(LifeSiteNews) — “Ten years ago it was sexting and nudes causing havoc in classrooms,” writes Sally Weale in a chilling new report at the Guardian. “Today, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have made it child’s play to generate deepfake nude images or videos, featuring what appear to be your friends, your classmates, even your teachers. This may involve removing clothes, getting an image to move suggestively or pasting someone’s head on to a pornographic image.”
I have been covering the rise of the next horrific manifestation of our collective porn crisis here at LifeSiteNews since 2019, when I warned that the rise of “deepfakes” would inevitably result in people making artificial pornography of their peers. Just a few years later, I reported on stories of middle-schoolers making deepfake pornography of kids they attended class with; last year, I reported on the rise of “nudify” apps that can digitally undress people in photographs, and the trauma, bullying, and inevitable sexual blackmail that has resulted.
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The Guardian report reveals how swiftly this crisis is escalating. One teacher described an incident in which a teenage boy took out his phone, chose a social media image of a girl from a neighboring school, and used the “nudify” app to digitally remove her clothes. The teacher was shocked to see that the boy wasn’t even hiding his actions, because he didn’t see what he was doing as shocking, or even shameful. “It worries me that it’s so normalized,” she said. Other students reported the boy, his parents were contacted, and the police were called. The victimized girl was not even told.
The crisis is global. “In Spain last year, 15 boys in the south-western region of Extremadura were sentenced to a year’s probation after being convicted of using AI to produce fake naked images of their female schoolmates, which they shared on WhatsApp groups,” Weale writes. “About 20 girls were affected, most of them aged 14, while the youngest was 11.”
A similar situation unfolded in Australia, where 50 high school students had deepfake images distributed; in the United States, 30 female students in New Jersey discovered that “pornographic images of them had been shared among their male classmates on Snapchat.”
The mother of one student in Australia said that “her daughter was so horrified by the sexually explicit images that she vomited.” In the United Kingdom, the problem has exploded overnight:
A new poll of 4,300 secondary school teachers in England, carried out by Teacher Tapp on behalf of the Guardian, found that about one in 10 were aware of students at their school creating “deepfake, sexually explicit videos” in the last academic year. Three-quarters of these incidents involved children aged 14 or younger, while one in 10 incidents involved 11-year-olds, and 3% were younger still, illustrating just how easy the technology is to access and use. Among participating teachers, 7% said they were aware of a single incident, and 1% said it had happened twice, while a similar proportion said it had happened three times or more in the last academic year. Earlier this year, a Girlguiding survey found that one in four respondents aged 13 to 18 had seen a sexually explicit deepfake image of a celebrity, a friend, a teacher or themselves.
Predictably, teachers are also being targeted. Girls and women are left shattered by this victimization. Laura Bates, author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution Is Reinventing Misogyny, writes: “It feels like someone has taken you and done something to you and there is nothing you can do about it. Watching a video of yourself being violated without your consent is an almost out-of-body experience.” Boys, meanwhile, are engaging in criminal behavior often without even knowing it. In the world they have grown up in, pornography is normal – and this is merely the next step.
The experts that Weale interviews are, as usual, at a loss of what can be done about this crisis. They emphasize education, while admitting that this is the equivalent of taking a water pistol to a raging forest fire. They are skeptical that guidelines or bans around technology at school will help. Understandably, educators are demoralized and even despairing. Pornography and sexting have already transformed schools. Deepfake pornography is now making an already ugly crisis far more personal, and there is no indication that the problem can be stopped without dramatic action.
The only genuine solution was put forward by Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England. She has advocated that “nudification apps such as ClothOff” be simply banned. “Children have told me they are frightened by the very idea of this technology even being available, let alone used,” de Souza stated. De Souza is correct. The solution to the porn crisis is both tremendously difficult, but extraordinarily simple: we must simply make this content – and these apps – illegal.
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The good news is that the first step in this direction has already been taken in the U.K. On November 3, the government tabled the Crime and Policing Bill in Parliament. It includes an amendment criminalizing pornography featuring strangulation or suffocation – usually referred to as “choking” – with legal requirements for tech platforms to block this content from U.K. users.
This is the first time a genre of pornography has been criminalized on the basis that even if it is consensual, it genuinely harms society. That is an encouraging precedent, because it applies to virtually all hardcore pornography – and certainly to the “nudification” apps that are set to make middle school a hyper-sexualized hell for women and girls.
The porn industry is destroying society. We must destroy it first.
