Technology

I believe their point is that an employer logically shouldn't care if some third party fabricates an image resembling you. We still have an issue with latent puritanism, and this needs to be addressed as we face the reality of more and more convincing fakes of images, audio, and video.

This is a transitional period issue. In a couple of years you can just say AI made it even if it's a real picture and everyone will believe you. Fake nudes are in no way a new thing anyway. I used to make dozens of these by request back in my edgy 4chan times 15 years ago.

"Fools! Everybody at my school is laughing at me for having a 2-incher, but little do they know it actually curves to the LEFT!"

Exactly. I’m not even shy, my boobs have been out plenty and I’ve sent nudes all that. Hell I met my wife with my tits out. But there’s a wild difference between pictures I made and released of my own will in certain contexts and situations vs pictures attempting to approximate my naked body generated without my knowledge or permission because someone had a whim.

I think this is why it's going to be interesting to see how we navigate this as a society. So far, we've done horribly. It's been over a century now that we've acknowledged sexual harassment in the workplace is a problem that harms workers (and reduces productivity) and yet it remains an issue today (only now we know the human resources department will protect the corporate image and upper management by trying to silence the victims).

What deepfakes and generative AI does is make it easy for a campaign staffer, or an ambitious corporate later climber with a buddy with knowhow, or even a determined grade-school student to create convincing media and publish it on the internet. As I note in the other response, if a teen's sexts get reported to law enforcement, they'll gladly turn it into a CSA production and distribution issue and charge the teens themselves with serious felonies with long prison sentences. Now imagine if some kid wanted to make a rival disappear. Heck, imagine the smart kid wanting to exact revenge on a social media bully, now equipped with the power of generative AI.

The thing is, the tech is out of the bag, and as with princes in the mid-east looking at cloned sheep (with deteriorating genetic defects) looking to create a clone of himself as an heir, humankind will use tech in the worst, most heinous possible ways until we find cause to cease doing so. (And no, judicial punishment doesn't stop anyone). So this is going to change society, whether we decide collectively that sexuality (even kinky sexuality) is not grounds to shame and scorn someone, or that we use media scandals the way Italian monastics and Russian oligarchs use poisons, and scandalize each other like it's the shootout at O.K. Corral.

I'm not arguing whether people should or should not have control over whether others can produce a nude (or lewd) likeness or perpetuate false scandal, only that this technology doesn't change the equation. People have been accused of debauchery and scorned long before the invention of the camera, let alone digital editing.

Julia the Elder was portrayed (poorly, mind you) in sexual congress on Roman graffiti. Marie Antoinette was accused of a number of debauched sexual acts she didn't fully comprehend. Marie Antoinette actually had an uninteresting sex life. It was accusations of The German Vice (id est lesbianism) that were the most believable and quickened her path to the guillotine.

The movie, The Contender (2000) addresses the issue with happenstance evidence. A woman politician was caught on video inflagrante delicto at a frat party in her college years just as she was about to be appointed as a replacement Vice President.

Law enforcement still regards sexts between underage teens as child porn, and our legal system will gladly incarcerate those teens for the crime of expressing their intimacy to their lovers. (Maine, I believe, is the sole exception, having finally passed laws to let teens use picture messaging to court each other.) So when it comes to the intersection of human sexuality and technology, so far we suck at navigating it.

To be fair, when it comes to human sexuality at all, US society sucks at navigating it. We still don't discuss consent in grade school. I can't speak for anywhere else in the world, though I've not heard much good news.

The conversation about revenge porn (which has been made illegal without the consent of all participants in the US) appears to inform how society regards explicit content of private citizens. I can't speak to paparazzi content. Law hasn't quite caught up with Photoshop, let alone deepfakes and content made with generative AI systems.

But my point was, public life, whether in media, political, athletic or otherwise, is competitive and involves rivalries that get dirty. Again, if we, as a species actually had the capacity for reason, we would be able to choose our cause célèbre with rationality, and not judge someone because some teenager prompted a genAI platform to create a convincing scandalous video.

I think we should be above that, as a society, but we aren't. My point was that I don't fully understand the mechanism by which our society holds contempt for others due to circumstances outside their control, a social behavior I find more abhorrent than using tech to create a fictional image of someone in the buff for private use.

Sadly, fictitious explicit media can be as effective as a character assassination tool as the real thing. I think it should be otherwise. I think we should be better than that, but we're not. I am, consequently frustrated and disappointed with my society and my species. And while I think we're going to need to be more mature about it, I've opined this since high school in the 1980s and things have only gotten worse.

At the same time, it's like the FGC-9, the tech cannot be contained any than we can stop software piracy with DRM. Nor can we trust the community at large to use it responsibly. So yes, you can expect explicit media of colleagues to fly much the way accusations of child sexual assault flew in the 1990s (often without evidence in middle and upper management. It didn't matter.) And we may navigate it pretty much the same way, with the same high rate of career casualties.

Human society is about power. It is because we can't get past dominance hierarchy that our communities do nothing about schoolyard bullies, or workplace sexual harassment. It is why abstinence-only sex-ed has nothing positive to say to victims of sexual assault, once they make it clear that used goods are used goods.

Our culture agrees by consensus that seeing a woman naked, whether a candid shot, caught inflagrante delicto or rendered from whole cloth by a generative AI system, redefines her as a sexual object, reducing her qualifications as a worker, official or future partner. That's a lot of power to give to some guy with X-ray Specs, and it speaks poorly of how society regards women, or human beings in general.

We disregard sex workers, too.

Violence sucks, but without the social consensus the propagates sexual victimhood, it would just be violence. Sexual violence is extra awful because the rest of society actively participates in making it extra awful.

Does it really matter though? "Well you see, they didn't actually see you naked, it was just a photorealistic approximation of what you would look like naked".

At that point I feel like the lines get very blurry, it's still going to be embarrassing as hell, and them not being "real" nudes is not a big comfort when having to confront the fact that there are people masturbating to your "fake" nudes without your consent.

I think in a few years this won't really be a problem because by then these things will be so widespread that no one will care, but right now the people being specifically targeted by this must not be feeling great.

Not so much computers evil! as just acknowledging there will always be malicious actors who will find clever ways to use technology to cause harm. And yes, there's a gathering of folk on 4Chan/b who nudify (denudify?) submitted pictures, usually of people they know, which, thanks to the process, puts them out on the internet. So this is already a problem.

Think of Murphy's Law as it applies to product stress testing. Eventually, some customer is going to come in having broke the part you thought couldn't be broken. Also, our vast capitalist society is fueled by people figuring out exploits in the system that haven't been patched or criminalized (see the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008). So we have people actively looking to utilize technology in weird ways to monetize it. That folds neatly like paired gears into looking at how tech can cause harm.

As for people's faces, one of the problems of facial recognition as a security tool (say when used by law enforcement to track perps) is the high number of false positives. It turns out we look a whole lot like each other. Though your doppleganger may be in another state and ten inches taller / shorter. In fact, an old (legal!) way of getting explicit shots of celebrities from the late 20th century was to find a look-alike and get them to pose for a song.

As for famous people, fake nudes have been a thing for a while, courtesy of Photoshop or some other digital photo-editing set combined with vast libraries of people. Deepfakes have been around since the late 2010s. So even if generative AI wasn't there (which is still not great for video in motion) there are resources for fabricating content, either explicit or evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.

This is why we are terrified of AI getting out of hand, not because our experts don't know what they're doing, but because the companies are very motivated to be the first to get it done, and that means making the kinds of mistakes that cause pipeline leakage on sacred Potawatomi tribal land.