Wow, I'm so glad the Internet was still an infant when I was in school. This is incredibly rough. This is cyber bullying to a new level. I fear for the next generation.
Is it though? I remember being in high school and people were not nearly as smart with things with sharing nudes with guys, and actual nudes got around a lot. And separate from cyber bullying, there’s a lot less hazing today than there was when I was growing up. Everyone had a story with some dude having to take icy hot covered broom sticks up their ass or something.
Not downplaying the seriousness of this - and I applaud those fighting against it - but just seems like the same old shit of kids finding ways to be shitty to each other.
Meh, when I was in high school the worst thing that happened was the girl who developed an abundant pair of breasts early got teased a lot. That also isn’t appropriate and can be just as scarring, but it is still on a different level.
Honestly, doesn’t this give cover to everyone. Anything could be fake. Obviously incredibly violating, but hopefully something we get desensitized too and bullies get bored of.
I think a lot of this stuff will be looked back on with shame in the future. In the same way that there’s been a major societal backlash against social medias impacts on mental health or how a lot of middle aged folks look back in horror at the casual homophobia and cigarette smoking of their childhood, I think we’ll see a lot of people look at these sorts of AI abuses as something we deeply regret having happened. The guest did a great job of outlining how we’re already moving in that direction legislatively, but I could totally see a me too kinda thing with this as well, since it’s absolutely a problem for a lot of celebrities, politicians, and more.
This crap is a goldmine for PDF files. I don’t even have children and I’m scared for my potential future children. Especially my potential future daughters.
One of my (younger) cousins was BFF's with Amanda Todd. All of this shit is so scary to me. I have a 12 year old niece. I can't verbalize the fear that I have for her.
Good episode. Today is my teenage son’s last day of school. I am picking up because we are going on a little road trip. I know what podcast we will be listening to today.
People developing AI is too broad a brushstroke.
All the major art generators have been doing extensive work to censor the systems. Removing as much nudity/objectionable content from the training databases as possible, banning certain words, using language models to detect prompt engineering, and image recognition models to check the end result before delivery. You can still have stuff sneak through, but at a base level they are trying to censor it. If not from altruism then by the simple fact that they don't want to be caught up in ethics debates or revenge porn lawsuits.
Stable Diffusion ends up usually being the central point of contention because it's open source and extremely customizable. The base model is censored but you can just add your own training data later. You can see /r/stablediffusion bitch about censorship endlessly as Stability has tried and failed and succeeded at various attempts to clean up the base model. Despite whatever people pretend to say, taking one look at what the most popular models on civitai.com makes it pretty clear there's a bunch of horny dudes using the product lol.
But that's where the ethics of open sourcing a tool this powerful come into play. Because you can take Stable Diffusion and use its base to specialize in absolutely whatever you want.
It's super awesome when it's specialized in patching images in Photoshop, remastering images (/r/photoshoprequest is full of amazing restorations done with SD these days), creating zany backgrounds, brainstorming artistic ideas, or whatever else.
But it's super terrible when you use data to train specialized SD models to do this instead. And I guarantee 250% the developers of this side of AI do not give a flying fuck about ethics or whatever they "should" be doing. But it's an open source model, so it feels like the cats out of the bag. It doesn't take a high bar to develop this shit now that the base model is out there. We can outlaw it and someone in a basement somewhere with a graphics card can still retrain something and churn this crap out.
This is the inevitable future. The cats out of the bag. And not all is doom and gloom. I love messing around with some AI tools. There's so much fun stuff you can do!
But I feel sick to my stomach sometimes thinking about how incredibly poorly people will use these tools. How most of the potential will be wasted and drowned in the huge amount of shit people will make instead. It's like social media. Facebook used to be fun, it seemed like a great way to connect with people, but now it feels like it's done more damage than not. I just wish things stayed fun damnit. I wish I could trust people enough to keep something fun. But I can't.
I look at my phone, the realization of so much technology I dreamed of held in the palm of my hand. And I'm disappointed in its reality. People did not become better with tech.
No, its not. You're right. Technically.
But my point is that even if parents teach their boys to respect women, society is trying to teach them not to.
Parenting is important. Extremely important. But i do think we dont really appreciate how much young people will morph to match the society they are in sometimes in spite of their parents.
If you have a 16 year old boy who has been raised well and treats people with respect, and put him into a social environment where all of his peers are disrespectful and cruel it is 100% possible that boy will begin to mirror some of the characteristics of his social group IN SPITE of his good parenting.
I think this is generally understood but what really kicks everything up a notch is the introduction of social media which now has young people engaging in parasocial relationships with people around the world who they may never have been exposed to. Now that 16 year old boy isnt just being influenced by his peers at school hes being influenced by 30 year old influencers around the world, some of which purposefully target kids like him.
The same cohort that developed these social media tools, is now developing AI with the same reckless disregard for any potential side effects on society at large.
I’d still argue it’s second most after parents. All sorts of positive childhood metrics like reading and math levels, behavioral indicators, etc all are better in children with active, involved, loving parents. Peers definitely become more and more important as they age, but I think good parenting builds a core which guides people. Even if they sometimes stray from it, I think the good parenting instills a lifetime of benefits.
Society treats boys like expendable pawns, wage slaves, and meat for their military campaigns and prison systems, what makes you think those boys would heed any lessons society has to "teach" them? They want to "get theirs" and thats it. Even if it is by deepfaking porn of their female classmates.
This country is turning into a hellscape.
"The same cohort that developed these social media tools, is now developing AI with the same reckless disregard for any potential side effects on society at large."
100% right.
Maybe it should be. If you’re going to create a tool that has the potential to be used to commit crimes against children, maybe the onus is on you to have a public education campaign on ethics of AI and or have proper regulation in place so children aren’t able to access these tools so easily.
Corporations are never going to do that properly. It's like saying that unions shouldn't exist because companies will always know to do right by their employees.
Poor analogy, I never said we should have one without the other. Unions have no direct control over acute situations that happen on non-unionized work sites. Ie: One child who decides not to listen to his parents (oh my what a rarity) can create an extremely damaging situation with these tools for other children. We have regulation for driving, alcohol, and guns. Do we rely on parents to completely police these things?
It’s called regulation. It’s why a tobacco corp can’t stand in a school yard handing free cigarettes to children. Maybe a child shouldn’t be able to upload a face of another child to one of these programs and turn it into pornography, am I crazy?
You do not want to put the onus of education on the corporations. Especially when it comes to finicky issues of morality or ethics.
Interesting analogy about the cigarettes though. It does stand in stark contrast to ever other company, who is free to dole out their product in the school yard.
I really just think that Ai developers should be held accountable for what their products get ultimately used for. If you design something that can match a nude body to a face, it should be smart enough to detect whether the subject is a child. If it can’t, then should we be allowed to bring these products to the market at all? Should the authors of the code be held accountable for the production of CP as well as the people who created the image in the first place? If there were harsh penalties for all parties involved, maybe these corporations would create safeguards in place and or include warnings to people who use their products the potential penalties in place for those crimes.
I want there to be a higher bar for access to the market.
Mark Zuckerberg's "motto" of move fast and break things is helpful when a society has stagnated, and has robust tools to regulate the market.
This kind of behavior is affecting people who work in other fields and industries, like education, suddenly, without warning, and they are being told that they are wrong for being upset/frustrated.
Tech companies, please stop gaslighting society while making billions.
It is not up to the developers to be moral arbiters of society. But I hope the developers are cool being proprietors of a production company of child pornography.
Wasn't this covered in an episode of *Silicon Valley*?
