6 ms·

Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

42 points by alphabettsy 3y ago

Invictus0 3y ago
Should it be illegal for a kid to draw a "naked picture" of another kid?
- vivekd 3y ago
  In Canada it is illegal to make naked pictures of kids even with ai. Not sure about US
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    They also don't care about freedom of speech there (or anywhere) as much as they do in the US.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  It is reprehensible to be cruel to others; that is, to increase the net amount of grief in their life in order to derive some satisfaction for yourself. it does not matter how you go about doing it or under what cover you can obfuscate it.
  - vasdae 3y ago
    We are not talking reprehensible here, we are talking illegal.
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      The latter originates as a formalized description of the former. That despicable and selfish people frequently exploit the delay between the former and the latter does not excuse their behavior and certainly does not dismiss the misery, however small, their actions contribute to the world.
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  It's not just drawing though? In this it's creating a copy that's realistic enough to pass for an original, which can be psychologically taxing and damaging for a person, or a potential career/safety issue. I get the teenage impulse to do it, it's just a bad idea for everyone involved (any halfway decent teen would regret doing it as an adult).
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  That’s not comparable though since the deepfake is going to be photo-realistic and the image wasn’t just made but shared. As noted in the article it seems that making these sorts of images of real people is highly likely to be made illegal in its own right and the behaviour could be illegal already under different laws.
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    > That’s not comparable though since the deepfake is going to be photo-realistic and the image wasn’t just made but shared You can make a photorealistic drawing too, that can pass as a real photography (and with enough skill it will be better than whatever generative models can produce). The difference here is the lower barrier to make the images. But I think that even a photorealistic drawing, if made and distributed to others, should be considered a form of harassment
    - meheleventyone 3y ago
      I agree there’s no difference between making a fake photo-realistic image by hand or by AI. A crudely rendered drawing could also be a form of harassment as well but probably in different circumstances.
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      > But I think that even a photorealistic drawing, if made and distributed to others, should be considered a form of harassment. I agree, but critically, I think it's the harassment that matters, not the drawing. If someone draws something in the privacy of their own home (maybe or maybe not with the assistance of an AI), and the police find it in an unrelated search, they should have nothing to prosecute. Drawing is one way humans work through their thoughts and emotions; the act of putting pencil to paper—including digital pencil to digital paper—should never be illegal, lest we effectively create thought crime.
    - irrational 3y ago
      Yes, when I was in college I took an art class where we had to cut a magazine picture in half, glue it to a piece of paper, then draw the other half. Mine was good enough that unless you got up close, you couldn’t tell which was the photo and which was my drawing. If someone had taken a picture of it, you wouldn’t have been able to tell at all. Photorealistic drawings are very possible.
- mcphage 3y ago
  Do you think there's a difference between pornography and the word "BOOB" written on a piece of paper?
autoexec 3y ago
If they'd cut out their classmate's head from their yearbook photo and pasted it onto the body of a pornstar with elmer's glue would police have gotten involved? This type of bullying is as old as dirt. Bullies suck, and the kids who did this should get in some kind of trouble with the school and their parents, but this is not something police need to be involved in. The moral panic over deepfakes is ridiculous, but the endless push to give literal children police records for acting like dumb kids is what's actually dangerous.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  The article describes them as teens so they’re almost certainly old enough to experience some more serious repercussions for sexual harassment. It’s the old as dirt behaviour that this is “acting like dumb kids” so it should slide that helps perpetuate this sort of thing.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > It’s the old as dirt behaviour that this is “acting like dumb kids” so it should slide that helps perpetuate this sort of thing. I never said it "should slide". This sort of behaviour is common in children and childhood is exactly the time to teach them to be better. This is a matter for the school and the parents to handle. There is zero reason for police to be involved in any of it.
    - sidlls 3y ago
      That depends on the extent of the harm. Some bullying is “mild” and recoverable. Assault is another matter. Reaching for the law as the first step is not a good idea, but excluding the possibility simply because they’re minors would be a mistake.
      - irrational 3y ago
        I just reread the article. Where are you seeing that someone was assaulted?
ge96 3y ago
See if the og were NFTs...
nvy 3y ago
Eventually, society is going to have to come around to the fact that this technology can't be legislated away. It's here to stay and it's only going to improve. I hope we get to a place where the automatic assumption upon seeing any digital image is that it's probably fake.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  Or we can just recognise creating and distributing fake images of real people as the harassment that it is.
  - nvy 3y ago
