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Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit content
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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I'm as suspicious of "think of the children" stuff as anyone here but I don't see how we are fighting for the rights of the people by defending non-consensual deepfake porn impersonation, of children or anyone.
If someone makes deepfake porn of my little cousin or Emma Watson, there's no scenario where this isn't a shitty thing to do to a person, and I don't see how the masses are being oppressed by this being banned. What, do we need to deepfake Joe Biden getting it on to protest against the government?
Not only the harassment of being subjected to something like this seems horrible, it's reasonable to say that people ought to have rights over their own likeness, no? It's not even a matter of journalistic interest because it's something completely made-up.
We're not talking about whether we should make fakes. We're talking about whether people who do, should be prosecuted - IE physically overpowered by police officers, restrained with handcuffs, and locked up in a prison cell. Some empathy?
If some classmate of your little cousin makes a fake, should the police come and drag them out of school and throw them in prison? You think that would help?
Realistically, it's as likely to happen as prosecution of kids who "get into fights" for assault. Kids tell mean lies about each other but that is not resolved in civil suits over defamation. Even between adults, that's not the usual thing.
Civil suits under this bill would be mainly targeted against internet services, because they have the money. And it would largely be used over celebrity fakes. That's the overwhelming part of fakes out there and they have the money to splurge on suing people who can't pay. It would be wealthy, powerful people using it against horny teens.
Also, this bill is so ripe for industrial abuse. Insert a risqué scene in a movie, and suddenly "pirates" can be prosecuted under this.
You do have a point about the excesses of police work, but if you want to talk about empathy you should also consider the position of the kid who is harassed and traumatized over something they didn't even have any say over. There is some discussion to be had over what degree of punishment ought to be appropriate, and the need to limit police brutality, well beyond this particular matter.
But as far as demanding that every such work is taken down, and giving vulnerable people the means to demand so without exposing themselves further, it is perfectly reasonable.
Except that in the case of deepfake porn it's not a matter of fuzzy two-sided conflicts. One side is creating the whole problem, and one side is just the victim of it despite not being involved in any way. That's the whole point of deepfake. The most that lies might play into it is in finding out that the porn is real, and in such case there is even more reason to take it down.
Gotta say I have a hard time feeling sorry for the people who can't be satisfied by the frankly immense amount of porn we have and decided that they absolutely must have porn from that one specific person who never consented to it. Maybe they are wealthy and powerful, sure. Does that mean it's a free pass to fabricate deepfake porn with their likenesses? I don't think so. Nobody is owed that. As much as you insist that it will be used by the powerful against the poor masses, it still seems to me that whatever regular dude decides to do it is crossing serious boundaries. This is not brave freedom fighter, it's just an asshole.
I think most likely what will happen is that these internet services will just take those down. As they should.
If my little cousin makes AI child porn, of anyone at all let alone a classmate he knows physically in real life, I dont think he should be allowed to kick his feet and go about his day.
Like..... Making kiddie porn of your classmates is not excusable because youre a horny teen. Sorry, bud, its fucking not
If two 14-year-olds get it on, they should both be prosecuted for child abuse? That is what you are actually saying?
You can only fuck by creating AI porn of the person you are trying to have sex with against their will? Are you a robot?
The people who think creating non consentual AI child porn is equivalent to sex need to spend time outside
The issue is there really is no way to stop it unless you make ai illegal. The cat is already out of the bag. The models and hardware are getting better and faster and cheaper.
How do you suppose you enforce a law like this when people stop even sharing the photos they create, maybe don't even save them themselves, because it's so easy and instant to create more when you want to see them. "Put her face on her body in this position", bam, instant album of photos to jerk off to, then delete them. That's how good and how available these models are getting.
How do you think restrictions on this should, or could, be enforced?
Nah, making deepfake porn illegal doesn't require making all of AI illegal. As proposed this law would neither apply to candid photography generation nor to entirely imaginary AI porn. As proposed it's targetting those generating and distributing such images rather than the technology itself, and giving victims means to defend themselves against being publicly humilliated.
It could be handled much like any matter of copyright is, that anyone hosting and sharing it must take it down or face the punishment.
Technology allows many things to be done quickly and easily, but whether they are legal and protected is a whole different matter. The models can be as good as they want, as quick as copying a file, it doesn't mean that people won't be sued over it.
It seems a bit questionable to assume that everything that is technologically possible ought to be permitted, no matter who is harmed. And frankly this is much more harmful than any piracy or infringement.