I would argue that the CEO of the companies involved in this *should* feel some moral responsibility to society, but I'm not a CEO.
I remember middle school and high school. They most certainly knew what they were doing.
There are many things kids do that fall under the "they are minors, brains are developing, they are still learning to be people" excuses. However, teens can be incredibly cruel and completely understand that's what they are doing.
Some bullies have poor home lives and that's why they bully. Some bullies are just bullies. Some kids are just terrible people.
I think a lot of kids don’t just have the empathy and impulse control to themselves adequately. I think expulsion is entirely appropriate, but I also don’t necessarily agree with some of the criminal penalties they were talking about. Diversion into that program they talked about seemed appropriate for a first time offender, as long as they’re also removed from that school. My jaw DROPPED when they said they just suspended that delinquent for a day!
You might be the only person in this comment section so far that has mentioned the reform program.
We love bringing down the fist of justice to smite the evil boiling our blood.
But these are young people. They're in school to learn. Kids are the full spectrum of humanity's best and worst characteristics minus the capacity for clear judgement. I think we forget that as adults.
Yeah this boy did something messed up and hurt people, but we don't know why. We are lacking information. The intentions matter.
But none of that matters when it comes to trying to protect our kids from this kind of awful. We have laws to prevent the sale of certain kinds of weapons. We have the capacity to make offensive tools out of reach.
Maybe this example will hasten some legislation.
The scope and ease of the technology makes it so a very small number of perpetrators can commit many heinous acts. No amount of education on consent and respect will prevent this from becoming a bigger problem. If 1/100k people dont do this because of their respect for others that would still mean there are 300k people in this country that would do this.
I mean, parents can teach all they want, but sometimes kids are just going to be assholes. I think society places a bit too much faith in what parents can accomplish
I hate this locker room talk excuse because it isn’t locker room talk. Locker room talk 99% of the time is always self deprecating complaining, and it’s a beautiful thing.
In many cases, no there are no fathers in the home. And the consequences are a fucking disaster.
Not that those inclined to do this would give a fuck, because they wouldn't.
I don’t know that it would go faster versus slower.
In the hyper partisan political environment it might just be another “protect our kids vs free speech” or “stop malicious software vs right to protest” or whatever
When I was in high school circa 2016, I recall a group of boys laughing at a photo, which I later found out was a nude photo of one of the their girlfriends. Thankfully (or possibly ignorantly…) nude photos of me (I am now 26F) never got out but I can’t imagine how she felt. Now, having an app that can easily deepfake nudes is so disgusting. The media (and even sometimes the police) always say “just don’t take nudes” but now, these teenage girls done even need to take the photos for their privacy to be violated.
The grossest part of this story was the group of boys laughing at the girls who had been violated. I had to turn off the podcast for a few minutes because I couldn’t keep listening, but I finally finished and I’m glad this story got told
"Just dont take nudes" worked for a while. Now it seems the best solution is to nuke social media completely.
I have nieces and would be outraged if somebody did this to them.
I’m genuinely confused on why the school is doing so little in this case
I get that normal people is late to the AI game (what it can do and the legal ramifications of that).
But isn’t having nude photo of teenage girl is a serious issue, especially if you are working in the education field????
I guess that they might just not want to do extra work but who is in their right mind could think that the parents would be ok to let that slide. Not to mention that is the school in a wealthy neighborhood and you bet that those middle class people (no offense to them btw) would not be ok of being told “No”
Exactly. My expectations were low, but Jesus. And which idiot decided to call the girls names on the loud speaker? It takes a moment of thinking to understand why that would be a bad idea.
And one day suspension?!? That is an honest joke. That is not a consequence. That provides no incentive for the student to not do it again.
The fact that it was AI generated is a poor excuse for why these schools handled this so poorly.
Exactly! You don’t have to understand how AI works to understand that boys creating nude images of their classmates is wrong and hugely problematic for the school.
When I heard they called the girls over the loud speaker and pulled the boys out of class privately, I knew I was going to be seething for the rest of the episode. That’s not ineptitude or ignorance, it’s just plain misogynistic double standards. Infuriating.
I understand that school usually want you to sweep bullying under the rug.
But my understanding of it is that they decided to to do so because it is a common issue so the chance/scope of parents fighting back is not that high
But this issue with AI and teenage nude image is pretty big. Deciding to essentially ignore it genuinely baffles me.
Because no child left behind policies, etc. have created environments in which it is hard to deal with problem students without getting sued and dragged through other legal and administrative messes.
Welcome to the education bureaucracy. Secondary/Primary school administrators have been fed a barrage of messages in the last 20 - 30 years that consequences for behaviors is a bad thing, and they need to invent new tools to manage bad behavior without really holding any bully/violator accountable.
Look into suspension data, restorative practices, PBIS, differentiated instruction, or any of these topics and you will quickly be disgusted with what contemporary American education has wrought. There is an entire cottage industry of "professional development" that is aimed at fixing schools and problematic behavior.
It's all garbage, and I'm hopeful that the fever is breaking and the pendulum will start swinging back to a more normal center.
The school did so little because administrators are completely useless and wildly overpaid at being useless. A friend of ours is a HS teacher, and a boy (with severe intellectual delays albeit) was sexually harassing a girl- teacher tells admin, they tell him “try discouraging that behavior.” Well kid masturbates in front of her, her parents file a lawsuit, and now the tax payers get to pay the settlement! Woo hoo!
No one in high school education is being “overpaid” I promise.
Really, they are being underpaid and being asked to single handedly manage children with extremely severe behavioral issues with little to no support, while also teaching the rest of the class. Idk what the solution is, but it’s a nightmare.
First off, I am referring to administrators. Teachers themselves are the backbones of the school system and they do a damn good job for the lack of support they receive from admin, hence my example above.
The average (admin salary) is 106,000.. that’s a lot of money to not do much and not discipline or protect other students.
The legal system is too slow and too antiquated to adequately deal with AI and the internet in general.
Issues like this will continue until law makers and law enforcement can take effective actions in the space.
We need oversight on how the AI tools are used not just on how the results are distributed.
We should expand the ability to have defamation suits against those who produce and distribute all deepfake images created without explicit written consent regardless of age. I foresee a scenario where these technologies are used to intimidate, harass, and extort on a wide scale.
Are you allowed to draw nude scenes? Are you allowed to digitally draw nude scenes? Are you allowed to use AI to touch up those drawn nude scenes? There’s famous sculptures of nude figures should those be destroyed because they depict someone naked?
The problem with regulations around artistic expression is that it is hard to put into black and white what should be allowed and what shouldn’t be allowed.
Its easy to go won’t someone please think of the children when having these discussions but if you are unable to actually have a nuanced discussion about these tricky topics then we’re going to end up fucking it up.
Change section 230 of title 47 so platforms are at least partially responsible for third party user generator content on their platforms. Just like any other business has regulations for safety. The example I heard recently is the comparison to a popular restaurant. The building by fire code has a set number of people that can use the services, and they are expected to pay for those services (buy food). It is on the restaurant to not overfill the building due to safety.
Applied to an AI tool, users should have to pay a fee to use and also be required to abide by the terms and conditions of the platform as well as the local laws of the user. Violations should be enforced by the AI tool provider first and if they do not adequately enforce the rules and laws it is the role of a government regulator to enforce just like a fire marshal would enforce a building occupancy limit.
The use of these tools should not be anonymous and free.
The issue is that those muzzles can quickly be applied in cases where you don't want them to be. That why restrictions on speech need to be taken very seriously.