    Sure, and I agree that it's harassment, and reprehensible, but there will always be people who do it because there are a lot of shitty people out there.
    - meheleventyone 3y ago
      Right so we can criminalise and tackle that. Rather than shrug our shoulders about it.
      - nvy 3y ago
        We can criminalize it, sure. I just doubt it will appreciably curb the behavior.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        We can criminalize adults for that. We're not supposed to criminalize children for acting inappropriately, we're supposed to teach/parent them. Either way, there should be no shrugging of shoulders and allowing harassment to go unaddressed.
        meheleventyone 3y ago
        It’s not just acting inappropriately it’s hurting other people. We wouldn’t (well hopefully) excuse rape or murder in the same way. Children very much can commit heinous acts and should with appropriate investigation into what they understand of it be held accountable. These are also teens rather than children. A lot of places allow people in their teen years all sorts of rights like the legal ability to consent to sex. I’d suggest they can understand and be culpable for sexual harassment at that age.
s5300 3y ago
[dead]
Reubend 3y ago
Our society will quickly need to adapt to the idea that seeing a photo of something no longer means it really happened. There are going to be fake videos, fake photos, fake articles, etc. Rather than burying our heads in the sand and making it illegal to produce those, I think the better long term approach is to teach our children to be skeptical, and to emphasize that we can't believe everything that's shared on the internet.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Speaking generally here, but I'd hoped that decades of photoshop would have been enough to inspire some healthy skepticism for pictures and hollywood/instagram filters enough to do it for video. On the plus side, the advancing technology can provide plausible deniability if a genuine intimate photo/video gets leaked, although as long as we're hoping for humanity to evolve a little, maybe we can collectively get a little less prudish about the human body and sex too.
- lordfrito 3y ago
  > Our society will quickly need to adapt to the idea that seeing a photo of something no longer means it really happened. Yup. We're already sort of getting there. I'm already living in a world where I can't trust what I read. Soon I won't be able to trust what I see or hear online. Face to face interactions will be required for anything important. Not looking forward to this.
vinni2 3y ago
Why is no one talking about if the girls were underage?
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  Is it relevant, do you think? I would assume the girls - as classmates - are of a similar are to the "teen boys". There's unlikely to be a significant age differential, and it doesn't really change the ethical implications.
  - vinni2 3y ago
    yes it is relevant because it’s pornography of underage girls then these boys are guilty! https://www.forbes.com/sites/elijahclark/2023/10/31/pedophiles-using-ai-to-generate-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/elijahclark/2023/10/31/pedophil...
    - averageRoyalty 3y ago
      From the article you linked: > While some legal authorities argue against the legality of these AI-generated depictions, there is no established precedent for prosecuting their creation. It's possible that what they did was illegal regardless of the age of the girls. These laws however exist to protect children. Treating a bunch of hormonal teenagers the same as a 50 year old adult is unlikely to be a net positive to society.
hiisukun 3y ago
I have some experience with this in a previous job -- one of the commenters here is right: going back to before smart phones, there has always been cut & paste nudes/porn made by kids. From magazines, through jpgs, now even mkvs. However, even back in the day there has been quite the spectrum of just how bad this kind of thing is: one image of a crush, who is 17 (technically underage), shared with a best friend? Inappropriate but not across the line of "law enforcement action" even if the crush's parent is very offended. A google drive link with 100s of pornographic deepfakes, of a single person (or sometimes many students) from a school, many of them 12-16 years old, shared extensively across the internet? This is a proper serious problem. Kinda like the difference between throwing a rock at a bus vs detonating a bomb in a train station. Both are some amount of kinetic force, but the magnitude is wildly different. I'm not pretending that physical violence is the same as making pornographic imagery, but my experience in that field (no jokes plz!) shows a much stronger link than many would like to admit, from one to the next. It's useful for teenagers to learn where these boundaries are in their particular society - life is often more pleasant when ~everyone agrees on the local standards of behaviour and they are (mostly) followed. As for police action where I lived, it too followed a broad spectrum: on one end, there is arrest and court action which on occasion is definitely warranted (another pun, sorry). On the flipside, there's educating kids about the reality of the world they live in: If you share a nude, it might get shared again -- consider not including your face and your reproductive organs in the same picture. If someone generates a fake picture of you, it'll feel hurtful and you will be wronged, but what if they wrote something mean (and fake) about you? Eventually you will need to deal with the fact that some people are arses. Some combination of protecting victims (but also helping them grow a thick skin in this world), educating kids on what is appropriate so they can know there is some boundary where things move from 'funny' to 'wrong'. They usually already have a sense of 'private' vs 'public', though that distinction is a becoming lot blurrier/different for current young generations. And nothing above has anything really to do with 'AI'.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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42 points by alphabettsy 3y ago

