The one thing we have always been able to predict with 100% confidence is that every new media will be used for pornography and crime, often in the same product. However, No Pasaran makes a case for there being a socially useful side to the ever-increasing realism of fake porn from popular LLM generators:
Seriously?! Am I the only person that sees the benefits of this “troubling trend” of online bullying?!
Think about it.
Blackmail is now a thing of the past.
That’s it.
It’s over.
Whether you are a teen or an adult, whether the photos are real or not, you can simply pass all of them off — indeed, you can do so nonchalantly — as fakes or deepfakes. To your classmates, to your spouse, to your constituents. Who will know whether you are fibbing or telling the truth? (Maybe you hardly know yourself …)
(In a totally different context, of course, that is exactly what Joe Biden’s White House did …)
As it happens, a considerable size of the audience for these sex photos/videos — maybe far more than half — will already be assuming that they’re fakes … (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)
Depression at 16? Suicide at 17? Why fear sextortion at this point? Compliment instead the (anonymous) photo/video creators for doing a good job — for doing an outstanding job.
On my phone I keep receiving photos of Donald Trump tenderly cuddling with Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin or Stormy Daniels. Lots of apps now make you “repair” snapshots that are decades or (over) a century old, colorize them, and make them into mini-movies (the latest one I saw delighted me as it involved Civil War daguerreotypes from the 1860s).
I also keep receiving AI ads where, by combining a couple of photos of myself and of any girl (someone I know and am perhaps infatuated with or some rock or movie star or someone — Marilyn Monroe? Rudolph Valentino? Che Guevara? Queen Victoria? — who has been dead for decades) I can make myself hug or kiss that person — hungrily — on the mouth.
Years ago (long before AI), I was writing a TV script imagining a politician who was on national television and who was all of a sudden ambushed with private photos of him in a compromising position (with a woman other than his wife, with a man, with many women, with many men, at an orgy, in a BDSM cave, with a money shot, whatever …). Talk of falling victim; talk of bullying; talk of harassment (justified or otherwise)!
How should he react?
Ignore the content. And, with an admiring voice, let out a whistle and praise the work: “Wow, that’s well done!”
“What do you mean?!” interrupts the TV presenter, visibly frustrated. “No no no! Don’t tell me you are claiming they’re fake?! We have proof that you were seen at—”
Again, this was before AI, needless to say, which only made the politician’s next words even more startling: “It is so how admirable the degree to which studios have made progress with special effects!”