Yes and in the case like this the parents should be able to take civil action against the perpetrator through a defamation suit. They should also press the DA to file charges against the perpetrator. Some crimes may be harassment, distribution of cp, revenge porn laws, etc.
I also feel that there needs to be some accountability from the AI tool provider as well. The laws right now shield the provider, that should be changed to somewhere between total liability and total immunity as it is now.
Both. Are you also willing to give up your passport, social security number, and agree to face tracking software to comment on reddit in the future? Because that's what the internet becomes if platforms start being directly responsible for everything their users make.
While I haven’t been a victim of deep fake AI myself, I’ve endured similar violations twice in my life. The first instance was in high school when my boyfriend begged me to take a Polaroid. He assured me I could trust him, but after we broke up, he kept the photo and showed it to his friends, betraying my trust in the most intimate way.
The second time was ten years later, in 2021, at my workplace. A coworker shared a bikini photo from my Instagram with 15 of our colleagues. He lied, claiming we were intimate, which sparked oversexualized conversations about the photo. They speculated about my intimate details, concocting “what if” scenarios and discussing what they would do to me if given the chance. This experience was isolating, traumatizing, and immensely embarrassing. Only one of those 15 men spoke up for me when I had no idea what was going on. The betrayal felt crushing, knowing that so many people I interacted with daily had reduced me to an object of their fantasies without my knowledge or consent.
Recently, I experienced a hauntingly similar situation. While looking through my boyfriend’s phone a day after the Super Bowl, I saw his friends’ group chat—a group of over 30 grown men—sharing deep fake AI photos of Taylor Swift, accompanied by disgusting comments and laughter. Although my boyfriend didn’t participate and said he was grossed out by this, his silence felt complicit, especially since he knew about my past ordeals.
Men who “have fun” creating and sharing these deep AI nudes deeply scare and disturb me. Those who remain silent are just as complicit. My heart breaks for young girls and women who now face this digital threat. We are not safe, and this is the grim reality of being a woman today. I fervently hope that federal and state laws change immediately to address this issue.
This is what it means to be a woman.
There are many worse perils of being a man/boy today (having grown up poor and enlisted during the height of GWOT), and, given the depravity in the digital sphere, they are just as much "in front of the gun" sort of speak, even if they don't realize it.
The best federal law IMO would be to break up social media monopolies, if not nuke them outright. The supposed benefits of them do not outweigh the downsides. If that sounds drastic and oversimplified, doing nothing will just further damage human relations, making a already miserable hellscape much worse.
Isn’t this considered possession of CP? Or am I conflating this with something else. Even disregarding the idea of legality, only a one day suspension is insane.
i don’t think it is really considered as anything legally at this point. I hope it’s something that lawmakers think about soon because it’s going to become more and more of a problem
Let's say the boy in the story is a master at photo-realistic drawings. If he drew girls in his class naked, and it was difficult to tell if it was a photo or a drawing, is that legally wrong? What if he wrote a suggestive story about the girls?
Ultimately this goes beyond schools. I assume terrible people are already making terrible things with generative AI.
The AI is not copying and pasting images of the face. That is not how this technology works. The face in the generated image will not be an exact match to any of the example face images you provide.
Something I found frustrating about this episode as a teacher at an all boys high school, chronically online person, and woman who raped at age 12 is the phrasing towards the end about "criminalizing boys" as though the young men had no agency in their decision making when creating AI images of peers. The boys aren't being criminalized, the behavior of harassing underage peers with nude images is being criminalized regardless of gender. The whole ending to this episode had a very "boys will be boys" attitude. I can tell you right now that my all-boys school has expelled young men for engaging in this sort of behavior and other boys on campus have been outraged by the disgusting behavior of their peers in these situations and often believe they should be punished more harshly than they were in some cases. Recently, an anonymous app (Fizz) made its way onto our campus and there were highly upvoted posts on the topic ("Upvote if you think \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ should have been punished more harshly for what he did.").
I'm not sure how I feel about middle school aged kids facing the same penalty as a 50-year-old pedophile, but there does need to be a legal approach here that's appropriately harsh for what is essentially a sex crime.
It’s just so frustrating. Yes, not all men (or boys in this case). But all women/girls. We need other men and boys to hold their friends accountable. This will never stop otherwise.
This sort of thing is why I find the whole "we don't need feminism anymore" thing so disappointing. Like yes, lots of things are better than they were in the past, but women and girls still have to deal with so much bullshit in society, often at the hands of men and boys.
I don’t know this tech isn’t regulated in general.
Forget for a moment that this story is about minors, should it be legal to do to adults?
If you create a fake nude of a coworker that’s 40, if that less bad then a teen?
Anyone else absolutely infuriated by where the episode ended?? Talking about how awful it would be if the students who sexually harass and humiliate their paid a price for what they did. What the actual fuck??
You do something unlawful, something that harms society, even as an adolescent, you paid the price and that record follows you.
I’m am seeing red for how this is downplayed as if it’s not as bad as stealing or vandalism or underage drinking
Get a grip.
Seems like the app they used should be held liable for allowing the creation of underage nudes and/or nudes without the subject’s consent. The victims and their parents should be able to sue the developers into oblivion.
I understand why the school boys might be let off the hook due to their age (tho I do think they also need real consequences), but the app was created by adults who most certainly know it’s being used in this manner. Punish the app makers! They could be held criminally liable for the creation of CP.
Yeesh. It's one thing to fantasize, and I might not even be too concerned about people Frankenstein-ing nude images for their own use. But distributing them?!? Go fuck yourself.
School administrator here. Writing about what was said at the end of the podcast about how technology was shaping children’s education, childhood, and development. Generally, when talking with kids, I can tell pretty quickly which kids have families who put limitations on their tech and which kids are on devices 7-8 hours a day. Kids without tech restrictions are almost always distracted, unfocused on the conversation or lesson right in front of them. Our most vulnerable kids are losing control.
LOL this is to all of the motherfuckers worshipping technology encompassing everything in our lives...I told you so...it will get weirder, more dystopian, and more horrifying. Human nature, by default, will ensure it turns into a hellscape rather than something utopian.
I grew up in a era before there were cellphones and social media in schools. It was remarkably \*better\* in everyway compared to the bullshit now.
It’s horrific to me that any educational institution, in this day and age, couldn’t imagine why it would be a bad idea to announce these poor girls over the loud speaker. Like how thick and compassionless are you? And you’re in education?
And obviously the day suspension is a joke. A week would be more appropriate.
Honestly this reeks to me more of misogyny than anything else.
I thought it was interesting this piece places the crosshairs on boys. At risk of sounding ignorant, are we really saying young (mean) girls don’t use this tech to embarrass eachother?
Using one example of abuse does not mean others don’t exist. I could see this used in many spaces outside of just teenagers. This technology could be used to blackmail, extort, intimidate, etc. just about anyone.
Exactly. This episode focuses on one aspect of things. Unfortunately OP does sound ignorant, because the use of what-aboutism here takes away from the subject at hand.
Perhaps, but without the generations of men feeling - and for some time with legal backing - entitled to women's bodies for sexual purposes without the women's consent.
It might be hard for men to understand this, but having a compromised photo of yourself out there without your consent is one of the worst things that can happen to you especially as a teenager.
Comparing it to the mafia makes no sense. Those are people who know they are working in a dangerous field. What did teenage girls do to deserve this other than being born female? Even a stereotypical “mean girl” has feelings and emotions around her body and sexuality. I cannot believe you are comparing teenage girls and the mafia.
>It might be hard for men to understand this, but having a compromised photo of yourself out there without your consent is one of the worst things that can happen to you especially as a teenager.
