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 laugh”, they said, and that “by them laughing on it we want to show people that they do not need to be ashamed of nudity, especially if it was made by neural networks”.
Techbro platforms operate via Schrodinger’s business model; they make money from platforming content but take no responsibility for doing so. While they don’t, Bacchus Marsh will not be the last place this happens – even though in the US, Spain and Australia faked images of this explicit nature are designated as child sexual abuse material and their production and distribution is a crime.
And there’s nothing new about sexual misconduct scandals at Australian private schools. “We encourage students to aspire to be active and positive members of society who value and respect others and have a strong sense of inclusion and service to others, integrity and compassion,” says the Bacchus Marsh Grammar website – because they always do, these places, in marketing material used to sell parents on the idea that paying to keep their kids away from the children of poor families is somehow moral.
Bacchus Marsh grammar joins Yarra Valley grammar, Salesian College Chadstone, Brighton grammar, the Shore school, Cranbook, and all the other private schools of the boys reported in Chantal Contos’ work in something one may suspect is a pattern.
Sexual misconduct complaints occur at four times the rate in private schools than the public system.
If anything’s fresh about the Bacchus story, it’s that it’s provoked a rare moment of agreement between my feminist self and the conservative senator Matt Canavan, who otherwise have as much in common as a bulldozer and a grape.
Canavan correctly identified the misogyny of the broader issues surrounding the allegations when he told Nine on Wednesday morning that it spoke to a gendered cultural problem, that “standards of behaviour are not being taught to boys”.
Human adolescence is a journey of personal urges frustrated by complex interpersonal permissions. Cultural artefacts abound in which horny boys impose sexualisation on the bodies of the girls around them. The ancient trope is present from Susanna and the elders in the Bible to the changeroom scene in Porky’s. In the “boys will be boys” school of determinist despair, AI nudification is but supercharged evolution of a terrible tradition.
Modern society – finally – admits that teenage girls are in thrall to the same, tormenting desires as the boys, so let’s note: the girls aren’t sexualising anyone like this. They’re not creating “rapability” lists, sexually harassing their peers or mutilating explicit sexual images of their classmates in anything beyond negligible numbers.
Yes, there really is a different standard of behaviour girls are being taught; it’s that they’re not entitled to do whatever they want to people deemed as lesser objects.
Specifically, girls are not taught by culture or tradition or institutional example or even some random roided-up, pissy YouTuber that they are entitled to control other people’s bodies.
Alas, in 21 states of the US, they’re taught they’re not even entitled to control their own.
AI mutilations of women and girls don’t come from sexual desire but a desire to exert power – to instruct that permissions are irrelevant, their bodies are not beyond reach.
Women have never been included within entitlement culture. When misogyny intersects with unregulated technology and elitist values, girls get hurt.
Canavan claims he doesn’t have “the answers” to deepfakes but, by recognising their gendered nature, he’s halfway there.
First, he can apologise for pushing anti-abortion causes and affirm the principle that women’s bodies are theirs alone.
He can support legislation to ban deepfake pornography, to strengthen platform regulation and to hold platforms legally liable for their content. He could also advocate regulation in which private schools who can’t keep students safe should be placed immediately under state control to ensure accountability to civic standards.
Finally, he can teach boys that the old tropes don’t reflect reality – they try to paper over it. There are no lesser objects in humanity.
Welcome to the sisterhood, senator.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
