 Oh boy, the AI controversies have just been getting spicier and spicier by the week, but I think we're finally at that five alarm like 10 million Scoville level because it doesn't get any worse than high school boys creating AI generated CSAM of their classmates and then sharing the images with each other in the secret group text. We definitely got to get the cyber police, the FBI, and maybe even Batman on this case, anything to protect the kids. So this happened in a New Jersey high school where these boys were spreading these images around and, you know, if you're a bit older, you might still remember back to when you were in high school how fast a rumor or something like that would spread. But obviously with phones and group text and social media and stuff like that, messages and images can spread around to every kid in a school within a few minutes. I really don't know where the principal of this school got the idea that these images had all been deleted from. I mean, maybe the boys who generated them or his first couple of friends he sent them to, they might have been deleted from their phones. But I guarantee you that there's going to be some other kids at this school that still have those images on their phone and they've probably even uploaded them to the internet by now because apparently these images were circulating within the school for several days before administrators got involved. And now there actually is an investigation that's being done into this incident by local law enforcement in Jersey because even though the images were AI, they might still be illegal because the images supposedly depict someone who's underage and it could be argued that the images were created with the express intent to harass the girls that they supposedly look like. In fact, John Bramek, a New Jersey senator said that he's going to look into whether New Jersey already has laws that criminalize this kind of AI content. And if there aren't laws like that that already exist, he's going to draft a bill to start creating them. Now, obviously, senators are going to say whatever they can to get your vote. They're going to say that they're going to protect your kids while they're on the way to Epstein Island because that's the best method to get votes. But this time it doesn't really look like it's just political posturing because several other states, Virginia, California, Minnesota and New York, they all have laws already banning the distribution of fake pornography. And it doesn't even matter whether the content is meant to depict a minor or not. It's just as long as it looks like someone, like a real person, and it was generated without their consent. And there have been people that have gotten in trouble for this kind of stuff. A man in New York by the name of Patrick Carey has been arrested back in April of 2023 and sentenced to six months in prison and 10 years probation for creating and posting deep fake images of real women to the internet, along with their names, phone numbers, and even addresses in some cases to encourage people to harass the women in real life. Now, obviously, this is a little bit further than what the boys in the high school did, but he was still charged with creating those images using AI, like that was part of what he was ultimately sentenced to jail for. And there's also Biden's executive order, which bans training AI models to produce CSAM or nudes or anything like that about anyone without their consent. And finally, if these new laws aren't enough, there's a federal law that has been made several years ago, I'm pretty sure, banning all visual depictions of CSAM, which even include cartoon stuff, although in reality, I think that's treated more like jaywalking in the sense that it's illegal, but it's generally not really enforced by law enforcement. And I guess the reason for that is even though it's kind of creepy for someone to like lowly, it's not possible to actually abuse a cartoon character, no actual children are being hurt here. But when it comes to creating fake nudes of anyone of any age, I really don't think it's something that can be stopped in a meaningful way without creating an Orwellian cyberpunk dystopia where the government just has total control over everyone's computer and everyone's data, because the fake nudes thing has been around for a long time. It's probably been around at least as long as photo editing software has been. Okay, I remember being an edgy teen that used to lurk on anonymous basket weaving image boards, because like most zoomers and millennials, my parents really did not know how to put any parental controls on the internet access or the router or anything like that. And I remember a common thread that I would see where these things called x-ray threads where somebody would post an image of I guess some random lady from Facebook or sometimes it'd be celebrities and stuff like that. And then some other person who's skilled at Photoshop would download the image imported into Photoshop or some other program along with other images of real nude people like a porn star or just someone else nude that looks similar. And then they would upload a new fake picture of that original person completely nude or you know sometimes they would put them in other sexual positions and so on. Or you could even do something as simple as just cropped out the clothed girl's head and then stick it on the body of like some broad that's getting dp'd and as long as you have the right lighting and stuff like that in the two photos and you do a little bit of blending, even an amateur could make fairly realistic images like that. And so even though I see fake nudes as an immoral thing now I don't really think it makes a lot of sense to apply the same failed legislation that we've had for years to generative AI. Plus AI actually adds a whole new level of controversy here because you could generate nudes that look like a real person just from text descriptions without the person that's writing the text ever actually knowing what that real person looks like never actually looking at a picture or anything like that. Like if you're somebody who's really good at what they call prompt engineering, which is this process of writing text in a way so that the AI is able to interpret it and you know create what you want, you might be able to generate nudes of your dream girl. And as long as your dream is realistic, there's a good chance that you're going to end up creating images that actually look like a real person. So as usual, when reactionary people start passing these laws all of a sudden around things that they do not understand, they end up creating more problems and not actually addressing the first issue. But like most problems, the real solution actually lies with you and not with the government. It lies with the people and not the state. And I think the best way to ensure that AI-generated nudes are not created of you or your children is to really just keep images of you and them off social media. If your son or daughter is posting selfies of themselves on Instagram every day, it's going to be a whole lot easier for someone to train a generative AI on those images, you know, just scrape all those images if they're public and then use them to create realistic, fake CSAM. And those images have already been used to train a lot of existing models, you know, Microsoft and OpenAI. They've scraped thousands of images of your son or daughter if they're out there on Instagram because they've scraped millions and millions of people's pages, you know, literally everyone's pages that has any public social media. And so there's a good chance that any prompts that happen to match a description of one of your kids could create something that looks like them just by coincidence. And while these companies that create these online models might try to put some restrictions in place and now they're actually compelled by the government to do that, it's really, really hard to prevent, like completely prevent the creation of nudes. There's all these new methods people are finding to jailbreak the AI and basically make them break the rules, make them create all these things that are supposed to be illegal now that this executive order is passed. So it might be possible to stop this from happening if I guess you raise your family the Amish way away from social media and stuff like that to ultimately mitigate these pictures. But for everyone else that's living their life on social media, the AI-generated CSAM is already literally out of control.