A teenage private schoolboy has been arrested for allegedly distributing “incredibly graphic” deepfake images of 50 girls from Bacchus Marsh grammar in Victoria. The story represents a triskelion knot of technolibertarianism, exclusivity and misogyny we are disastrously failing to untie.
The girls’ recognisable features were apparently scraped from social media photos, then an AI “nudifying” app did the rest. The boy allegedly shared the resulting composite images on social media. He was arrested but released without charge. But the girls saw the images. Friends saw them. Parents saw them. One parent described having to provide a bucket for her traumatised daughter to be sick into after seeing them – and her daughter wasn’t even one of the victims. One word the parent used in her description of the images was “mutilated”.
The Bacchus Marsh episode is shocking but not unprecedented. The wild west world of barely regulated AI technology has made schoolyard deepfake pornographers a global phenomenon. In February they struck in Beverly Hills. Before that, New Jersey. Last September a group of local girls aged 12 to 14 found themselves the victims of a similar attack from generational peers in a small town in Spain.
Despite outrage, apps enabling the abuse remain available; app-makers confronted by ABC News in the US about the Spanish case responded with a digital shrug. Their work was to make “people........