If someone claims to have seen a nude of you, but no-one can find it, does it exist? The article <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1980775" author="Ashley Belanger" source="Ars Technica">Teen boys use AI to make fake nudes of classmates, sparking police probe</a> should be addressing the question, but doesn't.<fn> <bq>According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school "believed" that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.</bq> But it also sounds like the school "believed" that the images even existed in the first place. Nobody reliable has ever claimed to have seen them---just teen boys, who are notoriously unreliable. <h>Back in the day...</h> <img attachment="image.jpg" align="right">Hell, when I was in high school, I might have claimed I'd made naked pictures of girls in school, <i>just to fuck with everybody</i>. I know my friends and I would almost certainly have thought it was pretty funny. we have even done it, just because people thought that we shouldn't, but couldn't stop us. We might have kidded ourselves into believing that we did it to remind people what free speech is. I don't think it's that funny anymore, but not because I think people are justified in ruining their own lives worrying about it, but because I'm just generally unable to enjoy certain things I used to enjoy immensely, perhaps because of a reduction in ignorance, perhaps on account of a general reduction of being able to enjoy things at all. Overthinking has its price. If someone claimed that they had a naked photo of me, it might make me uncomfortable---or it might've made me uncomfortable---but if the simultaneous claim was that it had <i>been generated</i>, then what the hell am I going to do about that? If I'd given out a photo of myself under certain conditions---perhaps implied conditions---then I have a right to be mad about those conditions being broken, but I certainly don't think that there's any legal recourse. If there weren't even implied conditions---to say nothing of explicit ones---then what the hell am I going to do about it? What I mean is: how could it be wrong to just <i>say</i> you'd seen something like that? It's not even really conceivable that it's illegal to have a naked picture that you <i>made</i> and then you <i>say</i> it's a girl in school. What if you were really good with a pencil, and you drew one of them? Is that illegal? Get a fucking grip, people. You can't legislate this kind of thing and call yourself a free society. <h>The hot take</h> <bq>It remains unclear how many students were harmed.</bq> No-one! No-one can even confirm that there are pictures, other than the say-so of a bunch of teenage boys. I'm not being a dick about this; read this summary, <bq><b>The school had not confirmed whether faculty had reviewed the images</b>, seemingly only notifying the female students allegedly targeted when they were identified <b>by boys claiming to have seen the images.</b></bq> Oh, man, am I glad that my anti-authoritarian self grew up in a world where you couldn't get thrown out of school, to say nothing of being prosecuted, for saying that you'd seen salacious material about real-life people, just for fun. Talk about an entire society that can't take a joke. <bq>Some of the girls targeted told the WSJ that they were <b>not comfortable</b> attending school with boys who created the images. They're also afraid that the images may reappear at a future point and <b>create more damage</b>, either professionally, academically, or socially. Others have said the experience has <b>changed how they think about posting online.</b></bq> My immediate reaction is: Oh, man, listen to that lovely language. <iq>Not comfortable</iq> ... then throw them out of school! Might <iq>create more damage</iq> ... how can fake pictures of you create more damage? We have to create a world where people dismiss this kind of shit---it's not going to stop. Maybe we should make naked, porn-posed pictures of everyone. And then there's the possibility that it's <iq>changed how they think about posting online</iq> ... Good! You <i>should</i> be thinking about what the hell you're posting online, you goddamned narcissist. Ok, let's take a crack at a non-immediate reaction and see where we land. <h>Feeling unsafe</h> Instead of just being delighted that they've gotten to a place where they no longer have to worry about being actually being harmed, where it's no longer a real concern, many elites and their children now commonly confuse "being made uncomfortable" with "being harmed" and decided to root that out, no matter what collateral damage is done to rights and free expression. As detailed in the article, they're trying to move us mentally to a place where we think that it's OK for someone to get in trouble at school for saying that they'd seen a picture, that someone else had created, of a girl, depicting her in a way that makes her uncomfortable---or, in the vernacular of the day, makes her feel "unsafe". The story might be made up, the picture might not exist, the picture might not be of her, it might be a simulation of her, it might be based on a picture she'd uploaded herself. Now she feels unsafe. The world is a less-safe place for her because she now thinks that everyone is picturing her naked, or thinks she's a slut, or whatever. But this feeling of being unsafe could arise wholly without anyone actually doing anything at all. One of her friends could tell her that someone had told her that they'd heard that other people were trading AI-generated pictures of a naked woman with her face on it. She might <i>think</i> she heard one of her friends could tell her that someone had told her that they'd heard that other people were trading AI-generated pictures of a naked woman with her face on it. It doesn't matter how it happened---the feeling can be created in many ways, some real, and some fantastical. In all cases, that feeling is <i>real, to her</i>. In which of these cases is this feeling actionable, though? Should any of them be actionable? How realistic is the goal of preventing the world from ever making her feel unsafe? It's completely unrealistic. You can't plug all of the holes<fn> in someone's fantasy. And what if the girl <i>deliberately invents</i> her feeling of being unsafe? What's to prevent her from doing so? Hell, if she invents it well enough, it can even <i>become real to her</i>. Which, as we've discussed above, is the same as all of the other methods by which she could come by a feeling of being unsafe. It's the feeling that society is trying to prevent, regardless of the path one took to get to that feeling. This is how the mind works, especially for a teens, a group that is notoriously highly susceptible to peer pressure. If you're the kind of person who feels mortified because you think people have seen you naked, you're going to find some way of being mortified anyway, no matter how many fingers society shoves into the dike.<fn> It's just a matter of time. <h>We have to do something!</h> Do we, as a society, want to encourage this kind of mortification by helping these people punish other people for perhaps having inspired it? Are we so sure that we can tell the difference between all of the ways in which this feeling of insecurity/unsafeness could be engendered? Of course not. We'll draw an arbitrary line protecting the squeakiest wheels and damning less-squeaky or less-relevant people to punishment that they might not even deserve. This is how we used to treat girls. Now it's how we treat boys. The victims have changed, but the policy is the same: take the path of least resistance to protect your career and position in society, generally by shitting on the less-powerful people in any power dynamic. Generally, you're not going to get fired these days for punishing boys for looking at AI-generated naked pictures of their classmates. You might very well get fired for not doing anything about it, arguing, as I have above, that there is nothing you can sensibly or morally do about it, really. In the old days, we'd have said "boys will be boys" and that was very wrong and stupid. We would say "boys will be boys" when those boys had actually harmed people. Now we do the same thing, but abet girls in meting out harm against boys, for a perceived harm that can't be proven. Neither of these cases was or is OK. <hr> <ft>The author cites the Wall Street Journal, which is a buttoned-down, "make rules for everyone but the white-collar criminals whose promotion is the only reason for its existence" type of newspaper. So keep that in mind.</ft> <ft>I hear it.</ft> <ft>Oh, yeah, definitely hearing it, but can't stay away from the metaphor. Thanks be to God it's a homophone.<fn></ft> <ft>OMG Phrasing again. 🤦‍♂️</ft>