Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting AI-generated explicit content
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
nbcnews.com
Rep. Joe Morelle, D.-N.Y., appeared with a New Jersey high school victim of nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes to discuss a bill stalled in the House.
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Other than vague slippery slope fearmongering I don't see how banning the creation and distribution of deepfake porn is going to make AI monopolized by corporations. If have your own personally trained and run AI model, you have complete control of what sort of content it's generating. Why would you have issues with deepfake porn laws if you are not generating and hosting that content?
It just doesn't add up, there's some logical leap here that seems almost on the level of conspiracy theories. As much as governments do tend to favor corporations over regular people there is nothing so far even vaguely suggesting that AI would be so profoundly restricted that only corporations could use it. In fact, what has been described of what is proposed so far does not target the technology at all, only the users who engage in this kind of bad conduct.
But I profoundly disagree with this "nothing to be done about it". How would fighting it be worse than letting people suffer for it? It's not like drugs where the main person who might have issues is the user themselves, this affects unrelated vulnerable people.
If it is identified who is making deepfake porn and where it's being hosted, it can be taken down. You could argue that not every single responsible person will be identified, but it might still be enough to diminish the prevalence and number of victims. And to the point that the remaining ones will have to be sneaky about it, that still might lead to less harassment to the victims.
You compare it to the war on drugs. Meanwhile I think of the rise of the automobile, with people crying that seat belts and traffic lights were ruining their freedom and "there's nothing to be done" about people dying in car crashes.
If everyone could create their own, and just run it locally, explain how the laws could be enforced?
Aguing that since you do a crime with a tool, outlawing the crime outlaws the tool is a bad argument. Outlawing murder doesn't outlaw knives.
As far as enforcement, it may be enforced with varying degrees of success but the argument that someone may get away with the crime also isn't a reason not to make it a crime.
If someone created deep fakes using locally run models, rubbed one out and then deleted everything they probably wouldn't be caught..but largely who cares that they didn't? It's the harm to others that it causes that you would largely like to prevent, and if a person didn't distribute the image at all them "getting away with it" doesn't matter much.
Edit: I think the argument that existing laws already cover this is more compelling than any of the above arguments as far as why this new law shouldn't be passed.
You conceded that no one cares if someone makes images locally then deletes them. But that's how they're all going to be made shortly.
Currently folks are sharing them because not everyone has the means to create them, some folks do, and share what they've made.
Once litterally every can just make them the moment they want to, no one will be sharing. Everyone will fall under that use case that you admitted no one would care about, which is exactly what I've been saying. It's 1. futile to try to stop, and 2. going to become so wide spread that we as a society will stop caring about it.
I do not think this is true. There are reasons to generate and distribute these other than to have a personal wank off gallery.
Like what? Why share something when anyone curious to see it can instantly generate their own?
I'm curious as to why you cannot come up with any yourself, but here are a few from the top of my head: to pass them off as authentic (likely for clout purposes), to have a laugh with the boys about it, to collaborate with others on them, and to distribute them to harass, ridicule, or disparage the target of them.
Degenerates exist in lots of shapes and forms, and not all degenerates will have enough of a sense of shame to be degenerates privately or to even know they are being degenerates at all.
I don't think you're properly understanding the paradigm shift that's coming with these models being open source and widely available while wearable AR smart glasses get better.
"You know Sharon is HR, look at this scandalous photo of her."
"Uh, I'm seeing a live generated porno of everyone in this room right now, why would I care about that."
And I don't think you're fully understanding that the above is some type of fantasy you have, and will not actually be what the future is like at all.
It's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but my point stands. It's going to be so easy for anyone to see ai gen material of anyone else, no one is going to care anymore.
I don't even think that's necessarily true. If you make it illegal and/or platforms ban it, you're already taking a step toward making it more difficult to do.
I think throughout this thread you're mistaking the technically possible for the probable or likely.
By making it illegal, you essentially eliminate the commercial incentive for making it easy. Every barrier to doing something makes it more unlikely that people will do it. I understand that there is an inherent motive for people to do it anyway, but, every hoop they have to jump through (e.g. setting up their "own, local AI") reduces the likelihood of them doing it.
People don't even run their own email servers, music servers, video servers, etc. etc. etc....most people don't even "jail break" devices...many don't even store a local cache of regular porn...why the hell would most people bother themselves with setting up a local generative AI instance for this purpose?
Outlawing it and banning it from platforms makes it much more within the realm of the creepy basement weirdo rather than something that is as inevitably ubiquitous as you're saying it will be.
Policy is very often about reduction of harms rather than elimination of harms. It's not the black and white realm that you're trying to make it out to be.
It's not illegal to to work on, sell, or distribute the models. And making that illegal is what the first commenter said would be dangerous to do, since then regular people wouldn't be able to compete with corporation's abilities.
Once the models and portable hardware are good enough, and it's just a matter of time, I think you're underestimating how ubiquitous it will become.
Every teenage boy will have a pair of nudie glasses in the form of their smartphone running open source models, and you think they're just going to not use them?
I think you again vastly overestimate how many people are going to run their own AI versus using a sanitized, policy-driven, managed platform version that's cloud based (e.g. Dall-E and ChatGPT right now).
It's possible today (and usually better) to do a lot of things locally, but yet still almost everything routes through an app to a platform on your smartphone and the few remaining things that don't route through a platform using your phone's browser.