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> The concern about fake pictures of people naked is stupid. The same process mentioned above happens to naked pictures of people: they lose evidentiary value.

by acdha 2y ago

> The concern about fake pictures of people naked is stupid. The same process mentioned above happens to naked pictures of people: they lose evidentiary value. This is too narrow: it presumes rational contexts where evidence will be evaluated critically, and it assumes a mild, uncreative attacker but harassers are good at exploiting social norms. The damage caused by this kind of harassment isn’t seeing yourself nude as much as wondering or knowing what other people will think, and there’s no way to undo that. Even if people _say_ they believe that the pictures are fake, the victim may be wondering whether that’s really true for the rest of their life. The other thing to think about is that we’re really just getting started. Most of the deepfakes which the average person has seen are fairly mainstream porn nudes: there’s a huge control issue but in general there are worse things than people thinking you have a star’s body. We’re going to see those worse things soon: it won’t be a porn fantasy but things designed to degrade and more targeted - if the target had body issues, exaggerating them; punishing the person who rejected someone by faking them looking not like a porn star but less attractive and having degrading sex with someone unpopular, knowing that a bunch of people are going to think “well, he would say that”; make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; etc. Because the attacks are being directed by humans, they’re going to adjust and find what works. Anything which forces an official investigation is going to be especially bad because we can’t just ignore things like child abuse so it’s going to be like SWATing where there’s an ugly period where the wrong teenager can get an incredibly high-leverage response with a single message.

Manuel_D 2y ago
> make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; The harm comes from falsely accusing someone of rape, not the deepfake itself. This can be done with or without a deepfake. As a counterpoint: if a group of boys find their teacher is really hot and they use Stable Diffusing inpaint her clothes to create a fictional naked photo, where's the harm? They could also just use their imaginations to fantasize about what she'd look naked. I don't really see that much different - they're essentially delegating the imagination to the computer. The typical response is that if the teacher discovers these photos, that discovery could be disturbing for her. I do agree. But at the same time, if these boys walk up to her and tell her "I just jacked off to fantasies of you last night", that's also probably disturbing too. Like the first scenario, the deepfake is tangential to the actual harm: the harm stems from telling another person that you've fantasized about them sexually - not the exact nature of whether that fantasy was produced by a human brain or a silicon one.
- RajT88 2y ago
  Women get fired from jobs for naked photos of them leaking - photos obtained through illicit means, photos taken consensually or even selfies not shared with anyone in particular. As long as it looks convincing, when deepfakes start circulating like this, the object of the deepfake will face consequences far in excess of what you are suggesting. Hell, some parts of the country even obvious deepfakes may get a woman in trouble. Any woman, not just a teacher.
  - Manuel_D 2y ago
    Again, the harm comes from dishonesty not the deepfake itself. Calling someone's employer and falsely accusing them of stealing from their past companies or abusing their co-workers achieves the same purpose. If a company fires an employee because of fictional content, the blame lies with the company.
    - RajT88 2y ago
      > If a company fires an employee because of fictional content, the blame lies with the company. You explain to me how to fix that. There's a whole culture around treating women (and their bodies) as a corruptive moral threat, which has proven completely intractable. God forbid a real photo leak somehow - the woman still gets fired. That shouldn't happen, but our culture seems to insist on it. > Again, the harm comes from dishonesty not the deepfake itself. This is a weird argument. "The deepfake is a thing; it has no agency and thus is not capable of any harm of its own accord" seems to be akin to the argument of "Guns don't kill people; people kill people". It similarly misses the trees for the forest.
- acdha 2y ago
  > The harm comes from falsely accusing someone of rape, not the deepfake itself. This can be done with or without a deepfake. The person I was responding to said they were not “a concern at all”, but clearly that can’t be true if they make harassment and false accusations easier and more damaging. Similarly, we shouldn’t dismiss the impact of making those attacks stronger - it’s like saying that giving a kid a gun is no big deal because they used to have a slingshot. You missed the reason why I mentioned that scenario. It’s not just that the targeted teacher gets harassed — and, let’s be honest, that’d be a lot of aggression just below the threshold of serious disciplinary measures – but that something like that would if found trigger a mandatory law enforcement response. School employees tend to be mandatory reporters so they don’t have the option of saying “that’s a fake, he’s probably lying”. The real harm is that unless it’s a very obvious fake, the victim is going to have to go through a police investigation into their personal life. Want to bet that’d especially be used to target people who have reason not to trust the police because they’re gay, brown, not an evangelical Christian, etc.?

by acdha 2y ago

Manuel_D 2y ago

> make some teacher’s life hell by faking them having sex with a student; The harm comes from falsely accusing someone of rape, not the deepfake itself. This can be done with or without a deepfake. As a counterpoint: if a group of boys find their teacher is really hot and they use Stable Diffusing inpaint her clothes to create a fictional naked photo, where's the harm? They could also just use their imaginations to fantasize about what she'd look naked. I don't really see that much different - they're essentially delegating the imagination to the computer. The typical response is that if the teacher discovers these photos, that discovery could be disturbing for her. I do agree. But at the same time, if these boys walk up to her and tell her "I just jacked off to fantasies of you last night", that's also probably disturbing too. Like the first scenario, the deepfake is tangential to the actual harm: the harm stems from telling another person that you've fantasized about them sexually - not the exact nature of whether that fantasy was produced by a human brain or a silicon one.

RajT88 2y ago
Women get fired from jobs for naked photos of them leaking - photos obtained through illicit means, photos taken consensually or even selfies not shared with anyone in particular. As long as it looks convincing, when deepfakes start circulating like this, the object of the deepfake will face consequences far in excess of what you are suggesting. Hell, some parts of the country even obvious deepfakes may get a woman in trouble. Any woman, not just a teacher.
- Manuel_D 2y ago
  Again, the harm comes from dishonesty not the deepfake itself. Calling someone's employer and falsely accusing them of stealing from their past companies or abusing their co-workers achieves the same purpose. If a company fires an employee because of fictional content, the blame lies with the company.
  - RajT88 2y ago
    > If a company fires an employee because of fictional content, the blame lies with the company. You explain to me how to fix that. There's a whole culture around treating women (and their bodies) as a corruptive moral threat, which has proven completely intractable. God forbid a real photo leak somehow - the woman still gets fired. That shouldn't happen, but our culture seems to insist on it. > Again, the harm comes from dishonesty not the deepfake itself. This is a weird argument. "The deepfake is a thing; it has no agency and thus is not capable of any harm of its own accord" seems to be akin to the argument of "Guns don't kill people; people kill people". It similarly misses the trees for the forest.
acdha 2y ago
> The harm comes from falsely accusing someone of rape, not the deepfake itself. This can be done with or without a deepfake. The person I was responding to said they were not “a concern at all”, but clearly that can’t be true if they make harassment and false accusations easier and more damaging. Similarly, we shouldn’t dismiss the impact of making those attacks stronger - it’s like saying that giving a kid a gun is no big deal because they used to have a slingshot. You missed the reason why I mentioned that scenario. It’s not just that the targeted teacher gets harassed — and, let’s be honest, that’d be a lot of aggression just below the threshold of serious disciplinary measures – but that something like that would if found trigger a mandatory law enforcement response. School employees tend to be mandatory reporters so they don’t have the option of saying “that’s a fake, he’s probably lying”. The real harm is that unless it’s a very obvious fake, the victim is going to have to go through a police investigation into their personal life. Want to bet that’d especially be used to target people who have reason not to trust the police because they’re gay, brown, not an evangelical Christian, etc.?