When it's widely available, you could share a perfectly legal photo, along with the prompt. Then everyone who runs it would see similar generated images on their own devices, without distributing anything illegal.
I'm trying to point out how futile it is to fight this, and that any attempt to actually stop it will eventually lead to limits on the AI models themselves.
(Sorry didn't mean to reply twice, Lemmy things)
Welp, you deleted the one I had replied to and cut off my response. I had replied this:
Deepfakes don’t happen by accident. It’s also not “perfectly legal” to distribute and alter a photo you have no permission to use.
Your argument essentially seems to be that because people will try to find ways around it, no law should be created and no action should be taken to prevent it, is this right? Because this could be said of pretty much any law and it isn’t a particularly compelling argument. Part of enforcing the law is getting around the tricky ways people try to disguise their actions.
Nevermind that this proposed law is supposed to protect the victims who are harassed because of it. If it was so invisible, they wouldn’t be suffering.
If this will eventually lead to AI models getting limitations to prevent people from using them for deepfake porn… Good? Who loses beyond the people trying to make deepfake porn
There isn't ways to limit certain models without limiting all AI tech, which is what the first comment above from another user was saying. That corporations want to be the only ones using it by keeping it out of the hands of regular people, and this plays into that.
Something this powerful should absolutely be democratized, we should all have our own open source models, and unfortunately that means those smart glasses the guy on the bus is wearing could be undressing everyone in real time.
There's nothing to be done about it, and trying to do something is worse. It's like the war on drugs. Folks who want to do it are gonna do it. Fighting it is only going to make the world worse. Unfortunately there are victims here, but societally I think we're just going to have to get over it.
Other than vague slippery slope fearmongering I don't see how banning the creation and distribution of deepfake porn is going to make AI monopolized by corporations. If have your own personally trained and run AI model, you have complete control of what sort of content it's generating. Why would you have issues with deepfake porn laws if you are not generating and hosting that content?
It just doesn't add up, there's some logical leap here that seems almost on the level of conspiracy theories. As much as governments do tend to favor corporations over regular people there is nothing so far even vaguely suggesting that AI would be so profoundly restricted that only corporations could use it. In fact, what has been described of what is proposed so far does not target the technology at all, only the users who engage in this kind of bad conduct.
But I profoundly disagree with this "nothing to be done about it". How would fighting it be worse than letting people suffer for it? It's not like drugs where the main person who might have issues is the user themselves, this affects unrelated vulnerable people.
If it is identified who is making deepfake porn and where it's being hosted, it can be taken down. You could argue that not every single responsible person will be identified, but it might still be enough to diminish the prevalence and number of victims. And to the point that the remaining ones will have to be sneaky about it, that still might lead to less harassment to the victims.
You compare it to the war on drugs. Meanwhile I think of the rise of the automobile, with people crying that seat belts and traffic lights were ruining their freedom and "there's nothing to be done" about people dying in car crashes.
If everyone could create their own, and just run it locally, explain how the laws could be enforced?
Aguing that since you do a crime with a tool, outlawing the crime outlaws the tool is a bad argument. Outlawing murder doesn't outlaw knives.
As far as enforcement, it may be enforced with varying degrees of success but the argument that someone may get away with the crime also isn't a reason not to make it a crime.
If someone created deep fakes using locally run models, rubbed one out and then deleted everything they probably wouldn't be caught..but largely who cares that they didn't? It's the harm to others that it causes that you would largely like to prevent, and if a person didn't distribute the image at all them "getting away with it" doesn't matter much.
Edit: I think the argument that existing laws already cover this is more compelling than any of the above arguments as far as why this new law shouldn't be passed.
You conceded that no one cares if someone makes images locally then deletes them. But that's how they're all going to be made shortly.
Currently folks are sharing them because not everyone has the means to create them, some folks do, and share what they've made.
Once litterally every can just make them the moment they want to, no one will be sharing. Everyone will fall under that use case that you admitted no one would care about, which is exactly what I've been saying. It's 1. futile to try to stop, and 2. going to become so wide spread that we as a society will stop caring about it.
I do not think this is true. There are reasons to generate and distribute these other than to have a personal wank off gallery.
Like what? Why share something when anyone curious to see it can instantly generate their own?
I'm curious as to why you cannot come up with any yourself, but here are a few from the top of my head: to pass them off as authentic (likely for clout purposes), to have a laugh with the boys about it, to collaborate with others on them, and to distribute them to harass, ridicule, or disparage the target of them.