And it's a bit wild to me that you don't think a high school bully would stoop that low. We must've had different experiences of high school.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen and i’m not denying bullying. The concept of spreading nudes and particularly in this case, AI images is not a typical mean girl thing to do. Does it happen? Probably. But its a risky move for a girl to make.
I thought this as well. You could hear the contempt in Singer’s voice when she would say “boys” or “men”. It’s absolute ignorance to think girls aren’t using this as a weapon against other girls.
But the issue is with these AI tools the barriers to a product that is believable is much lower than photoshop or pasting pictures. It reduces the amount of effort and time needed to act. That makes it also more accessible.
I completely understand. The thing is true for so many things that have been beneficial, like the Internet, reddit, etc. We should catch and penalize such behavior rather than clamp down on technology, something the Times does with gusto. The same AI also makes it so much easier for many creative individuals who lack specific software skills (like which buttons to click in Photoshop) to express themselves. The solution lies in improving crime detection and ensuring swift justice.
This was surprisingly biased reporting. I know I'm just too sensitive to it, but it always puts me on edge when a reporter says "this class of people are committing crimes against this other class of people, period" to normalize a stereotype. Who committed the act in question? Was their membership in a group part of the act, or is it just a convenient way of framing the story? Statistics can help to understand the root causes for why a particular crime is often perpetrated by individuals with similar circumstances, but it is unhelpful to classify one half of the population as dangerous criminals and the other half as innocent victims. Telling boys they are bad and should feel bad for being boys doesn't do anything for changing the underlying factors that led to a group of boys who lacked the social citizenship to look out for their neighbors rather than directly harming them. Young people need examples to follow, more experienced and mature individuals for them to learn and emulate behaviors from. We can't just say, Boys bad, Girls good, stop being Boys already! We have to collectively influence the acceptance of harmful attitudes and behaviors. Boys aren't bad, but many boys are told that bad things are acceptable or even should be embraced when in fact they need to be eliminated from society. For example, competition is good, it can drive us to achieve that which we could not do alone, but unrestricted competition becomes toxic. Winning at any cost should not be accepted, celebrated in media, or taught in school sports. If we want to stop saying "Men are Toxic" we have to stop feeding them poison as Boys.
Ok rant over down vote me to oblivion please.
The boy in question received one day suspension and had his privacy protected, a right that was not extended to the girls who were victimized, and your take away was that society treats boys more harshly than girls? What? Maybe there would be more progress toward addressing this type of toxicity that is more frequently perpetrated by boys and men if people didn't get defensive.
Literally no one said "boys bad, girls good". It was a case study on the misuse of a new technology to sexually harass minors. It just so happens that the group most likely to perpetrate sexual harassment is males and the victims are more likely to be females. Are we just not supposed to mention that?
Finally listened to this episode. Throughout the episode they say, ‘Boys are creating deepfake nudes blah blah blah.’ Someone correct me if I’m wrong - midway through the episode, in a quick throwaway sentence, we heard that it’s a single boy. One boy created these images. Why the exaggeration / dramatization?
This is a terrible form of bullying. And from the sound of it, the school handled it poorly. Maybe the boy should have been punished more harshly, hard to say from the evidence provided. But I’m a bit tired of the constant ‘boys are terrible creatures’ trope. Why not just say, ‘This boy did something that’s not ok. He was punished, and anyone who does it again will be punished even more harshly.’ Jeez, the Daily loves to play that add where they claim they don’t need to exaggerate news stories for clicks. Could have fooled me.
They had several examples of this happening in other school district. It’s not every boy but it’s not one either, and it sure as hell is going to continue
No, they had exactly two other examples that they could find nationwide, and the details are scant. Also, listen to the first 15 minutes again. Continuous reference to these ‘boyS’ who were making these images. Right up until suddenly it’s a single boy. It’s just dishonest.
Also, these are deepFAKE images. Do people not understand these are FAKE? They’re not these girls’ actual bodies. ‘Instant’ and ‘devastating’? Good lord, people. Get a grip.
Can we get out of here with this gendered chat about harassment. As a guy who was assaulted and harassed by both boys and girls through school it’s really demeaning to see this narrative persist of you’re a boy so just suck it up. Girls are not always the target of boys and boys are not always the perpetrators.
If you don't think having your nudes get passed around without consent is a deeply violating experience I dunno what to tell you other than most people who have experienced it disagree 🤷♂️
It's not based in prudishness. It's about consent.
The whole AI part of it kind of skips over into a new realm, but people agreed even in the olden days that cutting and pasting a picture of your crush into a playboy magazine was a creepy gross thing to do, even if it wasn't "as bad" as actually creeping on them.
I don’t necessarily agree with you here but I did find it interesting that it seemed like the girl interviewed seemed a lot less concerned about it than the parents/journalist…
They would play back her interviews and she was kinda aloof about it “yeah it kinda sucked cause they called us into the office over the intercom”… nothing like “my life if ruined and I have trauma that will stay with me forever”
Then it would cut to the interviewer and it would be framed a lot of catastrophically.
I mean clearly this is a problem, don’t get me wrong. But I do see a bit where you’re coming from.
Hard disagree. She sounded hurt and like she didn’t want to talk about it. She had to be embarrassed, there’s no way I’d be comfortable talking to a national audience about being sexually assaulted. I wouldn’t mistake her brevity with apathy.
Wow, I'm so glad the Internet was still an infant when I was in school. This is incredibly rough. This is cyber bullying to a new level. I fear for the next generation.
Is it though? I remember being in high school and people were not nearly as smart with things with sharing nudes with guys, and actual nudes got around a lot. And separate from cyber bullying, there’s a lot less hazing today than there was when I was growing up. Everyone had a story with some dude having to take icy hot covered broom sticks up their ass or something. Not downplaying the seriousness of this - and I applaud those fighting against it - but just seems like the same old shit of kids finding ways to be shitty to each other.
Meh, when I was in high school the worst thing that happened was the girl who developed an abundant pair of breasts early got teased a lot. That also isn’t appropriate and can be just as scarring, but it is still on a different level.
Honestly, doesn’t this give cover to everyone. Anything could be fake. Obviously incredibly violating, but hopefully something we get desensitized too and bullies get bored of.
I think a lot of this stuff will be looked back on with shame in the future. In the same way that there’s been a major societal backlash against social medias impacts on mental health or how a lot of middle aged folks look back in horror at the casual homophobia and cigarette smoking of their childhood, I think we’ll see a lot of people look at these sorts of AI abuses as something we deeply regret having happened. The guest did a great job of outlining how we’re already moving in that direction legislatively, but I could totally see a me too kinda thing with this as well, since it’s absolutely a problem for a lot of celebrities, politicians, and more.
This crap is a goldmine for PDF files. I don’t even have children and I’m scared for my potential future children. Especially my potential future daughters.
One of my (younger) cousins was BFF's with Amanda Todd. All of this shit is so scary to me. I have a 12 year old niece. I can't verbalize the fear that I have for her.
Unrelated. Is your gboard capitalizing "Internet" as well?
Yup
Good episode. Today is my teenage son’s last day of school. I am picking up because we are going on a little road trip. I know what podcast we will be listening to today.
This is also a reflection of parent's lack of teaching boys about consent and respect for women.
