Non-Pornographic Deepfakes and Beyond – The Direction We Should Take

As I wrote about last week, there was earlier this month what a Fox News article called a “Grok AI scandal.”  Per that piece and another in The New York Times, it involved “a recent flood of Grok-generated images that sexualize women and children,” including an “image depicting two young girls in sexualized attire,” and “new images” of “a young woman,” with “more than 6,000 followers on X,” wearing “lingerie or bikinis.”  Responses were swift, with the British prime minister saying that “the images were “disgusting” and would “not be tolerated,”” a Brazilian official threatening to ban the products, three United States Senators requesting removal of X and Grok apps from stores, and a Grok spokesperson publicly apologizing with the company greatly limiting user access to even unrelated image generation.

The problem, though, will not go away.  The technology is here to stay, and it is certain that no matter how many restrictions companies place on their chatbots and other products, there will be many who can use it to turn people in photos into electronic paper dolls.  So how can we understand the situation and both identify and sensibly enforce violations?

The situation now, outside AI, gives a mixed bag.  On one side, sexual exploitation of people under 16 or 18, especially girls who receive more emotion, has become the most hated crime, with intensity, over the past decade or two, far exceeding illegal drug sales and distribution during the Just Say No 1990s. Over the past 30 years or so, teenagers have been cloistered, almost never appear in public alone, and have been increasingly referred to as children, which, with their lower-than-before experience negotiating with adults, is more appropriate than it was in, say, the 1960s.  On the other side, the line supposedly crossed by the scandal is hardly firm, as bikinis and underwear, along with leotards, short skirts, and other scanty apparel items, are freely available, and pictures of them being worn by children and adults of all ages are unrestricted and easy to find.  Sex appeal, and what we might call semi-sex appeal, which can approach or even cross commonly recognized lines with the blessings of the paying subjects, have been used to sell products and publicize actual and would-be celebrities for centuries or more.  Female puberty has started much earlier – according to two sources, it moved from an average age of 17 in 1900 to 10 in 2000.  In the meantime, what arouses people sexually remains a strongly personal matter, and any picture of any person would turn at least a few on.

What should be illegal?  Beyond the most obvious of displaying genitalia in certain states and poses, it is not clear at all.  What is and is not pornographic has long been notoriously hard to strictly define. But we badly need to do just that.  Here are some insights.

First, all children are not the same.  Men and older boys are hard-wired to be sexually attracted to females capable of reproduction.  Fittingly, psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, long the industry’s premier desk reference, at least 40 years ago required, for a diagnosis of pedophilia, that the attraction objects be prepubescent.  That does not justify any sexual exploitation, but tells us that having feelings for adolescents calls for self-discipline and self-restraint, not a judgment of deviance. 

Second, at the start, people need to regard all shocking pictures of people with faces they recognize as bogus.  The laws will protect us when that is justified, but those things will not go away either.  Pictures of people with unknown faces should be attributed as genuine to nobody.  Everyone, from victims to parents to cultural observers to judges and lawmakers, should share these beliefs.

What we need, then, is a three-by-three matrix, with “pornographic,” “strongly suggestive,” and “acceptable” on one dimension, and “apparently prepubescent,” “apparently adolescent,” and “apparently adult” on the other.  For adults, only nonconsensual pictures could be considered problematic.  “Strongly suggestive” should have high standards, and such cases as the above, where one influencer was dressed in clothing used by other influencers, should not qualify.  We will need to rigorously define, as hard as that will be, the borders of these cells.  For example, is lingerie more provocative than a bikini, when many males respond more to the latter?  Such things will not be easy to classify, but the existence of chatbots has given us no alternative.

Once we have defined which cells only contain illegal material, we will need to consider their identifiability.  Purely AI-generated images with composite faces, not using photos of actual people, should generally, if appropriately and boldly tagged or watermarked, be legal not only for adults to generate for their own private use but to share with consenting adult recipients.  If that sounds extreme, consider this:  Wouldn’t it be a wonderful contribution for AI to send actual child pornography, with its accompanying damage to actual children, to extinction?  That could happen, as the synthetic photos and videos could be custom-made to the consumer’s tastes and have much higher quality, and the lack of often devastating criminal penalties would contraindicate genuine material for virtually everyone. 

It is not surprising that something we have been unable to solve might fall into place if we think new thoughts.  If we stay legally muddled about images, many will suffer.  If not, we can get real freedom and more human happiness.  Which would we prefer?