Invictus0 3y ago

Should it be illegal for a kid to draw a "naked picture" of another kid?

vivekd 3y ago
In Canada it is illegal to make naked pictures of kids even with ai. Not sure about US
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  They also don't care about freedom of speech there (or anywhere) as much as they do in the US.
ChainOfFools 3y ago
It is reprehensible to be cruel to others; that is, to increase the net amount of grief in their life in order to derive some satisfaction for yourself. it does not matter how you go about doing it or under what cover you can obfuscate it.
- vasdae 3y ago
  We are not talking reprehensible here, we are talking illegal.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    The latter originates as a formalized description of the former. That despicable and selfish people frequently exploit the delay between the former and the latter does not excuse their behavior and certainly does not dismiss the misery, however small, their actions contribute to the world.
lusus_naturae 3y ago
It's not just drawing though? In this it's creating a copy that's realistic enough to pass for an original, which can be psychologically taxing and damaging for a person, or a potential career/safety issue. I get the teenage impulse to do it, it's just a bad idea for everyone involved (any halfway decent teen would regret doing it as an adult).
meheleventyone 3y ago
That’s not comparable though since the deepfake is going to be photo-realistic and the image wasn’t just made but shared. As noted in the article it seems that making these sorts of images of real people is highly likely to be made illegal in its own right and the behaviour could be illegal already under different laws.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > That’s not comparable though since the deepfake is going to be photo-realistic and the image wasn’t just made but shared You can make a photorealistic drawing too, that can pass as a real photography (and with enough skill it will be better than whatever generative models can produce). The difference here is the lower barrier to make the images. But I think that even a photorealistic drawing, if made and distributed to others, should be considered a form of harassment
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    I agree there’s no difference between making a fake photo-realistic image by hand or by AI. A crudely rendered drawing could also be a form of harassment as well but probably in different circumstances.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    > But I think that even a photorealistic drawing, if made and distributed to others, should be considered a form of harassment. I agree, but critically, I think it's the harassment that matters, not the drawing. If someone draws something in the privacy of their own home (maybe or maybe not with the assistance of an AI), and the police find it in an unrelated search, they should have nothing to prosecute. Drawing is one way humans work through their thoughts and emotions; the act of putting pencil to paper—including digital pencil to digital paper—should never be illegal, lest we effectively create thought crime.
  - irrational 3y ago
    Yes, when I was in college I took an art class where we had to cut a magazine picture in half, glue it to a piece of paper, then draw the other half. Mine was good enough that unless you got up close, you couldn’t tell which was the photo and which was my drawing. If someone had taken a picture of it, you wouldn’t have been able to tell at all. Photorealistic drawings are very possible.
mcphage 3y ago
Do you think there's a difference between pornography and the word "BOOB" written on a piece of paper?

autoexec 3y ago

If they'd cut out their classmate's head from their yearbook photo and pasted it onto the body of a pornstar with elmer's glue would police have gotten involved? This type of bullying is as old as dirt. Bullies suck, and the kids who did this should get in some kind of trouble with the school and their parents, but this is not something police need to be involved in. The moral panic over deepfakes is ridiculous, but the endless push to give literal children police records for acting like dumb kids is what's actually dangerous.

meheleventyone 3y ago
The article describes them as teens so they’re almost certainly old enough to experience some more serious repercussions for sexual harassment. It’s the old as dirt behaviour that this is “acting like dumb kids” so it should slide that helps perpetuate this sort of thing.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > It’s the old as dirt behaviour that this is “acting like dumb kids” so it should slide that helps perpetuate this sort of thing. I never said it "should slide". This sort of behaviour is common in children and childhood is exactly the time to teach them to be better. This is a matter for the school and the parents to handle. There is zero reason for police to be involved in any of it.
  - sidlls 3y ago
    That depends on the extent of the harm. Some bullying is “mild” and recoverable. Assault is another matter. Reaching for the law as the first step is not a good idea, but excluding the possibility simply because they’re minors would be a mistake.
    - irrational 3y ago
      I just reread the article. Where are you seeing that someone was assaulted?

ge96 3y ago

See if the og were NFTs...

nvy 3y ago

Eventually, society is going to have to come around to the fact that this technology can't be legislated away. It's here to stay and it's only going to improve. I hope we get to a place where the automatic assumption upon seeing any digital image is that it's probably fake.

