I recently listed to this podcast from the Wall Streeet Journal, Teens Are Falling Victim to AI Fake Nudes: “Last fall, nude photos of a 14-year-old student started spreading around her high school. But they weren’t real… they’d been created with AI. WSJ’s Julie Jargon breaks down how fake photos like these are a growing trend among teens and why it’s difficult to deal with.”
This part of the ordeal stood out for me:
Elliston Berry: I did. I had a couple classes with him in eighth grade, but he was a classmate and we were mutuals on social media. I didn’t see him as a threat. It was really shocking knowing that he did this because he was a peer, he was a classmate.
Jessica Mendoza: The school district declined to comment about the enrollment status of the teenager who made the photos. The local district attorney said he couldn’t give specifics because the student was a minor, but that the boy was sanctioned within the juvenile justice system. Meanwhile, Elliston’s mom Anna decided to take some steps on her own. Could you walk me through your decision to come forward publicly and talk about this?
The offending student was ultimately suspended but his identity was not revealed to the victims. A big part of the WSJ story is what do to in these cases? It’s clearly wrong, but what does it fit under? I assume schools are afraid of legal liability coming from both sides.
In 2017, I wrote a blog post here during the Me Too environment. It talked about something that I did in my high school days that wasn’t meant to hurt anyone. It was more about wanting to get attention. I don’t know if this is the case for the offender, but I can imagine it starting off that way.
And so when everything is preoccupied about legal liability or political correctness, I think we lose sight of what could generally be considered “right.” The offender invaded the girls’ privacy in a way by creating AI nudes and yet his own identity is protected by the “system”. There isn’t this ability to have the person meet the girls, learn about the pain he causes and apologize (if he felt it was appropriate) or explain himself. I feel a big part of navigating life is understanding the real impact on people. If you fire someone, don’t source it to HR. If you break up with someone, don’t text and ghost them. Take the responsibility, as painful as it is. In today’s world, it feels quite easy to do whatever you want and ignore that responsibility. I can send a Tweet threatening to kill someone for example, or say all sorts of things online that I would never do in front of that person. I don’t learn to understand the impact of those actions on the person receiving them.
Just because the offender in the case was suspended doesn’t mean they really get it. And isn’t the purpose of punishment to help us improve?
Here’s an excerpt from that blog post I wrote years ago, which is no longer public:
I have my own story of guilt: 20 years ago in high school, I was going online during the starting days of the internet, the time when people started transitioning away from AOL and finding the internet: Yahoo, Google, Excite. E-Mail was a miracle. This was Web 1.0, the early days of Geocities, where anyone could create his own website and show off a cool animated “hits” counter to show off the number of page visits.
As many teenage boys do, I gawked at the attractive girls in my classes. I had an idea of naming the most attractive girls in my year and putting it on a website for everyone to see.
I learned basic HTML, scanned photos from my yearbook and put it up. Scraping emails from group threads among classmates, I executed my first example of spam / mass emailing / grassroots marketing. I didn’t ask permission from any of the girls, being scared of them (never had I talked to most of them) and their possible responses, yet still wanted the site out there, getting attention.
As that was, perhaps it wasn’t so bad and I started to get some hits. I can’t remember all the details at this point, but I’m sure I continued working on the site, seeing how I could adjust things. Some friends of mine gave feedback, and this is where I made the wrong decision.
A friend mentioned (paraphrased) that one girl had a physical feature that would be great for oral sex. I don’t think I really knew what that meant, but I thought, hey, more content, and something to put on the website.
And so I did. I remember showing the website to my dad at this point, and he made a very astute comment (as usual) that I should reconsider putting comments like that on the website.
But I wanted the attention, I wanted people to visit the site and have a reaction (even though I truly feared a negative one), so I kept it. A few days later, some anonymous students had a negative reaction to the site and I was actually harassed (pretty stressful for my teenage self) for it. I do not know if they were doing so in defense of one of the girls, or some other reason. It does not matter.
I clearly put my need for attention over something that was not nice to put in full public view. It could have affected one of the girls negatively, and it was a form of harassment.
As I reflect upon this over 25 years later, I could say putting yearbook photos on a website isn’t that big of a deal compared to creating AI nudes. One is porn! Attached to a 14 year old. But we live in different times. In my day, internet porn wasn’t readily available. Sex and violence in film and TV was extremely tame compared to today’s standards. I’m not saying that AI nudes are ok, I’m saying that the thresholds of acceptability are moving extremely fast. If you can download an app to make a nude, it’s suggesting that these are becoming everyday things. And I think there has to be some context around that.
If I were in high school today, would the equivalent of scanning yearbook photos and making a basic website of them in the past be the equivalent of today’s AI nudes? I hope not, and maybe it’s not the equivalent today, but what if it is in 5 years or 10 years?
I Spit Hot Fire 