[mkaic]

The point isn't that it wasn't possible before, it's that it's 100x faster, easier, and cheaper to fake nudes now than it was previously. I think the reason for why claims of leaked nudes being fake are scoffed at is because making 100% believable fakes takes non-negligible time and effort, and maybe even money. Now, it's just "upload clothes-on image, download clothes-off image 20 seconds later". I think it's not insane to expect this huge shift in accessibility to eventually cause social changes — in the same way that asking for someone's Instagram is normal now, despite Instagram being a relatively new invention, I think it's pretty obvious that a few years from now, nude photos will be assumed by default to be fake rather than real. The social standards are a product of reality, they don't determine reality.

[meheleventyone]

And until your prophecy comes to pass, if it ever does, women are out of luck.

[mkaic]

Agreed. The "transition period" between this technology being invented and society finally adapting to its existence is probably going to be quite rough for a lot of people. My only hope is that society adapts quickly.

[DonHopkins]

If God meant for people to be naked, then they'd be born that way.

Society has a lot of adapting to do, before they lose their superstitious hang-ups and religious bigotry. It will be a long time, if it ever happens at all.

[meheleventyone]

If it ever does, what's your plan if it doesn't go as you predict? After all I don't think you're from the future coming to reassure us that all this is actually totally fine.

[mkaic]

I mean, I'm just making an educated guess based on how society has historically been quite good at changing its norms based on new technology. We didn't have cars, and then we did, and within a generation it became extremely normal and expected for people to drive. Digital cameras were a big deal when they were invented, but for people like me who grew up in the early 2000s, they have never felt that unusual because I've been exposed to videos of myself as a baby for as long as I can remember. When The Avengers was released, it caused a huge amount of hype and hubbub. Now, Marvel produces a dozen superhero movies a year and nobody cares anymore.

Do I think that society will transform its views on nude images overnight? No, obviously not. Do I think that every person in society will go with the flow and adopt new assumptions about nude images? Also no. But it seems entirely logical to me to imagine that once the average person notices "hey, I am being inundated with 1000x the number of fake nudes that I used to," they will eventually reach the conclusion that "I should start assuming all nudes are fake by default."

[meheleventyone]

You're just restating your prediction with more words... what should we do if it doesn't come to pass?

Like I get that it feels cozy to think that it'll just blow over but it ends up being a "thought terminating cliche" that gets repeated ad nauseum in these conversations. I think it's reasonable even if you think the problem will pass to have some idea of what to do if it doesn't. And that's more productive!

[mkaic]

You're totally right, apologies for my non-answer earlier :)

I feel like education is probably our best bet for sort-of-kind-of dealing with the repercussions of the problem. Ultimately, attempting to legislatively regulate the production and private distribution of AI nudes just doesn't seem enforceable to me — see: Brandolini's principle. I think our best hope to mitigate the negative impact of this tech is to talk widely about it and actively try to make my "prophecy" come true. Sex ed curriculums should start including warnings about how fake nudes are an epidemic and begin to build the new social norm of not assigning moral judgements based off of them.

I could also see some government-funded PSAs on popular streaming services/TV channels/radio channels being effective. You'd want to try to disproportionately target such messaging to older members of society, since they're less technologically literate on average and therefore more likely to be emotionally traumatized by tech like this.

Now that I'm writing this, I do wonder if there are some regulatory approaches that could help, especially since we have had some success banning CSAM legislatively. The problem with AI nudes, I think, is that they are destined to become indistinguishable from genuine nudes, so a blanket ban is impossible without establishing a panopticon (which is obviously bad). Blanket banning works for CSAM because there is never any case in which a piece of CSAM should ever be knowingly stored or distributed, regardless of its origin. It is always immoral. This complicates things because nude images of adults can be shared consensually by said adults, and banning this practice would be absurd.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts as well. What sorts of options are there to combat this new AI-generated nude plague if my optimism about the situation turns out to be misplaced?

[taylodl]

It's already happened. Everybody knows the vast majority of celebrity nudes are fake and you can't easily tell which ones aren't. It's not that far of a stretch to extend that mindset to non-celebrity nudes.

[DonHopkins]

It's the Naked Streisand Effect: the ones the celebrities made a big deal about are probably real. The most effective defense is to release more fake ones with outrageously unbelievably sexy if not anatomically possible features, so people will want to look at those instead of the real ones you're trying to bury, and make a big deal out of denying and suppressing the fake ones, ignoring the real ones.

[concordDance]

The harm here is quite unintuitive. Can anyone take a stab at doing a first principles derivation of why this is harmful?

[meheleventyone]

If you look at it as a form of revenge pornography where the intention of publicly sharing it is to demean and shame the victim the harm should be pretty obvious. People kill themselves over selfish actions like that.

[bryanlarsen]

I believe that the parent comment's point is that if the default assumption that a nude of a real person on the internet is fake, the nude should lose a lot of its power to shame. If nobody believes that a picture is real, nobody should believe that the events in the picture happened.

I'm not sure that's true, though. An evil rumour should be assumed to be untrue, yet they're often believed and often cause significant harm.

[falcolas]

People have a tendency to keep ahold of their first opinions. And the first opinion will not be "this is obviously fake" - because it looks real, and we're animals first, humans second.

[GoblinSlayer]

It's not really the same, rumors are more privileged. Rumor is a method of distribution of information and you can't dispose of distribution of information.

[falcolas]

I hate that you're being downvoted for this.

Even today, women are judged not on the facts of who they are, but by the image men (and women) create around them. They're already bullied and harassed for their virginity (or lack thereof), "body count" (real or perceived), promiscuity, their conformity to society's standards of beauty, and so on.

Nudes, especially those created specifically to objectify or harass, will harm women. It will harm their self image, it will harm their reputations, it will harm their careers (women are already being fired from jobs because of nude pictures of them on various websites).

People are not rational beings. We can know intellectually that a picture is probably a fake, and it won't change how it impacts us. Especially if it plays on our expectations. We tend to go with our first impression, even if it's later proven wrong.

See: "Biden was shown images of babies being beheaded." An image many of us still have in our mind, even though it was explicitly debunked.

[GoblinSlayer]

If fake nudes become routine, it will become unreasonable to be hysteric over nudes.

[falcolas]

I'll simply repeat: People are not rational beings.

Even today, we believe stories which could easily be faked. We get outraged over stories which have long been proven false. Our belief in stories can even become stronger in the face of such proof.

Unreasonable... humans are entirely unreasonable, and will remain so even in the face of AI.

[GoblinSlayer]

You can't disbelieve all stories, because there are important stories to believe in, it's not irrational, it's difficulty of categorization. But you can disbelieve nudes, they don't need accurate categorization.

[meheleventyone]

What do we do if that's not true?