At least 20 girls between the ages of 11 and 17 from four different schools in the Spanish town of Almendralejo were stripped naked against their will

JFC. No, they weren’t. They had their faces pasted on to a simulated naked body. To suggest it is even remotely the same thing as actually being stripped naked is insulting to anyone who’s ever had that happen to them.

Pasting peoples faces on to other people’s naked bodies has been around since the invention of photography. When digital photography happened and we got Photoshop/GIMP it became easier. Now we’ve got AI that makes it even easier than that.

The problem though isn’t the technology it’s the fucking people doing it. Are the folks running the Newdify app assholes? Absolutely! Can we regulate that kind of app without breaking things for perfectly legitimate uses of technology? No! We already tried!

Back in the 90s legislators tried to introduce laws that would stop people from doing such things with Photoshop but they never made headway because it’s perfectly legal to manipulate photos. There’s no way to stop such things within the technology itself.

Instead you make it illegal for people to distribute naked pictures of people—simulated or not—without their permission. Except that’s already illegal. So what, exactly, are we to do about apps like Newdify?

Sue the assholes distributing the images and report them as CSAM. Just like always.