THE SENATE UNANIMOUSLY passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes — or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence.
The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act — passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday. The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House.
The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.
You’re missing the point. There may be lots of Nobody models out there that satisfy just about every possible aesthetic or body preference a person could have, and you can use them fairly guilt-free to make content that you want to see. I understand the appeal, and it is far preferable to using real people’s likenesses without their consent.
But that doesn’t scratch the itch people want to scratch. People grew up reading and watching Harry Potter and fantasized about fucking Hermione. They developed a crush on Emma Watson during their formative years, and it never went away completely. People want to see pervy pictures of her, specifically, and AI has given them broad access.
People have crushes, and their crushes have Instagram feeds. Crop out 60-100 good face shots and and a mid-grade gaming PC can churn out a LoRA or TI overnight. Then they’ll be generating the nudes they wish their crushes were texting them.
And some people are just fucked up. They hate women, and they want to exert power over them. Any woman with enough Instagram photos is a potential target, where deepfakes and nudifed photos are trivial to produce, and then attempt to use to humilate or blackmail a woman online.
People are already nudifying picture of kids, and then DMing those kids the photos, blackmailing them for actual nudes, and then escalating from their once they’ve trapped some vulnerable child in an abusive cycle.
There is little to nothing we can do to stop this technology from being available, but we absolutely need to lay the groundwork for holding people responsible, civilly and criminally, for abusing this technology to hurt people.
I don’t feel like arguing, but AI has not enabled people like this. It is simply shown a spotlight on the true spectrum of people.
Personally, I realized what fixation was and what it meant in regards to sexuality at around 12 years old. It is an adolescent behavior. There is nothing wrong with knowing examples of what you find attractive. It is better to understand them, and if the person is mature enough, to break down their fundamental psychology. If you look up scientific definitions of beauty, you will land in the realm of neoteny in humans. Youthful appeal is a current leading hypothesis about how homo sapiens evolved in the first place as part of the explanation for why sexual maturity happens so early compared to cognitive maturity, and why girls mature before boys. There is a lot more underpinning the appeal of what one sees when they are younger. I believe for the vast majority of humans, it is a protection for them to understand these elements of the true human psyche despite the present cultural taboos. If there is a safe outlet, and a person is made fully aware of what they do and do not find attractive, free from any external bias, that knowledge enables them to better understand dangerous situations where they need to be on guard.
My aunt was raped, as was someone I dated. Both were from drunken family in unexpected situations where they made terrible choices. I find it repulsive to think about hurting someone for the pointlessness of sex. It’s a 5 second drug hit in the brain; so the fuck what. There are way more effective drugs, and a fucking hand does a better job 9 times out of 10 if you’re really honest about it. I’m for the cultural shift of normalizing the fact that humans like youthful appeal, not because I want to have kiddie porn, but because I want people to thoroughly understand the taboo is more than just a rule, and if they find something attractive that is dangerous, they should be aware of everything involved. Don’t call them perverted or messed up. They are like someone with an addiction bad for their health like drinking, smoking, or harder drugs. They need to avoid circumstances where those drugs are present. Like if there are a bunch of kids at some house party, I don’t want someone feeling weird and crazy because they see some kid and think they are aesthetically pleasing. I want them to think that is perfectly normal human thought. What is not normal is fucking up that kid’s life by taking actions. They may not ever imagine doing something like that, but get them very drunk, and stumbling into an unexpected circumstance and really bad things happen in real life.
Like, in the bike shops I was a Buyer for, I was often asked why I carried so many low security locks for bikes. It’s simple; the goal is to keep honest people honest; to not give them an unexpected opportunity.
Nothing about this bill or AI is going to enable or change human behavior. The intelligence curve will always have more people at the bottom. They are going to fixate on stupid things. At least celebrities knew they were putting themselves in the public spotlight and at least they have the money to escape the reach of most if the crazies.
If anything, this could be the safe catalyst necessary for English culture to directly address and curb whole kiddie nonsense to a much better degree and resolution that actually impacts behaviors without ostracism and the adolescent mentality of blind repulsion.
I think everything happening as it is presently is the safest option and opportunity. If you take away the celebrity outlet, now the really fucked up psycho starts putting cameras in a temp rental, bathroom toilet, fitting room receptacle, or obsessing over their neighborhood kids. People will always find an outlet. We should be talking to them about their cognitive dissonance and underlying conflict so that they can be helped before they act on many of these behaviors, not because of the appeal of kids, but because of the unconscious counter motivations created by unresolved conflict that manifest as cognitive dissonance. If the person is not a condemned lost cause they are far more likely to learn or seek help.
So to me, this is a disproportionate reaction to something that ultimately has little to no impact. Nothing new has been instantiated; only a spotlight on what was already there. In this instance, we could have used it to grow and mature, but we largely fail to do so. We choose to continue our adolescent rampage and choose to continue with more people getting hurt as a result. Stupid people oversimplify and fail to question their biases in honest depth. I hate to see the effects and damages this blind spot causes to people I love.