Degenerates exist in lots of shapes and forms, and not all degenerates will have enough of a sense of shame to be degenerates privately or to even know they are being degenerates at all.
I don't think you're properly understanding the paradigm shift that's coming with these models being open source and widely available while wearable AR smart glasses get better.
"You know Sharon is HR, look at this scandalous photo of her."
"Uh, I'm seeing a live generated porno of everyone in this room right now, why would I care about that."
And I don't think you're fully understanding that the above is some type of fantasy you have, and will not actually be what the future is like at all.
It's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but my point stands. It's going to be so easy for anyone to see ai gen material of anyone else, no one is going to care anymore.
I don't even think that's necessarily true. If you make it illegal and/or platforms ban it, you're already taking a step toward making it more difficult to do.
I think throughout this thread you're mistaking the technically possible for the probable or likely.
By making it illegal, you essentially eliminate the commercial incentive for making it easy. Every barrier to doing something makes it more unlikely that people will do it. I understand that there is an inherent motive for people to do it anyway, but, every hoop they have to jump through (e.g. setting up their "own, local AI") reduces the likelihood of them doing it.
People don't even run their own email servers, music servers, video servers, etc. etc. etc....most people don't even "jail break" devices...many don't even store a local cache of regular porn...why the hell would most people bother themselves with setting up a local generative AI instance for this purpose?
Outlawing it and banning it from platforms makes it much more within the realm of the creepy basement weirdo rather than something that is as inevitably ubiquitous as you're saying it will be.
Policy is very often about reduction of harms rather than elimination of harms. It's not the black and white realm that you're trying to make it out to be.
It's not illegal to to work on, sell, or distribute the models. And making that illegal is what the first commenter said would be dangerous to do, since then regular people wouldn't be able to compete with corporation's abilities.
Once the models and portable hardware are good enough, and it's just a matter of time, I think you're underestimating how ubiquitous it will become.
Every teenage boy will have a pair of nudie glasses in the form of their smartphone running open source models, and you think they're just going to not use them?
I think you again vastly overestimate how many people are going to run their own AI versus using a sanitized, policy-driven, managed platform version that's cloud based (e.g. Dall-E and ChatGPT right now).
It's possible today (and usually better) to do a lot of things locally, but yet still almost everything routes through an app to a platform on your smartphone and the few remaining things that don't route through a platform using your phone's browser.
When it becomes one click to see the chick across from you naked, tell me how many 16 year old boys won't. You are far too naive to be having this conversation.
It's not naive to think that corporations will continue to win the "AI" war. It's actually pretty naive to think otherwise.
I also dunno why you think that all of the resources in oss AI will focus their efforts on making it easy to generate excellent, likely already illegal deep fake porn of random teenagers in "one click".
I've been using oss for decades and almost nothing is that easy to do even when it could be. Why would people focus their efforts on this?
Also also, I don't get why you think that generating AI porn of people around you is:
A) so much better than just watching the millions of hours of already available porn
B) anything even remotely similar to "seeing someone naked"
Tbh, I've always thought about it like this, making deepfake tech illegal would be like making photoshopping faces on porn images illegal. At the end of the day the technology itself shouldn't be regulated, the end products themselves should be though. If you Photoshop some kids face onto some nude body, you should be arrested for possession regardless if it was "real" or not. The same should go for deepfake porn exploiting children.
However I see very little wrong with some guy photoshopping adult celeb or "friends" faces onto nude model bodies, same for those who do it with deepfake tech, just don't distribute it.
Cant stop people from killing others with hammers unless we make hammers illegal guys
Mr. Vulpine, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this chat room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Any reason why you are quoting Adam Sandler movies at me?
Because if you have any criticism you could at least be specific and original.
Ahhhh, fine. It's reasonable to say that people ought to have rights over their own likeness? So if you're walking down the street and someone's recording you, what? You melt down over your likeness? Hide in your house for fear that someone will take a picture of you?
Don't you know? People already do have rights over their likeness and we already have laws regarding that. To some extent you are allowed to record public locations and events, and you don't need to seek permission to every passerby. But it doesn't mean you can record people and use their images in every location and situation.
Not to mention, we are talking about deepfakes made to look like specific people. I don't think you are going to accidentally pass by someone's deepfake porn while taking selfies on the streets, so there's not much point of bringing this up.
So someone is gonna tell you when they use your picture/ video for their personal use?? Lol bro
Which is why the proposed bill targets distributors.
You talk about it as if you never seen laws that apply to the internet before.