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.

  • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Nah, making deepfake porn illegal doesn’t require making all of AI illegal. As proposed this law would neither apply to candid photography generation nor to entirely imaginary AI porn. As proposed it’s targetting those generating and distributing such images rather than the technology itself, and giving victims means to defend themselves against being publicly humilliated.

    It could be handled much like any matter of copyright is, that anyone hosting and sharing it must take it down or face the punishment.

    Technology allows many things to be done quickly and easily, but whether they are legal and protected is a whole different matter. The models can be as good as they want, as quick as copying a file, it doesn’t mean that people won’t be sued over it.

    It seems a bit questionable to assume that everything that is technologically possible ought to be permitted, no matter who is harmed. And frankly this is much more harmful than any piracy or infringement.

    • curiousaur@reddthat.com
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      10 months ago

      When it’s widely available, you could share a perfectly legal photo, along with the prompt. Then everyone who runs it would see similar generated images on their own devices, without distributing anything illegal.

      I’m trying to point out how futile it is to fight this, and that any attempt to actually stop it will eventually lead to limits on the AI models themselves.

      (Sorry didn’t mean to reply twice, Lemmy things)

      • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Welp, you deleted the one I had replied to and cut off my response. I had replied this:

        Deepfakes don’t happen by accident. It’s also not “perfectly legal” to distribute and alter a photo you have no permission to use.

        Your argument essentially seems to be that because people will try to find ways around it, no law should be created and no action should be taken to prevent it, is this right? Because this could be said of pretty much any law and it isn’t a particularly compelling argument. Part of enforcing the law is getting around the tricky ways people try to disguise their actions.

        Nevermind that this proposed law is supposed to protect the victims who are harassed because of it. If it was so invisible, they wouldn’t be suffering.

        If this will eventually lead to AI models getting limitations to prevent people from using them for deepfake porn… Good? Who loses beyond the people trying to make deepfake porn

        • curiousaur@reddthat.com
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          10 months ago

          There isn’t ways to limit certain models without limiting all AI tech, which is what the first comment above from another user was saying. That corporations want to be the only ones using it by keeping it out of the hands of regular people, and this plays into that.

          Something this powerful should absolutely be democratized, we should all have our own open source models, and unfortunately that means those smart glasses the guy on the bus is wearing could be undressing everyone in real time.

          There’s nothing to be done about it, and trying to do something is worse. It’s like the war on drugs. Folks who want to do it are gonna do it. Fighting it is only going to make the world worse. Unfortunately there are victims here, but societally I think we’re just going to have to get over it.

          • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • curiousaur@reddthat.com
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              10 months ago

              If everyone could create their own, and just run it locally, explain how the laws could be enforced?

              • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                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.

                • curiousaur@reddthat.com
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                  10 months ago

                  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.

                  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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                    10 months ago

                    Once litterally every can just make them the moment they want to, no one will be sharing.

                    I do not think this is true. There are reasons to generate and distribute these other than to have a personal wank off gallery.

    • Gigasser@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Tbh, I’ve always thought about it like this, making deepfake tech illegal would be like making photoshopping faces on porn images illegal. At the end of the day the technology itself shouldn’t be regulated, the end products themselves should be though. If you Photoshop some kids face onto some nude body, you should be arrested for possession regardless if it was “real” or not. The same should go for deepfake porn exploiting children.

      However I see very little wrong with some guy photoshopping adult celeb or “friends” faces onto nude model bodies, same for those who do it with deepfake tech, just don’t distribute it.