A mother and her 14-year-old daughter are advocating for better protections for victims after AI-generated nude images of the teen and other female classmates were circulated at a high school in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, officials are investigating an incident involving a teenage boy who allegedly used artificial intelligence to create and distribute similar images of other students – also teen girls - that attend a high school in suburban Seattle, Washington.

The disturbing cases have put a spotlight yet again on explicit AI-generated material that overwhelmingly harms women and children and is booming online at an unprecedented rate. According to an analysis by independent researcher Genevieve Oh that was shared with The Associated Press, more than 143,000 new deepfake videos were posted online this year, which surpasses every other year combined.

  • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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    417 months ago

    I wonder what the prevalence of this kind of behavior is like in countries that aren’t so weird about sex.

    • @atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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      547 months ago

      This has nothing to do with “being weird about sex” and everything to do with men treating women poorly.

      You can expect this to be worse in nations where women don’t have as many rights and/or where misogyny is accepted as part of life.

    • @Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      197 months ago

      Kids don’t know or understand the damage this can cause someone.

      They see it as a joke most of the time.

      It needs to be made illegal and the kids properly educated about why.

      It’s easy as an adult to condemn these children but we have a lot more life experience.

      • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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        277 months ago

        So, you’re saying both:

        1. It’s childish behavior
        2. It should be made illegal

        So… you think the solution to childish behavior is putting kids in jail?

        *deep breath* lemme try to see a more logical interpretation….

        Wait, you did mention education, ok I musta missed that on my first read.

        So educate the kids, and if they don’t learn… jail

        • Jajcus
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          207 months ago

          Jail is not the only possible punishment for anything illegal.

            • Oshka
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              297 months ago

              That is correct. You punish and educate children who do things wrong. Timeout’s a new concept to you?

              • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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                77 months ago

                You may be from the US, where this isn’t really a concept, but there is significant evidence that you actually can teach better with proper rewards for good behaviour than you can with punishment for bad behaviour.

                I’m actually not sure what the science says about doing both together (maybe I’d read on it more if I actually had kids), but personal experience and discussions at least indicate that parents who punish consistently, rarely couple it with equivalent rewards/praise.

                But maybe you and/or your parents are different.

                Personally, I just got punished a lot for having ADHD. Not that they knew it at the time, but it turns out that’s effectively what was happening. And for people with ADHD, small immediate rewards are WAY more effective than potential, delayed punishment, even if severe.

                  • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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                    17 months ago
                    1. What I described is not “positive reinforcement”
                    2. I didn’t mean to say it’s an unheard of concept, but that it’s not a thing that’s normally put into practice here.
                • Behaviorbabe
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                  107 months ago

                  Science says we teach alternative behaviors and provide positive reinforcement for socially appropriate behaviors. Punishment (which isn’t just jail, it can be stuff like detention if we’re not losing our heads here) if it’s not paired with a replacement behavior is the least effective. Usually you reserve punishment for “danger to self or others” behaviors…

                  Now, as to where this behavior falls. Having AI generated porn of yourself all over the internet as a young girl in some of the puritan towns in the US? That could be an absolute nightmare for the victim this of course something has to occur. Perhaps punishment would be best direct towards those who should know better (parents). Here, the harm being to others…how can we replace this particular behavior? Yes, education, but there also needs to be something better for these kiddos to be doing with their time.

                  Further reading can be found in punishment, reinforcement, functional replacement behavior.

        • @Lmaydev@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          Didn’t say jail, you did. I in fact didn’t talk about punishment at all.

          But there has to be consequences.

          If kids steal we don’t just throw them straight in jail. But it is a possible consequence.

          We’re also talking about 14 year olds not literal children.

          • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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            87 months ago

            Illegal necessarily implies punishment, as far as I understand.

            Also, 14 year olds are children. But the trajectory of this conversation is clear, and it’s not going anywhere.

              • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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                27 months ago

                If I don’t make any logical steps given the limited words provided in a conversation, then communication becomes impossibly slow. Therefore i feel that I have to make such logical steps. Because text based communication, in the current times, is a bandwidth constraint on the passage of concepts between two human minds. In this case, because of said bandwidth constraint existing between your brain and mine, I made the step and assumed that when you mention making something illegal, that you meant that governments should prohibit the act and do as they (in my understanding) typically do and enforce said prohibition with threat of incarceration. That may have been an oversimplified view of the judicial system, there are other means of enforcement, but I’m only really familiar with the idea of children either being incarcerated or maybe given community service, but I usually (I’m not sure why) given to believe that community service isn’t usually a statutory punishment, but rather a discretionary adjustment that a judge can afford someone. It’s also worth noting that I have concerns about the way in which minorities are disproportionately sentenced, procecuted, and ultimately harmed by the judicial system. Concerns which bias my thoughts when the subject is raised. But I’d like to make clear that I’m using the term bias a bit more strictly, as in every human has a bias against/for basically everything.

                So, if I may take another leap, it seems you’re implying that you are specifically talking about me, and not using “you” in the general sense. And I’ll assume you’re actually referring to this current conversation, and claiming that I caused this outcome because I put words in your mouth. Oh, and by that you’re saying (again, these are my assumptions) that I’m claiming that you said something which you never actually said.

                So maybe, if you take some logical leaps for the sake of me being able to type this in my life time, you can see that I was not necessarily trying to maliciously misconstrue what it is that you were saying.

                And in case it’s not clear, the above is conveyed with mild contempt for you.

      • @TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        the kids properly educated about why.

        https://dare.org/

        • DARE is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
        • It has officer-led classroom lessons that reach 2,500,000 K-12 students per year.
        • “Enriching students across the US and 29+ countries around the world”

        If your argument is “The educators just need to make sure the kids learn that this is not a joke”, DARE has been educating students about the dangers of illegal drugs for 40 years.

        Overdoses claimed more than 112,000 American lives from May 2022 to May 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a 37 percent increase compared with the 12-month period ending in May 2020.

        https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-dozens-of-u-s-adolescents-are-dying-of-drug-overdoses-each-month-shown-in-3-charts

        You might persuade some, but the problem will not go away.

        • @Crewman@sopuli.xyz
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          147 months ago

          DARE is known as a bad program, because it goes for fear mongering rather actual education. Everyone knows someone who uses marijuana, and they’re teeth haven’t all fallen out and they’re haven’t turned into a psychotic murderer. [VOX - Why anti-drug campaigns like DARE fail

          ](https://www.vox.com/2014/9/1/5998571/why-anti-drug-campaigns-like-dare-fail)

          There are good and bad ways to go about education. Like comprehensive sex education vs abstinence only, even though they’re covering the same topic, actual education is much more effective than just say no. [NLM Abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education study

          ](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18346659/)

          • @TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            That was my point. DARE didn’t stop drug use. Any education will persuade some. However, unless the students and their families buy in at 100%, this problem isn’t going away.

            About 130 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills according to a Gallup analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education. This means more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

            https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

            The starkest differences were seen by education group. Returning to the first question given above, in many countries adults with a “low” level of education (the equivalent of completing secondary school) had less than a 50% chance of getting the question correct. In places like Canada and United States, this fell to as low as 25%.

            https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathematical.html

            Education alone is not going to make this go away.

            • @Crewman@sopuli.xyz
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              47 months ago

              I 100% agree that education alone will not resolve the issue, but I believe education can help the efficacy of other approaches.

            • @Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              7 months ago

              I did a report on the dangers of LSD when I was young.

              I learned it’s impossible to overdose on and nobody has died directly as a result of it.

              I had never been so interested in trying something out. “Okay so the world becomes crazy for 4-8 hours and you see crazy stuff and everything is hilarious and you can’t die at all and all you gotta do it be in a comfy set and setting”

              God damn, Imma clean out a vial and watch Enter the Void

              Quick edit: staring at my MacBook Pro turned into fractals and it’s just fucking anodized aliminium wtf that’s cool

        • @LilB0kChoy@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          DARE is not a good example to hold up because the program doesn’t work.

