I caught a portion of a video clip the other day that was both eye-opening and frankly disturbing. A young man, who appeared to be part of a roundtable discussion, said,
“I’m 30 years old. Not one of my friends has children. Zero. No one. No one’s having kids. Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children? … Look, GDP goes up. People have enough food. No one’s having kids. And this is across the world. This is across both the West, the East, everywhere it’s happening. So there’s a thing that happens, especially with younger people, Even younger than me. Like, the kids that are like 18 today. There’s a huge problem where they don’t dance. No one dances. They go to clubs, and they don’t dance. Why is this? Because you get recorded. If you’re an 18-year-old kid and you go to a club, you get recorded. If you approach a girl and you mess it up, you get recorded. Everything is a panopticon now. So if you ask me why, my answer is technology. My answer is social media. My answer is AI. My answer is algorithms.”
For the last few years, social scientists and cultural observers have hypothesized that declining marriage and birth rates are a consequence of young people being too attached to their phones to actually go out and try to meet people. But maybe the problem is much deeper than that. Maybe, as this young man suggests, it gets back to a legitimate fear of not merely being rejected, but having their rejection immortalized on TikTok and Instagram, where any awkward moment, any image, any encounter, can be captured, circulated, manipulated, and turned against them. Or worse, having their image and likeness used in the creation of AI-generated deepfakes.
If you are a woman walking down a sidewalk and see a man coming at you from the opposite direction wearing Ray-Bans, there is now every possibility that you are being recorded without your knowledge or consent, and that that recording could later be used to create deepfake nudes. This is not mere paranoid catastrophizing or speculation. The threat of AI-generated explicit content is not a theoretical problem that we need to worry about and legislate against in some far-off future. As former Washington Redskins coach George Allen famously said, “The future is now.”
Meta glasses have earned the moniker “pervert glasses” for a reason. “They’ve been used by all kinds of charlatans and brutes to harass strangers, from pickup artist ‘manfluencers’ filming themselves approaching strangers to juvenile pranksters recording members of the public without their consent,” writes Victor Tangermann for Futurism. Commenters in various online communities are appalled at the potential for exploitation and abuse. One wrote, “Not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg’s pervert glasses… I would prefer technology to make it more difficult to skeez, creep or perv on the world. I would like tech to protect me from creeps, not smooth the runway for them.”
Today, you don’t need to be proficient with photo editing software; all you need to do is upload a face and type in a prompt. Nor is this any longer a problem confined to high-visibility celebrities. Common Sense Media’s new report, Teens in the AI Era: Pornography and Sexual Content, finds that 44% of teenagers have already seen AI-generated sexual content, and among those teens, nearly one in four have seen content depicting themselves or someone they know personally. Even more alarming, 8% report personally creating AI-generated sexual content, while 13% know someone who has done so.
A new report from Thorn (a non-profit organization that builds specialized software and artificial intelligence tools designed to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online) adds a more disturbing dimension to this data. Thorn’s research found that teens face an evolving spectrum of online sexual harms that overlap. Thirty-four percent of surveyed teens report having engaged in online sexual interactions (involving receipt of sexual messages, receipt of nude photos or videos of the sender or another kid, requests to send a nude photo or video, or pressure to go “on cam” in a sexually explicit manner). An additional 7% report all of the above plus sharing their own SG-CSAM (self-generated child sex abuse material), seeing nonconsensually shared SG-CSAM, and nonconsensually resharing someone else’s nudes. An additional 1% experienced all of the above plus sextortion (receipt of threats to share sexual imagery of them to others to make them do something), and an additional 3% experienced all of the above plus deepfake nude experiences (involving the creation, sharing, or personal victimization of deepfake nudes).
The problem of deepfake nudes has been with us for some time, but these new tools, coupled with generative AI, have made it possible to produce at scale, and that will of course change the way young people interact in the real world. Sixty-seven percent of teens say they worry about being depicted in sexual deepfakes without their consent. Many are already changing their online behavior out of fear, making accounts private, posting fewer photos, or withdrawing from digital spaces altogether.
Those numbers help explain why the problem is not merely “online content” in the usual sense. AI-generated sexual material strikes at the foundations of trust, consent, and personal dignity, and it does so at the very ages when young people are learning how to understand themselves and relate to others.
Childhood and adolescence are supposed to be seasons of formation: learning trust, friendship, courtship, responsibility, and respect for others. Instead, many teenagers are growing up in an environment where anyone with a smartphone (or Meta glasses) can fabricate intimate images of a classmate in minutes. The harm goes beyond the fake images because it erodes the moral habits that make real relationships possible.
The measure of any technology should be whether it strengthens the conditions that allow human beings to flourish. The world this young man described—a world where no one dances because everyone fears being recorded—is not inevitable. But if we keep building technologies that make it easier to watch, exploit, and humiliate one another than to trust one another, we should not be surprised when young people retreat from the very relationships and risks that make human life worth living.