meheleventyone 3y ago
Or we can just recognise creating and distributing fake images of real people as the harassment that it is.
- nvy 3y ago
  Sure, and I agree that it's harassment, and reprehensible, but there will always be people who do it because there are a lot of shitty people out there.
  - meheleventyone 3y ago
    Right so we can criminalise and tackle that. Rather than shrug our shoulders about it.
    - nvy 3y ago
      We can criminalize it, sure. I just doubt it will appreciably curb the behavior.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      We can criminalize adults for that. We're not supposed to criminalize children for acting inappropriately, we're supposed to teach/parent them. Either way, there should be no shrugging of shoulders and allowing harassment to go unaddressed.
      - meheleventyone 3y ago
        It’s not just acting inappropriately it’s hurting other people. We wouldn’t (well hopefully) excuse rape or murder in the same way. Children very much can commit heinous acts and should with appropriate investigation into what they understand of it be held accountable. These are also teens rather than children. A lot of places allow people in their teen years all sorts of rights like the legal ability to consent to sex. I’d suggest they can understand and be culpable for sexual harassment at that age.

s5300 3y ago

[dead]

Reubend 3y ago

Our society will quickly need to adapt to the idea that seeing a photo of something no longer means it really happened. There are going to be fake videos, fake photos, fake articles, etc. Rather than burying our heads in the sand and making it illegal to produce those, I think the better long term approach is to teach our children to be skeptical, and to emphasize that we can't believe everything that's shared on the internet.

autoexec 3y ago
Speaking generally here, but I'd hoped that decades of photoshop would have been enough to inspire some healthy skepticism for pictures and hollywood/instagram filters enough to do it for video. On the plus side, the advancing technology can provide plausible deniability if a genuine intimate photo/video gets leaked, although as long as we're hoping for humanity to evolve a little, maybe we can collectively get a little less prudish about the human body and sex too.
lordfrito 3y ago
> Our society will quickly need to adapt to the idea that seeing a photo of something no longer means it really happened. Yup. We're already sort of getting there. I'm already living in a world where I can't trust what I read. Soon I won't be able to trust what I see or hear online. Face to face interactions will be required for anything important. Not looking forward to this.

vinni2 3y ago

Why is no one talking about if the girls were underage?

averageRoyalty 3y ago
Is it relevant, do you think? I would assume the girls - as classmates - are of a similar are to the "teen boys". There's unlikely to be a significant age differential, and it doesn't really change the ethical implications.
- vinni2 3y ago
  yes it is relevant because it’s pornography of underage girls then these boys are guilty! https://www.forbes.com/sites/elijahclark/2023/10/31/pedophiles-using-ai-to-generate-child-sexual-abuse-imagery/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/elijahclark/2023/10/31/pedophil...
  - averageRoyalty 3y ago
    From the article you linked: > While some legal authorities argue against the legality of these AI-generated depictions, there is no established precedent for prosecuting their creation. It's possible that what they did was illegal regardless of the age of the girls. These laws however exist to protect children. Treating a bunch of hormonal teenagers the same as a 50 year old adult is unlikely to be a net positive to society.

hiisukun 3y ago

I have some experience with this in a previous job -- one of the commenters here is right: going back to before smart phones, there has always been cut & paste nudes/porn made by kids. From magazines, through jpgs, now even mkvs. However, even back in the day there has been quite the spectrum of just how bad this kind of thing is: one image of a crush, who is 17 (technically underage), shared with a best friend? Inappropriate but not across the line of "law enforcement action" even if the crush's parent is very offended. A google drive link with 100s of pornographic deepfakes, of a single person (or sometimes many students) from a school, many of them 12-16 years old, shared extensively across the internet? This is a proper serious problem. Kinda like the difference between throwing a rock at a bus vs detonating a bomb in a train station. Both are some amount of kinetic force, but the magnitude is wildly different. I'm not pretending that physical violence is the same as making pornographic imagery, but my experience in that field (no jokes plz!) shows a much stronger link than many would like to admit, from one to the next. It's useful for teenagers to learn where these boundaries are in their particular society - life is often more pleasant when ~everyone agrees on the local standards of behaviour and they are (mostly) followed. As for police action where I lived, it too followed a broad spectrum: on one end, there is arrest and court action which on occasion is definitely warranted (another pun, sorry). On the flipside, there's educating kids about the reality of the world they live in: If you share a nude, it might get shared again -- consider not including your face and your reproductive organs in the same picture. If someone generates a fake picture of you, it'll feel hurtful and you will be wronged, but what if they wrote something mean (and fake) about you? Eventually you will need to deal with the fact that some people are arses. Some combination of protecting victims (but also helping them grow a thick skin in this world), educating kids on what is appropriate so they can know there is some boundary where things move from 'funny' to 'wrong'. They usually already have a sense of 'private' vs 'public', though that distinction is a becoming lot blurrier/different for current young generations. And nothing above has anything really to do with 'AI'.

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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