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Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

arstechnica.com

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Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#51

Post by jltsiren »

autoexec wrote: post #6

If they'd cut out their classmate's head from their yearbook photo and pasted it onto the body of a pornstar with elmer's glue would police have gotten involved? This type of bullying is as old as dirt. Bullies suck, and the kids who did this should get in some kind of trouble with the school and their parents, but this is not something police need to be involved in. The moral panic over deepfakes is ridiculous, but…

The act of creating something is usually just irrelevant tinkering. Discussions like this on HN tend to overemphasize the importance of creation, probably because most of us have jobs where we are supposed to create something. But the real-world consequences of creation usually don't come from what was created or how it was created, but from distributing the creation.

And that's what laws should be concerned about. Creating something for your private consumption is usually a private matter. Distributing it should be judged according to the potential harm, as well as to potential legitimate uses.

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#52

Post by ChainOfFools »

Aeolun wrote: post #33
meheleventyone wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not comparable though since the deepfake is going to be photo-realistic and the image wasn’t just made but shared. As noted in the article it seems that making these sorts of images of real people is highly likely to be made illegal in its own right and the behaviour could be illegal already under different laws.

Photo realistic only in a sense. The body will have no relation to the actual body of the person in question.

I think you may be underselling what's going on here, because the entire point of AI generated artwork is that it is based on some chain of relationships to the source material, that there is no actual creativity involved.

So the AI is going to take what you give it, and combine that with what others have given it based on a bunch of similarity weights. If the AI is any good at its job, it will produce an image that is remarkably correlated to the undisclosed original, since that is exactly what AI is doing every time it's asked to do anything at all: "I have an incomplete thought/image in my mind, please produce a written or visual completion of it based on a model built on several billion best guesses from real world data." And if the victim of the harassment has had the misfortune (or lack of foresight) to have their actual nude images somehow slip into the ai's training data, it is likely the AI will prioritize surfacing them in its output.

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#53

Post by nvy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #49
nvy wrote: post #10

Eventually, society is going to have to come around to the fact that this technology can't be legislated away. It's here to stay and it's only going to improve. I hope we get to a place where the automatic assumption upon seeing any digital image is that it's probably fake.

> society is going to have to come around to the fact that this technology can't be legislated away Neither can fraud or murder. Yet we still ban it. This concept that if a problem cannot be 100% solved by the law, it shouldn't be banned, is an umbrella for the insufferable.

By all means ban it. I'm not suggesting that 100% is required. I'm suggesting that banning it won't really accomplish much because it's pretty hard to enforce what you can and can't generate on your own machine without trampling on people's civil rights.

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#54

Post by Reubend »

Our society will quickly need to adapt to the idea that seeing a photo of something no longer means it really happened. There are going to be fake videos, fake photos, fake articles, etc.

Rather than burying our heads in the sand and making it illegal to produce those, I think the better long term approach is to teach our children to be skeptical, and to emphasize that we can't believe everything that's shared on the internet.

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#56

Post by autoexec »

meheleventyone wrote: post #34
autoexec wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s the old as dirt behaviour that this is “acting like dumb kids” so it should slide that helps perpetuate this sort of thing. I never said it "should slide". This sort of behaviour is common in children and childhood is exactly the time to teach them to be better. This is a matter for the school and the parents to handle. There is zero reason for police to be involved in any of it.

If you just shrug it off as “bullying” but I’m not convinced this behaviour is so innocent and I suspect that at some point between the age of 13-19 as in this case there should be more serious repercussions.

> If you just shrug it off as “bullying”

It is literally bullying

> I suspect that at some point between the age of 13-19 as in this case there should be more serious repercussions.

Child development doesn't advance on a set schedule. Kids at the same age can be at vastly different levels of maturity and even older kids often make stupid choices carelessly. It's part of growing up. Their brains are a work in progress and that applies most to the parts that help them make good choices (https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Fam...).

That doesn't mean that kids can't make good choices, but it does mean we need to expect them to make terrible ones from time to time. As adults, it's our job to show them how they screwed up and set them right, but destroying their lives when their brains let them down isn't helping anyone.

Children need teaching and guidance as they grow up, not prison sentences or sex offender status. We gain nothing by treating children like criminals for acting like kids.

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#57

Post by inetknght »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39
hhh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It states they created the images and were sharing them. This 'boys will be boys' mentality contributes to these things.

> Did you read the article? It states they created the images and were sharing them. I'd need to see more to conclude harassment, i.e. proof of intent to cause psychological harm, versus teasing without any clue about the impacts of one's actions. > 'boys will be boys' mentality I don't think this is equivalent. This is immature kids playing with new technology and pushing the boundaries of decency with it. Without p…

> proof of intent to cause psychological harm, versus teasing without any clue about the impacts of one's actions

Teasing, whether you have a clue or not, is intent to cause psychological harm.

> Without proof of intended malice, or evidence of actual harm, it's not a matter for criminal procedure.

I concur. However I think it absolutely is grounds for a civil matter.

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#58

Post by rightbyte »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48
rightbyte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. But this is like 1/100th of the transgression of spreading actual photos from gym class showers, which is a thing that happens quite a lot since everyone has a camera nowadays.

> spreading actual photos from gym class showers, which is a thing that happens quite a lot Source? It's a shower. Where are you hiding the phone?

You don't hide it. You take a camera and photograph some girl or guy far down in the pecking order.

I guess the FBI might knock down my door soon after trying to Google for some report or stats about it. Just some random news articles. Maybe I overestimated the problem?

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31
kibibu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see a tangible difference in the detectability of the fake being a factor? The glued on photo will always be uncanny, but deepfake will not.

> glued on photo will always be uncanny, but deepfake will not Eh, this is still a civil matter. Unless the picture was made for the purpose of harassment, there is no ill will we can presuppose the perpetrators had towards the victim. Just immense immaturity and a lack of judgement and empathy. Judgement and empathy can be taught. (If it was done with the intent of causing distress, i.e. cruelly, it's a matter for t…

> Eh, this is still a civil matter.

Well, yes, that's clearly true whether or not it is also a criminal matter.

> Unless the picture was made for the purpose of harassment, there is no ill will we can presuppose the perpetrators had towards the victim

That is almost tautologically true, but on what bases do you conclude that it is so certain as not to warrant inquiry that there was no intent to harrass?

Re: Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe

#60

Post by dragonwriter »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39
hhh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It states they created the images and were sharing them. This 'boys will be boys' mentality contributes to these things.

> Did you read the article? It states they created the images and were sharing them. I'd need to see more to conclude harassment, i.e. proof of intent to cause psychological harm, versus teasing without any clue about the impacts of one's actions. > 'boys will be boys' mentality I don't think this is equivalent. This is immature kids playing with new technology and pushing the boundaries of decency with it. Without p…

> I'd need to see more to conclude harassment,

Yes, that's why invesitgations happen.

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