Julia, 21, has received fake nude photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence. The phenomenon is exploding.
“I’d already heard about deepfakes and deepnudes (…) but I wasn’t really aware of it until it happened to me. It was a slightly anecdotal event that happened in other people’s lives, but it wouldn’t happen in mine”, thought Julia, a 21-year-old Belgian marketing student and semi-professional model.
At the end of September 2023, she received an email from an anonymous author. Subject: "Realistic? “We wonder which photo would best resemble you”, she reads.
Attached were five photos of her.
In the original content, posted on her social networks, Julia poses dressed. In front of her eyes are the same photos. Only this time, Julia is completely naked.
Julia has never posed naked. She never took these photos. The Belgian model realises that she has been the victim of a deepfake.
This is going to be a serious issue in the future - either society changes and these things are going to be accepted or these kind of generating ai models have to be banned. But that’s still not going to be a “security” against it…
I also think we have to come up with digital watermarks that are easy to use…
With ai and digital art… What is real? What is a person? What is a cartoon or a similar but not same likeness? In some cases what even is nudity? How old is an ai image? How can anything then be legal or illegal?
I think there’s a big difference between creating them and spreading them, and putting punishments on spreading nudes against someone’s will, real or fake is a better 3rd option. The free speech implications of banning software that’s capable of creating them is too broad and fuzzy, but I think that putting harsh penalties on spreading them on the grounds of harassment would be clear cut and effective. I didn’t see a big difference in between spreading revenge porn and deep fakes and we already have laws against spreading revenge porn.
Honestly, I see it as kinda freeing. Now people don’t have to worry about nudes leaking any more, since you can just say they’re fake. Somebody starts sending around deepfakes of me? OK, whatever, weirdo, it’s not real.
I’m guessing it’s easier to feel that way if your name is Justin.
If it was Justine, you might have issues.
Weird how that works.
Fair enough. Ideally it would be the same for women too, but we’re not there as a society yet.
Yeah, sorry - I disagree on every level with your take.
I am also convinced that at least the LLMs will soon destroy themselves, due to the simple fact that “garbage in, garbage out”.
Where did it say anything about a Ministry of Truth deciding what can be posted online? Making it illegal and having a 3rd party decide if every post is allowed are two very different things
If it’s illegal then there are ramifications for the platform, the user posting it, and the tool that created it.
Content moderation is already a thing so it’s nothing new. Just one more thing on the list to check for when a post is reported
Making it illegal and having a 3rd party decide if every post is allowed are two very different things
Depends on the scale. If you’re a black man in the South in 1953, having a 3rd party decide whether you can do something means you can’t do that thing.
I’m not speaking to this particular topic, just saying in general 3rd parties can be corrupted. It’s not a foolproof solution or even always a good idea.
We gotta ban photo editing software too. Shit, we gotta ban computers entirely. Shit, now we have to ban electricity.
I’m so tired of this “Don’t blame the tool” bs argument used to divert responsibility.
Blame the fucking tool and restrict it.
Why not blame the spread? You can’t ban the tool, it’s easily accessible software and that only requires easily accessible consumer hardware, and you can even semi easily train your own models using easily accessible porn on the Internet, so if you want to ban it outright, you’d need to ban the general purpose tool, all porn, and the knowledge to train image generation models. If you mean ban the online apps that sell the service on the cloud, I can get behind that, it would increase the bar to create them a little, but that is far from a solution.
But, we already have laws against revenge porn and Internet harassment. I think the better and more feasible approach that doesn’t have far reaching free speech implications would be to simply put heavy penalties on spreading nudes images of people against their will, whether those images are real or fake. It’s harassment as revenge porn, and I didn’t see how it’s different if it’s a realistic fake. If there is major punishment for spreading these images then I think that will take care of discouraging the spread of the images for the vast majority of people.
Social media is a tool used to spread misinformation. Should social media be banned?