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.”
I don’t think this is “hand slap” level, but it also isn’t multiple decades behind bars level which is what they would be looking at for that quantity of CSAM, particularly for a couple of horny teenagers that likely weren’t even sure what they were doing was illegal. I do think you’re over exaggerating somewhat the harm in this case as fundamentally what was done isn’t much different from something like cutting out photos of these girls heads and pasting them into a porn magazine. It’s certainly fancier and more convincing, but at the end of the day that’s what happened, their faces got superimposed on the bodies of porn stars. That likely bothered these girls in the same way the thought of some random creep jerking off to their original photos would, and if the images were widely circulated it could cause some issues down the line (heartache certainly, but job loss certainly not), but if this bothered them enough to alter the way they feel about sex for the rest of their lives there were already significant mental issues at play.
I honestly don’t know exactly what an appropriate level of punishment would be. My gut says something like 6 months to a year in juvenile detention plus some years of probation. I think a significant amount of weight needs to be given to the fact that these were a couple of teenagers doing something that wasn’t obviously illegal. They cannot and should not be held to the same standards as adults would be for the same reason statutory rape is a thing, they’re incapable of reasoning about their actions to the same degree as an adult is.