          Although some studies reveal that DARE has the positive effects of promoting positive police- juvenile relations and imparting accurate information about drugs and drug use, but it does not appear to deter drug use.

          Edit: to clarify, DARE has always been flawed and ineffective. There was a study in 1994 that showed this yet it didn’t stop or change the program.

        • Riskable
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          7 months ago

          You’re using DARE as a positive example‽ the DARE program is widely considered to be an enormous failure. Here’s a decent rundown:

          https://www.talkitoutnc.org/dare-program-effectiveness/#:~:text=program failed to live up,rate of teen drug use.

          (But if you just search it up you’ll find hundreds of similar articles)

          I was in school when the DARE program was quite strongly promoted and I specifically remember being fed endless misinformation about drugs. It was never about educating children it was about trying to scare them with bullshit.

          “If they were wrong about marijuana being addicting they’re probably wrong about everything else…”

          …aaaaand that’s how young people ended up trying all sorts of new things they shouldn’t have.

        • @lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          47 months ago

          Other people seem to think you’re holding up Dare as a positive example. I can tell you’re not, but I don’t think it’s a great negative example either. So much of the content is fear mongering bullshit that anyone who actually encounters drugs in real life will see through it.

          Education works a lot better when you teach kids things that aren’t directly contradicted by their experiences or their peers’.

      • @interceder270@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I think at some point kids need to learn that there won’t be someone stopping them from doing bad things.

        They need to suffer the consequences of their actions through social rejection. If the microcosm is so shitty that it doesn’t ostracize people who disseminate nudes, then the people in it deserve to suffer until they improve.

        This should be one of the easiest ways to identify shitbags, but I understand a lot of social hierarchies put shitbags at or near the top.

    • OurTragicUniverse
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      157 months ago

      Boys and men are pretty similar the world over. Some are always going to be creeps who do shit like this, it doesn’t matter what culture they’re in.

      • DarkGamer
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        117 months ago

        So you’re saying they’re criminalizing natural and predictable human behavior

        • Snot Flickerman
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          7 months ago

          Nobody said it was natural. Learned behavior reverberates through generations. Especially when it is more than one family that doesn’t frown on such behavior. Cultural norms re-enforce bad behavior as “normal.”

          • DarkGamer
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            57 months ago

            It’s implied when one says that behaviors are the same the world over, spanning cultures and ethnicities.

    • @ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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      7 months ago

      What does this have to do with the other? Where I live nudity isn’t all that uncommon (when compared to the US, for example). But sexually harassing someone with fake porn is whole different issue.

      I see a lot of problems with people having trouble understanding consent and struggling to respect other people. Those boys are weird about sex. That’s the weirdness we should address.

      • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        My bad, I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. I meant, I wonder if boys would be so weird as to want to make such fake porn in places that are less weird about sex.

        Did you think I was advocating for the fake images?

        • @eatthecake@lemmy.world
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          17 months ago

          Naked pictures are all over the internet and they still wanted to make porn of their classmates. It’s not about wanting the porn, it’s about wanting to burt the girls.

          • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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            17 months ago

            I first thought it was more about the boys having a shitty concept, or no concept at all of consent… but that it was ultimately a horrible expression of interest in the girl. But no doubt both are possibilities. And neither is okay.

          • @NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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            17 months ago

            I imagine, in a society where the appeal of such images is low, the sanctity of the image of the body probably isn’t a big deal and people wouldn’t be so hurt by them either.

            • @ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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              27 months ago

              It’s still a questionable way to approach it. Why should the consequence be that people are simply “too weird about sex” and that should change? Instead of that the boys are weird and should change? It’s typical victim blaming.

              This perspective (the victim should change) is very prevalent when the crime is sexual harassment of girls and women.