’re not talking about individuals fantasizing in the privacy of their own homes. You have to read all of the words in the sentences, my friend.
If a boy fantasises sexually about a girl, is that harmful to her? If he tells his friends about it? No, this is not harmful - these actions do not affect her in any way. What affects the girl is how the boys might then treat her differently than they would do someone they don’t find sexually attractive.
The solution, in both cases, has to be to address the harmful behaviour. The only arguments for criminalising deepfakes themselves are also arguments for criminalising sexual fantasies. that is why people are talking about thought crime, because once you criminalise things that are harmless on their own, but which might down the line lead to directly harmful behaviour, there is no other distinction.
Both of these, for example, apply just as readily to discussing a shared sexual fantasy about someone who didn’t agree to it.
No distinction, that is, other than this is new and icky. I don’t want government policy to be dictated by fear of the new and by what people find icky, though. I do lots of stuff people find icky.
No an image that is shared and distributed is not the same as a fantasy in someone’s head. That is deranged. Should CSAM also be legal because making it illegal is like criminalizing the fantasies of pedophiles? Absolutely insane logical framework you have there.
This isnt fantasy. It is content. It is media. It is material. It is produced without the consent of the girls and women being sexualized and it commodifies their existence, literally transforming the idea of them into sexual media consumed for the gratification of boys and men.
It is genuinely incredible to me that you could be so unempathetic, so impassive, so detached from the real world and the consequences of this, that you could even make this comparison. You have seemingly no idea what youre talking about if you believe that pornography is the same thing as mental fantasies.
And even in the case of mental fantasies, are those all good? Is it really a good thing that boys see the mere existence of the girls around them as inherently some kind of sexual availability?
When someone makes child porn they put a child in a sexual situation - which is something that we have amassed a pile of evidence is extremely harmful to the child.
For all you have said - “without the consent” - “being sexualised” - “commodifies their existence” - you haven’t told us what the harm is. If you think those things are in and of themselves harmful then I need to know more about what you mean because:
I am not unempathetic, but I attribute the blame for what makes me feel bad about the situation is that girls are being made to feel bad and ashamed not that a particular technology is now being used in one step of that.
Are you OK with sexually explicit photos of children taken without their knowledge? They’re not being actively put in a sexual situation if you’re snapping photos with a hidden camera in a locker room, for example. You ok with that?
The harm is:
Historically, the respectability of a woman depended on her sexuality. In many conservative cultures and communities, that is still true. Spreading the message that deepfakes are some particular horrible form of harassment reinforces that view.
If having your head on the model of a nude model is a terrible crime, then what does that say about the nude model? What does it say about women who simply happen to develop a larger bosom or lips? What does it say about sex before marriage?
The implicit message here is simply harmful to girls and women.
That doesn’t mean that we should tolerate harassment. But it needs to be understood that we can do no more to stop this kind of harassment than we can do to stop any other kind.
Spoken like someone who hasn’t been around women.
This is just apologia for the sexual commodification and exploitation of girls and women. There literally is no girl being sexually liberated here, she has literally had the choice taken from her. Sexual liberation does NOT mean “boys and men can turn all women into personal maturation aids”. This ENFORCES patriarchy and subjugation of women. It literally teaches girls that their bodies do not belong to them, that its totally understandable for boys to strip them of humanity itself and turn them into sex dolls.
The most deepfaked women are certainly actresses or musicians; attractive people that appear on screens and are known by much of the population.
In some countries, they do not allow people to appear on-screen exactly because of that. Or at least, that’s one justification. If the honor or humanity of a woman depends on sexual feelings that she might or might not arouse in men, then women cannot be free. And men probably can’t be free either.
At no point have I claimed that anyone is being liberated here. I do not know what will happen. I’m just pointing out how your message is harmful.
Sexual attraction doesn’t necessarily involve dehumanization. Unlike most other kinds of interest in a human being, it doesn’t require interest in their personality, but these are logically not the same.
In general you are using emotional arguments for things that work not through emotion, but through literal interpretation. That’s like using metric calculations for a system that expects imperial. Utterly useless.
No, it’s not. It’s literally a photorealistic drawing based on a photo (and a dataset to make the generative model). No children have been abused to produce it. Laws work literally.
No, because the woman is not being literally sexually exploited. Her photo being used without consent is, I think, subject of some laws. There are no new fundamental legal entities involved.
I think I agree. But it’s neither child pornography nor sexual exploitation and can’t be equated to them.
There are already existing laws for such actions, similar to using a photo of the victim and a pornographic photo, paper, scissors, pencils and glue. Or, if you think the situation is radically different, there should be new punishable crimes introduced.
Otherwise it’s like punishing everyone caught driving while drunk for non-premeditated murder. One is not the other.
Hey so, at least in the US, drawings can absolutely be considered CSAM
Thank you. Focusing on the harm the victims is the right way to understand this issue. Too many people in here hunting for a semantic loophole.