Julia, 21, has received fake nude photos of herself generated by artificial intelligence. The phenomenon is exploding.
“I’d already heard about deepfakes and deepnudes (…) but I wasn’t really aware of it until it happened to me. It was a slightly anecdotal event that happened in other people’s lives, but it wouldn’t happen in mine”, thought Julia, a 21-year-old Belgian marketing student and semi-professional model.
At the end of September 2023, she received an email from an anonymous author. Subject: "Realistic? “We wonder which photo would best resemble you”, she reads.
Attached were five photos of her.
In the original content, posted on her social networks, Julia poses dressed. In front of her eyes are the same photos. Only this time, Julia is completely naked.
Julia has never posed naked. She never took these photos. The Belgian model realises that she has been the victim of a deepfake.
Prove it. Trawl through thousands and thousands of images and videos of child sexual assualt and tell me which ones were AI generated and which were not. Prove the AI hadn’t been set up to produce CSAM matching a real child’s likeness. Prove it won’t normalize and promote the sexual assault of real children. Prove it wasn’t trained on images and videos of real children being raped.
Legalising AI-generated child pornography is functionally identical to legalising all child pornography.
Legalizing or already legal? Because that’s my question. I don’t think it would be illegal, at least not in the U.S. I can’t speak for other countries, but here, proving a negative in court isn’t a thing.