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by techdragon 873 days ago
She is rich, and famous, and can both afford to fight legally, and sway public opinion to her side ( which is is the ethically sound side, it’s hard to argue it’s totally fine for anyone to make fake porn and share it of you without permission… doubly so given we allow people to exercise likeness rights )

So she has the social and economic power to stand up for her rights, and enforce her existing likeness rights in the face of some widespread AI imagery that is violating those rights…

I’m not expecting precedent, just another sad example of how the rich and powerful have rights the rest of us don’t, because you have to assert those rights which requires lawyers which requires money and so… the status quo continues as it exists today… “nothing to see here, move along”… sadly.

2 comments

Full agreement.

That's why I think this is really important for everyone - and not just about fake sex tapes - but in how much we control our presence in the world, specifically at the intersection of our Digital existence and our Biological existence.

And this is imperative to get right, given that our Digital selves are effectively immortal from this point forward - even though they will ultimate just be boiled down to some coordinate in a vector graph for eternity.

I think you expect too much. The end result is that she assets rights she already had yesterday, rights she had years ago before DALL-E or Stable Diffusion even existed… there’s nothing new here… just existing power structures that give the rich and famous some measure of control over their likeness due to it being part of their personal brands and thus their l business interests… while the non rich and famous have no right to privacy in public and short the limited protections that have been implemented in some circumstances against revenge porn, no right to protect their likeness being misused… from people taking pictures in public, to AI generated images… they do not have protections against this kind of thing as no act has been perpetuated against them unless it crosses a tiny minority of laws against things like commercial imagery rights which is why models have to sign a release… but that won’t protect from generated imagery given away for free.
Ironically I think that her fame has a chance of being her undoing on this subject and we'll end up with a situation where the famous have to endure certain kinds of sexual content being produced that features their likeness while the little people do not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell

It’s going to spread to the little people too. Once deepfake technology proliferates to the point where anyone can train and run a model on consumer hardware using photos and videos from someone’s social media profile, what do you think the boys at school are going to do with it?