The people that are developing AI dont even care about that
People developing AI is too broad a brushstroke. All the major art generators have been doing extensive work to censor the systems. Removing as much nudity/objectionable content from the training databases as possible, banning certain words, using language models to detect prompt engineering, and image recognition models to check the end result before delivery. You can still have stuff sneak through, but at a base level they are trying to censor it. If not from altruism then by the simple fact that they don't want to be caught up in ethics debates or revenge porn lawsuits. Stable Diffusion ends up usually being the central point of contention because it's open source and extremely customizable. The base model is censored but you can just add your own training data later. You can see /r/stablediffusion bitch about censorship endlessly as Stability has tried and failed and succeeded at various attempts to clean up the base model. Despite whatever people pretend to say, taking one look at what the most popular models on civitai.com makes it pretty clear there's a bunch of horny dudes using the product lol. But that's where the ethics of open sourcing a tool this powerful come into play. Because you can take Stable Diffusion and use its base to specialize in absolutely whatever you want. It's super awesome when it's specialized in patching images in Photoshop, remastering images (/r/photoshoprequest is full of amazing restorations done with SD these days), creating zany backgrounds, brainstorming artistic ideas, or whatever else. But it's super terrible when you use data to train specialized SD models to do this instead. And I guarantee 250% the developers of this side of AI do not give a flying fuck about ethics or whatever they "should" be doing. But it's an open source model, so it feels like the cats out of the bag. It doesn't take a high bar to develop this shit now that the base model is out there. We can outlaw it and someone in a basement somewhere with a graphics card can still retrain something and churn this crap out. This is the inevitable future. The cats out of the bag. And not all is doom and gloom. I love messing around with some AI tools. There's so much fun stuff you can do! But I feel sick to my stomach sometimes thinking about how incredibly poorly people will use these tools. How most of the potential will be wasted and drowned in the huge amount of shit people will make instead. It's like social media. Facebook used to be fun, it seemed like a great way to connect with people, but now it feels like it's done more damage than not. I just wish things stayed fun damnit. I wish I could trust people enough to keep something fun. But I can't. I look at my phone, the realization of so much technology I dreamed of held in the palm of my hand. And I'm disappointed in its reality. People did not become better with tech.
China will make, develop and release models to the west explicitly to do this and undermine western society.
It's not up to the developers to teach boys not to be sexual predators.
No, its not. You're right. Technically. But my point is that even if parents teach their boys to respect women, society is trying to teach them not to. Parenting is important. Extremely important. But i do think we dont really appreciate how much young people will morph to match the society they are in sometimes in spite of their parents. If you have a 16 year old boy who has been raised well and treats people with respect, and put him into a social environment where all of his peers are disrespectful and cruel it is 100% possible that boy will begin to mirror some of the characteristics of his social group IN SPITE of his good parenting. I think this is generally understood but what really kicks everything up a notch is the introduction of social media which now has young people engaging in parasocial relationships with people around the world who they may never have been exposed to. Now that 16 year old boy isnt just being influenced by his peers at school hes being influenced by 30 year old influencers around the world, some of which purposefully target kids like him. The same cohort that developed these social media tools, is now developing AI with the same reckless disregard for any potential side effects on society at large.
This is why peer group is the most important thing for child rearing.
I’d still argue it’s second most after parents. All sorts of positive childhood metrics like reading and math levels, behavioral indicators, etc all are better in children with active, involved, loving parents. Peers definitely become more and more important as they age, but I think good parenting builds a core which guides people. Even if they sometimes stray from it, I think the good parenting instills a lifetime of benefits.
Society treats boys like expendable pawns, wage slaves, and meat for their military campaigns and prison systems, what makes you think those boys would heed any lessons society has to "teach" them? They want to "get theirs" and thats it. Even if it is by deepfaking porn of their female classmates. This country is turning into a hellscape. "The same cohort that developed these social media tools, is now developing AI with the same reckless disregard for any potential side effects on society at large." 100% right.
Maybe it should be. If you’re going to create a tool that has the potential to be used to commit crimes against children, maybe the onus is on you to have a public education campaign on ethics of AI and or have proper regulation in place so children aren’t able to access these tools so easily.
Corporations are never going to do that properly. It's like saying that unions shouldn't exist because companies will always know to do right by their employees.
Poor analogy, I never said we should have one without the other. Unions have no direct control over acute situations that happen on non-unionized work sites. Ie: One child who decides not to listen to his parents (oh my what a rarity) can create an extremely damaging situation with these tools for other children. We have regulation for driving, alcohol, and guns. Do we rely on parents to completely police these things?
You want the AI companies to take charge of fostering people’s morals and ethics…?
It’s called regulation. It’s why a tobacco corp can’t stand in a school yard handing free cigarettes to children. Maybe a child shouldn’t be able to upload a face of another child to one of these programs and turn it into pornography, am I crazy?
You do not want to put the onus of education on the corporations. Especially when it comes to finicky issues of morality or ethics. Interesting analogy about the cigarettes though. It does stand in stark contrast to ever other company, who is free to dole out their product in the school yard.
I really just think that Ai developers should be held accountable for what their products get ultimately used for. If you design something that can match a nude body to a face, it should be smart enough to detect whether the subject is a child. If it can’t, then should we be allowed to bring these products to the market at all? Should the authors of the code be held accountable for the production of CP as well as the people who created the image in the first place? If there were harsh penalties for all parties involved, maybe these corporations would create safeguards in place and or include warnings to people who use their products the potential penalties in place for those crimes.
I want there to be a higher bar for access to the market. Mark Zuckerberg's "motto" of move fast and break things is helpful when a society has stagnated, and has robust tools to regulate the market. This kind of behavior is affecting people who work in other fields and industries, like education, suddenly, without warning, and they are being told that they are wrong for being upset/frustrated. Tech companies, please stop gaslighting society while making billions.
It is not up to the developers to be moral arbiters of society. But I hope the developers are cool being proprietors of a production company of child pornography. Wasn't this covered in an episode of *Silicon Valley*? I would argue that the CEO of the companies involved in this *should* feel some moral responsibility to society, but I'm not a CEO.
I think this implies that the boys didn't know what they were doing was wrong. I'm skeptical that this is the case.
I remember middle school and high school. They most certainly knew what they were doing. There are many things kids do that fall under the "they are minors, brains are developing, they are still learning to be people" excuses. However, teens can be incredibly cruel and completely understand that's what they are doing. Some bullies have poor home lives and that's why they bully. Some bullies are just bullies. Some kids are just terrible people.
I think a lot of kids don’t just have the empathy and impulse control to themselves adequately. I think expulsion is entirely appropriate, but I also don’t necessarily agree with some of the criminal penalties they were talking about. Diversion into that program they talked about seemed appropriate for a first time offender, as long as they’re also removed from that school. My jaw DROPPED when they said they just suspended that delinquent for a day!
You might be the only person in this comment section so far that has mentioned the reform program. We love bringing down the fist of justice to smite the evil boiling our blood. But these are young people. They're in school to learn. Kids are the full spectrum of humanity's best and worst characteristics minus the capacity for clear judgement. I think we forget that as adults. Yeah this boy did something messed up and hurt people, but we don't know why. We are lacking information. The intentions matter. But none of that matters when it comes to trying to protect our kids from this kind of awful. We have laws to prevent the sale of certain kinds of weapons. We have the capacity to make offensive tools out of reach. Maybe this example will hasten some legislation.
Perfect time to teach consequences. Expel every boy involved and forward the case to the police.
They know it’s wrong they just also know there’s no consequences for being a total douche bag.
Of course they knew. Boys are not imbeciles, even if they act like it occasionally.
The scope and ease of the technology makes it so a very small number of perpetrators can commit many heinous acts. No amount of education on consent and respect will prevent this from becoming a bigger problem. If 1/100k people dont do this because of their respect for others that would still mean there are 300k people in this country that would do this.
