Technology

This is a sad article to read. I'm not a woman nor am I young adult growing up with all this technology that can be leveraged against me. Could you imagine being a junior high or high school student, and having an anonymous classmate creating deepfake porn of you using your yearbook photo? And the children in your class gossiping about you, sharing your porn video/photo online with their friends, and enduring that harassment? It's already well-documented what damages that too much pornography causes on our psychological development, now imagine the consumer of this content being around the victim. That harassment can get so much worse.

I can't even begin to fathom what kind of psychological damage this will cause to the youth. I feel for women everywhere - this is a terrible thing people are doing with this technology. I can't imagine raising a daughter in this environment and trying to help her navigate this problem when some asshole creates deepfake porn of her. My niece is currently getting bullied in school - what if her bullies use these tools against her? This just makes my blood boil.

It's bad enough that since social media has risen and captured the attention span of kids and teenagers, that there is a well-defined correlation with an increase in suicide rates since 2009 (the year Twitter first came out). https://www.health.com/youth-suicide-rate-increase-cdc-report-7551663 . Now, a nonconsensual AI-generated porn era to navigate.

These are dangerous times. This opens persons up for attack, and regulation to increase friction to access these tools is one of the next most important steps to take. Granted, outright bans never work (as the persistent ones will always get their hands on it), but we need to put controls into place to limit access to this. Then we can remediate the root cause to these problems (e.g., proper systemic education, teaching a modified sexual education in schools to address things like consent, etc.).

EDIT:

Wanted to also add after I posted this, that a common prevalent argument I hear parroted by people is this:

• People are gonna do this AI generation anyway. It'll get to the point that you won't be able to tell what's real or not, so women can just deny it. You can't prove it's real anyway, so why bother?

This is another way of saying "boys will be boys" and ignoring the problem. The problem is harrassment and violence against women.