What can be done about AI porn?

The foul-mouthed puppet musical Avenue Q, way back in 2003, caught the spirit of the age to come. ‘The internet is for porn!/ The internet is for porn!’ runs one of its more memorable songs. ‘Why do you think the net was born?/ Porn! Porn! Porn!’ Never was a truer word sung by a copyright-skirting knockoff of The Muppet Show. What those puppets didn’t see coming, though, was the effect on this basic truth of the development of artificial intelligence.  

A report this weekend in the Wall Street Journal came headlined: ‘AI fake nudes are booming. It’s ruining real teenagers’ lives.’ The story opened with a case study. A 26-year-old YouTuber called Gabi Belle discovered that, though she’d never posed nude, upwards of 100 sexual images of her were circulating on internet porn sites. They had been generated by AI – which can now extrapolate convincingly from clothed photographs of people to show what they would look like undressed, or edit their faces into pornographic videos.