The PD’s PR team changing their narrative seems to lack competence. The school board focusing on being light touch on a specific case instead of cracking down in general seems like another error of judgment. This whole article says more about the effectiveness and competency of cops and school boards as it does about generative imagery.

Reading comments demanding harsh punishments or preaching morality in response to these kinds of incidents always leaves me feeling profoundly grim.

Speaking as a man, never once in my entire life have I consciously willed myself to feel a sexual impulse, thinking, "Alright, I am going to get aroused now." It is always an involuntary release of hormones or whatever; all I can do is hope that my frontal lobe manages the impulse properly so I don't end up doing something society punishes. Is it different for other people? Do people frame this as a failure of willpower because they are somehow generating their sexual urges voluntarily?

Aren't sex offenders, fundamentally, individuals who struggle to take appropriate action because their impulses are overwhelmingly stronger, or their executive function is lower, compared to "normal" people? Much like gambling addiction or obesity. What they really need isn't harsh punishment or moral grandstanding, but rather medical and social support.

The same applies to teenagers. We arbitrarily categorize them as "children" based purely on a number, but physical and neurological development varies wildly from person to person. Confining them in enclosed spaces with attractive peers for hours on end, and then completely derailing the lives of those whose biological makeup couldn't resist the resulting impulses—leading to criminalized behavior—feels like an incredibly cruel system.

Perhaps if enough generations pass, individuals with these genetic predispositions will be weeded out and the number of victims will decrease. But surely we can implement more humane and effective measures? If society essentially prohibits them from passing on their genes, shouldn't there at least be some form of compensation or alternative support?

The framing bothers me. It's shifting responsibility away from kids and the community. Deepfakes didn't do anything: kids made and used deepfakes in destructive ways.

Big tech sucks, you get no argument from me there. But, how do people so quickly get over the fact that a kid is sexually harrassing someone?

This is like when a mass shooting happens and everyone only talks about guns. Well, yeah, if you didn't have guns a mass shooting couldn't happen, but isn't the underlying issue that someone decided that hurting a bunch of people is the best thing to do?

The more people dislike a crime, the less likely they are to talk about the perpetrator's inner life, but, come on, these are kids. How do people get so side-tracked?

One of the mothers says this quite explicitly:

> Calling the event rumors and speculation when a crime occurred was almost worse than the crime

What's the defense? Intelligent screening of incoming messages so that the threat never reaches the blackmail target? I imagine they'll find an unprotected channel.

Don't post innocuous images of children ever? Seems like losing.

For example here the word "abuse" technically refers to the making and spreading of these images and attendant bullying, but obviously has connotations of actual sexual abuse:

>Despite all this, Radnor’s administration failed students in the days and weeks after it learned about the abuse,

This is maybe subtle but later the article gets more explicit about it:

>this technology [...] bears little difference from the non-consensual intimate imagery that’s plagued young girls and teenagers since the invention of the camera.

(i.e. a straightforward equation of images of nudity that did not happen, and images produced by actually pointing a camera at someone who is physically present with their nude body)

>Because the images aren’t “real,” authorities grapple with how to handle them.

Putting "real" in scare-quotes, very nice.

Dorfman is also quoted doing some nice sleight of hand, going in one sentence from "It was about the creation of the videos" to "and then share them with others as if the girls were something to be passed around." - i.e. equating the making of videos depicting unreal events with something that almost sounds like gang rape.

Anyway enough examples, article is full of them. I'm not saying there's no problem here, just that these people seem to have some kind of ideology of the sanctity of the image, i.e. a realistic image always depicts real events, and should always be interpreted as if it does. If it does not, clearly that's a problem to be corrected by reinforcing the connection between images and reality by making it impossible to produce realistic images of non-real things. It strikes me as exactly the wrong way to go about it, that can only make the bullying and harrassment (the actual problem which should be solved on the social level) worse by making its ammunition stronger.

(Slight aside but I do think the closing quote by Woelfel makes a good point)

The modern web has not been without its warts. It's led society to some very unhealthy behaviors. It's telling that a lot of people think the internet is society, rather than a slice of it. Perhaps its decline is the correction society needed.

It's easy to feel like a doomer if you're thinking "it's sad that the web is being torn apart" and your framing of the web is "the magical place of promise it used to be 25 years ago."

You will have no compute and you will like it. The top comment here is about arresting the children for distributing child porn.

We really should have kept the normies out.

Cameras cryptographically signing all photos and videos should become the standard. Media that cannot be traced back to real camera hardware should a priori be considered fake or tampered with.

Still, deepfakes are partly a social problem and, as should be well known, social problems can rarely be solved by technological solutions.

Society is built around not destroying everything when you're angry. Hopefully that is easier when you're adult, but it's certainly the norm to expect it from children as well.

I do have to say that I find it disturbing how liberally parents seem to post pictures of their children in public though. Respect the privacy of your children, they’re not your pets.

Same defenses that are used against fraud and other crime.

criminal prosecution of the blackmailers AND the services used to generate the pictures.

This is effectively child porn... so penalties would be pretty harsh.

There are extradition treaties to most of the world, so unless the blackmailers are in China/Russia they will end up in jail.

That same thing played out with piracy with people extradited to the US from various countries

Prosecution of AI operators for making indecent images of children?

You won't prevent people stabbing others with knife by banning knife or asking people to wear knife-proof vest going outside. You deter them by making everybody know that the consequence of harming somebody else is going to be a very unpleasant experience.

Prosecuting every one of those blackmailers. If this kind of crime starts going into the "you're gonna get caught and jailed 100%" category, less people will try it.

As an aside, please do not use the b-mail word. It is insensitive towards BIPOCs.

Don’t raise boys who abuse girls. That’d be a big step in the right direction.