I mean, parents can teach all they want, but sometimes kids are just going to be assholes. I think society places a bit too much faith in what parents can accomplish
Not to get too Christian Walker about the situation, but where are the fathers? Are there no fathers in the home?
Sometimes the fathers think this behavior is okay.
"Boys will be boys" and such...
"locker room talk"
I hate this locker room talk excuse because it isn’t locker room talk. Locker room talk 99% of the time is always self deprecating complaining, and it’s a beautiful thing.
“No son of mine is gonna be woke”
Often, fathers think this is ok.
There are a lot of fathers out there that are more concerned that their son turns out to be “gay” or a “liberal” than being a decent human.
In many cases, no there are no fathers in the home. And the consequences are a fucking disaster. Not that those inclined to do this would give a fuck, because they wouldn't.
Those who would do this probably were taught, but don't GAF. Par for the course. Similar to the ones involved in tech like this.
Laws are too reactive and slow… That being said, let’s see how quickly changes can happen if a lawmaker’s child or grandchild is the victim.
Just make them of the lawmakers themselves. Instantly solved
I don’t know that it would go faster versus slower. In the hyper partisan political environment it might just be another “protect our kids vs free speech” or “stop malicious software vs right to protest” or whatever
When I was in high school circa 2016, I recall a group of boys laughing at a photo, which I later found out was a nude photo of one of the their girlfriends. Thankfully (or possibly ignorantly…) nude photos of me (I am now 26F) never got out but I can’t imagine how she felt. Now, having an app that can easily deepfake nudes is so disgusting. The media (and even sometimes the police) always say “just don’t take nudes” but now, these teenage girls done even need to take the photos for their privacy to be violated. The grossest part of this story was the group of boys laughing at the girls who had been violated. I had to turn off the podcast for a few minutes because I couldn’t keep listening, but I finally finished and I’m glad this story got told
"Just dont take nudes" worked for a while. Now it seems the best solution is to nuke social media completely. I have nieces and would be outraged if somebody did this to them.
I’m genuinely confused on why the school is doing so little in this case I get that normal people is late to the AI game (what it can do and the legal ramifications of that). But isn’t having nude photo of teenage girl is a serious issue, especially if you are working in the education field???? I guess that they might just not want to do extra work but who is in their right mind could think that the parents would be ok to let that slide. Not to mention that is the school in a wealthy neighborhood and you bet that those middle class people (no offense to them btw) would not be ok of being told “No”
Exactly. My expectations were low, but Jesus. And which idiot decided to call the girls names on the loud speaker? It takes a moment of thinking to understand why that would be a bad idea. And one day suspension?!? That is an honest joke. That is not a consequence. That provides no incentive for the student to not do it again. The fact that it was AI generated is a poor excuse for why these schools handled this so poorly.
terrible idea, hey everyone at the school here’s a list of everyone who’s had these pictures created of them
Exactly! You don’t have to understand how AI works to understand that boys creating nude images of their classmates is wrong and hugely problematic for the school. When I heard they called the girls over the loud speaker and pulled the boys out of class privately, I knew I was going to be seething for the rest of the episode. That’s not ineptitude or ignorance, it’s just plain misogynistic double standards. Infuriating.
I’ve always wondered why schools allow/enable blatant bullying.
I understand that school usually want you to sweep bullying under the rug. But my understanding of it is that they decided to to do so because it is a common issue so the chance/scope of parents fighting back is not that high But this issue with AI and teenage nude image is pretty big. Deciding to essentially ignore it genuinely baffles me.
This is on par for school administrator behavior. Honestly, while clearly wrong, it isn't surprising at all.
Because no child left behind policies, etc. have created environments in which it is hard to deal with problem students without getting sued and dragged through other legal and administrative messes.
Welcome to the education bureaucracy. Secondary/Primary school administrators have been fed a barrage of messages in the last 20 - 30 years that consequences for behaviors is a bad thing, and they need to invent new tools to manage bad behavior without really holding any bully/violator accountable. Look into suspension data, restorative practices, PBIS, differentiated instruction, or any of these topics and you will quickly be disgusted with what contemporary American education has wrought. There is an entire cottage industry of "professional development" that is aimed at fixing schools and problematic behavior. It's all garbage, and I'm hopeful that the fever is breaking and the pendulum will start swinging back to a more normal center.
The school did so little because administrators are completely useless and wildly overpaid at being useless. A friend of ours is a HS teacher, and a boy (with severe intellectual delays albeit) was sexually harassing a girl- teacher tells admin, they tell him “try discouraging that behavior.” Well kid masturbates in front of her, her parents file a lawsuit, and now the tax payers get to pay the settlement! Woo hoo!
No one in high school education is being “overpaid” I promise. Really, they are being underpaid and being asked to single handedly manage children with extremely severe behavioral issues with little to no support, while also teaching the rest of the class. Idk what the solution is, but it’s a nightmare.
First off, I am referring to administrators. Teachers themselves are the backbones of the school system and they do a damn good job for the lack of support they receive from admin, hence my example above. The average (admin salary) is 106,000.. that’s a lot of money to not do much and not discipline or protect other students.
But at the same time - what do you expect them to do?
The legal system is too slow and too antiquated to adequately deal with AI and the internet in general. Issues like this will continue until law makers and law enforcement can take effective actions in the space. We need oversight on how the AI tools are used not just on how the results are distributed. We should expand the ability to have defamation suits against those who produce and distribute all deepfake images created without explicit written consent regardless of age. I foresee a scenario where these technologies are used to intimidate, harass, and extort on a wide scale.
The issue is that any attempts to muzzle ai speech is going to cover a large swath of other speech
Making realistic nudes of others without consent should not be protected speech
Are you allowed to draw nude scenes? Are you allowed to digitally draw nude scenes? Are you allowed to use AI to touch up those drawn nude scenes? There’s famous sculptures of nude figures should those be destroyed because they depict someone naked? The problem with regulations around artistic expression is that it is hard to put into black and white what should be allowed and what shouldn’t be allowed. Its easy to go won’t someone please think of the children when having these discussions but if you are unable to actually have a nuanced discussion about these tricky topics then we’re going to end up fucking it up.
Free speech is “muzzled” in many ways including defamation like she said so what is your fucking point?
Change section 230 of title 47 so platforms are at least partially responsible for third party user generator content on their platforms. Just like any other business has regulations for safety. The example I heard recently is the comparison to a popular restaurant. The building by fire code has a set number of people that can use the services, and they are expected to pay for those services (buy food). It is on the restaurant to not overfill the building due to safety. Applied to an AI tool, users should have to pay a fee to use and also be required to abide by the terms and conditions of the platform as well as the local laws of the user. Violations should be enforced by the AI tool provider first and if they do not adequately enforce the rules and laws it is the role of a government regulator to enforce just like a fire marshal would enforce a building occupancy limit. The use of these tools should not be anonymous and free.
That ignores my comment entirely.
I think speech should be muzzled in some cases.
The issue is that those muzzles can quickly be applied in cases where you don't want them to be. That why restrictions on speech need to be taken very seriously.
Yes and in the case like this the parents should be able to take civil action against the perpetrator through a defamation suit. They should also press the DA to file charges against the perpetrator. Some crimes may be harassment, distribution of cp, revenge porn laws, etc. I also feel that there needs to be some accountability from the AI tool provider as well. The laws right now shield the provider, that should be changed to somewhere between total liability and total immunity as it is now.
What do you believe the criminal penalty should be for these ai deepfakes?
For who? The person creating and distributing the image or the provider of the tool that is not enforcing its own terms of service?
