Last month, a detective in a small town outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, invited dozens of high school girls and their parents to the police station to undertake a difficult task: one by one, the girls were asked to confirm that they were depicted in hundreds of AI-generated deepfake pornographic images seized by law enforcement.
In a series of back-to-back private meetings, Detective Laurel Bair of the Susquehanna Regional Police Department slid each image out from under the folder’s cover, so only the girl’s face was shown, unless the families specifically requested to see the entire uncensored image.
“It made me a lot more upset after I saw the pictures because it made them so much more real for me,” one Lancaster victim, now 16, told Forbes. “They’re very graphic and they’re very realistic,” the mother said. “There’s no way someone who didn’t know her wouldn’t think: ‘that’s her naked,’ and that’s the scary part.” There were more than 30 images of her daughter.
The photos were part of a cache of images allegedly taken from 60 girls’ public social media accounts by two teenage boys, who then created 347 AI-generated deepfake pornographic images and videos, according to the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office. The two boys have now been criminally charged with 59 counts of “sexual abuse of children,” and 59 counts of “posession of child pornography,” among other charges, including “possession of obscene materials depicting a minor.”
It does seem like there needs to be a new law specifically addressing this. In the past someone could have cut out the heads of a 17 year old and pasted it on top of a playboy model. That’s an obvious fake, but I don’t think it is the same as what’s happened here. But to a degree there are similarities. Does the ability to detect a fake matter? I don’t know. There are applications that can determine if a picture is AI generated with some level of confidence. Does that mean only human opinion matters? Again, I don’t know. Certainly there was no abuse at the time the image was taken, so there is a difference with this and CP.