It is pretty weird, like "The reaction was one of massive support for all the affected mothers"..?

How do the girls not get a say? They asked their mothers for help who organised to found others who are affected.

I imagine it leans into the idea of some people being "too young" to form a grown-up opinion.

Really fucking weird, given the context is around their likeness being used for the purpose of porn.

This is a a really really over simplified solution and I’m gonna argue it’s not at all effective. The cat is out of the bag, just like you said. You can’t undo that.

Nothing on the internet is real, okay let’s start from there.

So now how do we relay scientific findings for example? Rely on the media? Pray to some god and hope our reasoning and interpretations are correct enough?

Should we trust video recordings? Pictures?

Should we trust word of mouth? Each other? Ourselves?

Is that an actual legal right? If you've described it accurately, then Facebook and Instagram would be completely illegal

~~AI generates novel images, though. They are merely trained to produce your likeness. None of the pixels are from any source images.~~

In this case, I'm mistaken. They used a clothing remover app on normal photos and did not train an AI.

While you're completely right, that's hardly a consolation for those affected. The damage is done, even if it's not actually real, because it will be convincing enough for at least some.

The faces are not generated, and that is where the damage comes. It targets the girls for humiliation by implying that they allowed the nudes to be taken of them. Depending upon the location and circumstances, this could get the girls murdered. Think of "honor killings" by fundamentalists. It makes them targets for further sexual abuse, too. Anyone distributing the photos are at fault, as well as the people who made the photos.

The problem goes deeper, though. We can never trust a photo as proof of anything, again. Let that sink in, what it means to society.

To push back your attempt to minimalise what's going on here ...

Yes, they're not actually photos of the girls. But, nor is a photo of a naked person actually the same as that person standing in front of you naked.

If being seen naked is unwanted and embarrassing etc, why should a photo of you naked be embarrassing, and, to make my point, what difference would it make if the photo is more or less realistic? An actual photo can be processed or taken under certain lighting or with a certain lens or have been taken some time in the past ... all factors that lessen how close it is to the current naked appearance of the subject. How unrealistic can a photo be before it's no longer embarrassing?

Psychologically, I'd say it's pretty obvious that the embarrassment of a naked image is that someone else now has a relatively concrete image in their minds of what the subject looks like naked. It is a way of being seen naked by proxy. A drawn or painted image could probably have the same effect.

There's probably some range of realism within which there's an embarrassing effect, and I'd bet AI is very capable of getting in that range pretty easily these days.

While the technology is out there now ... it doesn't mean that our behaviours with it are automatically acceptable. Society adapts to the uses and abuses new technology has and it seems pretty obvious that we're yet to culturally curb the abuses of this technology.

Exactly, the technology is out there and will not cease to exist. Maybe we'll digitally sign our photos in the future so that deepfakes can be sorted out by that.

I think that happened at least 10k years ago ... it's just that the spiral is getting faster and faster ...

That's always the case. Evolution, both biological and societal, happens after the environment changes.