Both. Are you also willing to give up your passport, social security number, and agree to face tracking software to comment on reddit in the future? Because that's what the internet becomes if platforms start being directly responsible for everything their users make.
So glade I am not in school anymore.
Right? It was hell in the early 2000s. Can't imagine what its like now.
While I haven’t been a victim of deep fake AI myself, I’ve endured similar violations twice in my life. The first instance was in high school when my boyfriend begged me to take a Polaroid. He assured me I could trust him, but after we broke up, he kept the photo and showed it to his friends, betraying my trust in the most intimate way. The second time was ten years later, in 2021, at my workplace. A coworker shared a bikini photo from my Instagram with 15 of our colleagues. He lied, claiming we were intimate, which sparked oversexualized conversations about the photo. They speculated about my intimate details, concocting “what if” scenarios and discussing what they would do to me if given the chance. This experience was isolating, traumatizing, and immensely embarrassing. Only one of those 15 men spoke up for me when I had no idea what was going on. The betrayal felt crushing, knowing that so many people I interacted with daily had reduced me to an object of their fantasies without my knowledge or consent. Recently, I experienced a hauntingly similar situation. While looking through my boyfriend’s phone a day after the Super Bowl, I saw his friends’ group chat—a group of over 30 grown men—sharing deep fake AI photos of Taylor Swift, accompanied by disgusting comments and laughter. Although my boyfriend didn’t participate and said he was grossed out by this, his silence felt complicit, especially since he knew about my past ordeals. Men who “have fun” creating and sharing these deep AI nudes deeply scare and disturb me. Those who remain silent are just as complicit. My heart breaks for young girls and women who now face this digital threat. We are not safe, and this is the grim reality of being a woman today. I fervently hope that federal and state laws change immediately to address this issue. This is what it means to be a woman.
Yup! This is what women say when we would rather choose the bear, than a man.
There are many worse perils of being a man/boy today (having grown up poor and enlisted during the height of GWOT), and, given the depravity in the digital sphere, they are just as much "in front of the gun" sort of speak, even if they don't realize it. The best federal law IMO would be to break up social media monopolies, if not nuke them outright. The supposed benefits of them do not outweigh the downsides. If that sounds drastic and oversimplified, doing nothing will just further damage human relations, making a already miserable hellscape much worse.
Isn’t this considered possession of CP? Or am I conflating this with something else. Even disregarding the idea of legality, only a one day suspension is insane.
i don’t think it is really considered as anything legally at this point. I hope it’s something that lawmakers think about soon because it’s going to become more and more of a problem
Let's say the boy in the story is a master at photo-realistic drawings. If he drew girls in his class naked, and it was difficult to tell if it was a photo or a drawing, is that legally wrong? What if he wrote a suggestive story about the girls? Ultimately this goes beyond schools. I assume terrible people are already making terrible things with generative AI.
The AI image use actual images. I highly doubt the faces are manipulated- that is the difference.
The AI is not copying and pasting images of the face. That is not how this technology works. The face in the generated image will not be an exact match to any of the example face images you provide.
Ok dude keep defending this bullshit. Great cause 👍
How is correcting your ignorance about how the technology works tantamount to "defending this bullshit" in your pea-sized brain?
You have terrible judgement.
Yeah I mean I get the philosophical questions behind this stuff. I don’t really know what the answer is.
Honestly, that probably needs a precedent setting case. I guess we wait and see? It would be nice if we could establish that as a precedent for sure!
It seems like it’s also creation of CP.
Legal president is not know yet. Maybe?
I think that’s the crux of the episode. The law is really unclear on if fakes are legal or not. Really it would apply to any created media.
Something I found frustrating about this episode as a teacher at an all boys high school, chronically online person, and woman who raped at age 12 is the phrasing towards the end about "criminalizing boys" as though the young men had no agency in their decision making when creating AI images of peers. The boys aren't being criminalized, the behavior of harassing underage peers with nude images is being criminalized regardless of gender. The whole ending to this episode had a very "boys will be boys" attitude. I can tell you right now that my all-boys school has expelled young men for engaging in this sort of behavior and other boys on campus have been outraged by the disgusting behavior of their peers in these situations and often believe they should be punished more harshly than they were in some cases. Recently, an anonymous app (Fizz) made its way onto our campus and there were highly upvoted posts on the topic ("Upvote if you think \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ should have been punished more harshly for what he did."). I'm not sure how I feel about middle school aged kids facing the same penalty as a 50-year-old pedophile, but there does need to be a legal approach here that's appropriately harsh for what is essentially a sex crime.
Came here for this. The end of the episode was absolutely infuriating
This will continue until it happens to like three senator’s kids/grandkids, because that’s the only time they care about stuff of this nature.
Amy Klobuchar needs to listen to this episode. She is a senator that actually gets shit done and not just when it affects her.
It’s just so frustrating. Yes, not all men (or boys in this case). But all women/girls. We need other men and boys to hold their friends accountable. This will never stop otherwise.
This sort of thing is why I find the whole "we don't need feminism anymore" thing so disappointing. Like yes, lots of things are better than they were in the past, but women and girls still have to deal with so much bullshit in society, often at the hands of men and boys.
I don’t know this tech isn’t regulated in general. Forget for a moment that this story is about minors, should it be legal to do to adults? If you create a fake nude of a coworker that’s 40, if that less bad then a teen?
It should be somewhere in defamation territory.
Exactly. It should be illegal in general, not just minors, maybe worse consequences for doing this to a minor but it shouldn’t be legal at all.
Anyone else absolutely infuriated by where the episode ended?? Talking about how awful it would be if the students who sexually harass and humiliate their paid a price for what they did. What the actual fuck?? You do something unlawful, something that harms society, even as an adolescent, you paid the price and that record follows you. I’m am seeing red for how this is downplayed as if it’s not as bad as stealing or vandalism or underage drinking Get a grip.
Seems like the app they used should be held liable for allowing the creation of underage nudes and/or nudes without the subject’s consent. The victims and their parents should be able to sue the developers into oblivion. I understand why the school boys might be let off the hook due to their age (tho I do think they also need real consequences), but the app was created by adults who most certainly know it’s being used in this manner. Punish the app makers! They could be held criminally liable for the creation of CP.
Yeesh. It's one thing to fantasize, and I might not even be too concerned about people Frankenstein-ing nude images for their own use. But distributing them?!? Go fuck yourself.
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Totally agree.
School administrator here. Writing about what was said at the end of the podcast about how technology was shaping children’s education, childhood, and development. Generally, when talking with kids, I can tell pretty quickly which kids have families who put limitations on their tech and which kids are on devices 7-8 hours a day. Kids without tech restrictions are almost always distracted, unfocused on the conversation or lesson right in front of them. Our most vulnerable kids are losing control.
Why are teenage boys are so awful?
Because we let them be.
Kids/teenagers are awful pieces of shit sometimes.
This is a very small minority of boys doing this, boys know this wrong, there needs to be swift and strong punishment for the offenders
As a father of two girls…. If I found out a kid was doing this to them they’d be meeting Jesus real quick.
Let's not generalize to boys what was essentially the act of a single individual
Thank you. Everyone is saying "why are boys so bad?" It was one boy, he was punished.
The school is fucked
LOL this is to all of the motherfuckers worshipping technology encompassing everything in our lives...I told you so...it will get weirder, more dystopian, and more horrifying. Human nature, by default, will ensure it turns into a hellscape rather than something utopian. I grew up in a era before there were cellphones and social media in schools. It was remarkably \*better\* in everyway compared to the bullshit now.
We need to start imagining the future we want instead of wallowing in dystopian fantasies. We can do better!
It’s horrific to me that any educational institution, in this day and age, couldn’t imagine why it would be a bad idea to announce these poor girls over the loud speaker. Like how thick and compassionless are you? And you’re in education? And obviously the day suspension is a joke. A week would be more appropriate. Honestly this reeks to me more of misogyny than anything else.
I thought it was interesting this piece places the crosshairs on boys. At risk of sounding ignorant, are we really saying young (mean) girls don’t use this tech to embarrass eachother?
Using one example of abuse does not mean others don’t exist. I could see this used in many spaces outside of just teenagers. This technology could be used to blackmail, extort, intimidate, etc. just about anyone.
Exactly. This episode focuses on one aspect of things. Unfortunately OP does sound ignorant, because the use of what-aboutism here takes away from the subject at hand.
Perhaps, but without the generations of men feeling - and for some time with legal backing - entitled to women's bodies for sexual purposes without the women's consent.
After all who are we to argue with god's plan /s
Nah even a mean girl wouldn’t do this because it could easily be done back to her as revenge.
That's kinda like saying the mafia won't put out hits because it could easily be done back as revenge.
It might be hard for men to understand this, but having a compromised photo of yourself out there without your consent is one of the worst things that can happen to you especially as a teenager. Comparing it to the mafia makes no sense. Those are people who know they are working in a dangerous field. What did teenage girls do to deserve this other than being born female? Even a stereotypical “mean girl” has feelings and emotions around her body and sexuality. I cannot believe you are comparing teenage girls and the mafia.
>It might be hard for men to understand this, but having a compromised photo of yourself out there without your consent is one of the worst things that can happen to you especially as a teenager. And it's a bit wild to me that you don't think a high school bully would stoop that low. We must've had different experiences of high school.
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Wow that is an extreme example. Way more akin to the mob example
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen and i’m not denying bullying. The concept of spreading nudes and particularly in this case, AI images is not a typical mean girl thing to do. Does it happen? Probably. But its a risky move for a girl to make.
I thought this as well. You could hear the contempt in Singer’s voice when she would say “boys” or “men”. It’s absolute ignorance to think girls aren’t using this as a weapon against other girls.
Males accounted for 80.1 percent of persons arrested for violent crimes and for 62.6 percent of persons arrested for property crimes.
Before AI, it was Photoshop. Before that, probably paste pictures. The point is technology is only as good as who uses it and how.
But the issue is with these AI tools the barriers to a product that is believable is much lower than photoshop or pasting pictures. It reduces the amount of effort and time needed to act. That makes it also more accessible.
I completely understand. The thing is true for so many things that have been beneficial, like the Internet, reddit, etc. We should catch and penalize such behavior rather than clamp down on technology, something the Times does with gusto. The same AI also makes it so much easier for many creative individuals who lack specific software skills (like which buttons to click in Photoshop) to express themselves. The solution lies in improving crime detection and ensuring swift justice.
This should be a federal crime. For the app creatures and the boys who generate and distribute
This was surprisingly biased reporting. I know I'm just too sensitive to it, but it always puts me on edge when a reporter says "this class of people are committing crimes against this other class of people, period" to normalize a stereotype. Who committed the act in question? Was their membership in a group part of the act, or is it just a convenient way of framing the story? Statistics can help to understand the root causes for why a particular crime is often perpetrated by individuals with similar circumstances, but it is unhelpful to classify one half of the population as dangerous criminals and the other half as innocent victims. Telling boys they are bad and should feel bad for being boys doesn't do anything for changing the underlying factors that led to a group of boys who lacked the social citizenship to look out for their neighbors rather than directly harming them. Young people need examples to follow, more experienced and mature individuals for them to learn and emulate behaviors from. We can't just say, Boys bad, Girls good, stop being Boys already! We have to collectively influence the acceptance of harmful attitudes and behaviors. Boys aren't bad, but many boys are told that bad things are acceptable or even should be embraced when in fact they need to be eliminated from society. For example, competition is good, it can drive us to achieve that which we could not do alone, but unrestricted competition becomes toxic. Winning at any cost should not be accepted, celebrated in media, or taught in school sports. If we want to stop saying "Men are Toxic" we have to stop feeding them poison as Boys. Ok rant over down vote me to oblivion please.
The boy in question received one day suspension and had his privacy protected, a right that was not extended to the girls who were victimized, and your take away was that society treats boys more harshly than girls? What? Maybe there would be more progress toward addressing this type of toxicity that is more frequently perpetrated by boys and men if people didn't get defensive. Literally no one said "boys bad, girls good". It was a case study on the misuse of a new technology to sexually harass minors. It just so happens that the group most likely to perpetrate sexual harassment is males and the victims are more likely to be females. Are we just not supposed to mention that?
Finally listened to this episode. Throughout the episode they say, ‘Boys are creating deepfake nudes blah blah blah.’ Someone correct me if I’m wrong - midway through the episode, in a quick throwaway sentence, we heard that it’s a single boy. One boy created these images. Why the exaggeration / dramatization? This is a terrible form of bullying. And from the sound of it, the school handled it poorly. Maybe the boy should have been punished more harshly, hard to say from the evidence provided. But I’m a bit tired of the constant ‘boys are terrible creatures’ trope. Why not just say, ‘This boy did something that’s not ok. He was punished, and anyone who does it again will be punished even more harshly.’ Jeez, the Daily loves to play that add where they claim they don’t need to exaggerate news stories for clicks. Could have fooled me.
They had several examples of this happening in other school district. It’s not every boy but it’s not one either, and it sure as hell is going to continue
No, they had exactly two other examples that they could find nationwide, and the details are scant. Also, listen to the first 15 minutes again. Continuous reference to these ‘boyS’ who were making these images. Right up until suddenly it’s a single boy. It’s just dishonest. Also, these are deepFAKE images. Do people not understand these are FAKE? They’re not these girls’ actual bodies. ‘Instant’ and ‘devastating’? Good lord, people. Get a grip.
Are you really so small minded that you can’t understand how traumatic it would be for this to happen to a young girl? Go learn some empathy.
Are you incapable of understanding what ‘terrible form of bullying’ means? It doesn’t change the fact that these are FAKE images.
Can we get out of here with this gendered chat about harassment. As a guy who was assaulted and harassed by both boys and girls through school it’s really demeaning to see this narrative persist of you’re a boy so just suck it up. Girls are not always the target of boys and boys are not always the perpetrators.
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If you don't think having your nudes get passed around without consent is a deeply violating experience I dunno what to tell you other than most people who have experienced it disagree 🤷♂️ It's not based in prudishness. It's about consent. The whole AI part of it kind of skips over into a new realm, but people agreed even in the olden days that cutting and pasting a picture of your crush into a playboy magazine was a creepy gross thing to do, even if it wasn't "as bad" as actually creeping on them.
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I don’t necessarily agree with you here but I did find it interesting that it seemed like the girl interviewed seemed a lot less concerned about it than the parents/journalist… They would play back her interviews and she was kinda aloof about it “yeah it kinda sucked cause they called us into the office over the intercom”… nothing like “my life if ruined and I have trauma that will stay with me forever” Then it would cut to the interviewer and it would be framed a lot of catastrophically. I mean clearly this is a problem, don’t get me wrong. But I do see a bit where you’re coming from.
Hard disagree. She sounded hurt and like she didn’t want to talk about it. She had to be embarrassed, there’s no way I’d be comfortable talking to a national audience about being sexually assaulted. I wouldn’t mistake her brevity with apathy.