Our AI Deepfake Problems Reveal a Much Bigger Issue

Explicit AI deepfakes are symptoms of a system that fails to protect our children and protects major porn sites instead.

Sixty teenage girls in Lancaster, PA are grappling with the horror and humiliation of knowing that AI-generated porn of them is circulating the internet. The two high school boys that made the deepfakes will each serve six months of probation, complete 60 hours of community service, and pay $12,000 in restitution after facing 59 counts of felony sexual abuse of children. This story made the headlines in March, but stories just like it play out in pretty much every school across the nation, whether we hear about it or not. In Lancaster, 60 girls were exploited, yet I count sixty-two victims.

Now before you close this page and slam me on social media, I am not excusing those boys for what they did. They made choices that caused real harm to other people and I’m glad they are facing consequences. But they didn’t get there on their own. Those boys are also victims, victims of a predatory industry that profits from misinformation and human misery:

Porn.

Allow me to explain.

This scandal has renewed the discussions around better regulation for AI products and better reporting structures to identify and take down deepfake and revenge porn quickly. It has also renewed the discussion around the emotional fallout for victims of deepfake porn, and rightly so. These are important matters to discuss. AI tools should absolutely be regulated to minimize their potential to be used for harm. We should have robust systems for taking down deepfakes and revenge porn. And we should educate young people on the psychological impact AI deepfakes and revenge porn have on their victims.

But none of those things get to the root of the problem. Regulating AI tools, building reporting systems, and helping young men understand the negative impact of nonconsensual deepfakes will not stop these kinds of events from occurring. The media is talking about the wrong things.

It’s like treating the symptoms of a disease. Treating symptoms alone won’t make the disease go away, even if the symptoms improve. And without treating the root cause, the disease will linger and will someday come back with a vengeance.

And the root of this problem is that these boys, and millions of others, have been taught that sexual misconduct towards girls and women is okay. Those boys didn’t fully understand that what they were doing was wrong. Again, I am not excusing their behavior, but I will explain it.

The reason those boys didn’t consider that what they were doing might hurt people is because they didn’t see their female classmates as people. I know, it sounds despicable-- and it is-- but it isn’t their fault.

I have no doubt that each one of those boys has already consumed hundreds of hours of pornography in his life. Sexual gratification is a powerful and universal motivator, no one can deny that, and porn carries a hefty dopamine hit for those that watch it. Dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter for memory and learning, which makes the lessons in porn very memorable and very convincing. And porn almost always depicts women as objects for sexual gratification and nothing more.

Ergo, these boys have spent hundreds of hours consuming a very compelling education on sex and gender roles that has taught them that girls and women are things to be used for pleasure and discarded when they lose their appeal. Which brings me back to my point that those boys didn’t fathom that they might cause harm to real people by their actions. They didn’t think these girls were real people.

“How can that be possible?” You ask. “These kids can drive a car and play Fortnite, how can they not recognize a human person?”

You might think I’m full of shit.

And I can see why you’d think that. But you don’t know porn like I do.

Remember that these boys have consumed hundreds of hours of highly engaging media that depict women being used for male sexual gratification. In many of these clips, women are literally moved, manipulated, and treated in the same ways a person might treat an inanimate sex doll. The women in porn often experience verbal abuse and violent treatment and the actresses usually pretend to like it. Porn tells a convincing story that women like to be treated poorly and those boys and countless others buy that story hook, line and sinker. It’s not that those boys think women are literal objects, but they have been convincingly taught that women respond positively to being treated like objects.

“But surely those boys know the difference between right and wrong! You don’t seriously expect me to believe that they made hundreds of AI deepfakes without realizing they were doing something wrong, do you?”

To help me make my point, let’s use a more familiar example.

By now, a smoker knows, logically, that cigarettes are bad for him, but he smokes them anyway. Why? Simple, because he is addicted to nicotine. Through habitual exposure to nicotine, his brain believes that it needs nicotine. That he would literally die without it. Humans are more easily tricked than we like to admit, and the smoker keeps smoking because the risk of lung cancer is nothing compared to the prospect of dying a horrible death from nicotine withdrawal. You know that quitting wouldn’t kill him. I know that quitting wouldn’t kill him. The logical part of his brain knows that quitting wouldn’t kill him. But the subconscious, lizard, part of his brain doesn’t know that, and it will rage against the idea of quitting smoking because it believes that he needs cigarettes for survival. In the mind of a nicotine addict, smoking is the right thing to do and quitting is wrong.

Porn is the same.

Cue the critics: “Sex addiction isn’t a recognized condition! Porn isn’t addictive! It isn’t even a drug! You’re just making excuses!”

The critics are all wrong.

Research AND human experience-- the more important of the two-- both tell us otherwise. Porn is addictive, same as cigarettes, cocaine, alcohol, gambling, and social media. Therefore, the subconscious brains of those boys believe that exciting, stimulating pornography is a requirement for survival. Even if the logical part of their brains (which is still developing, by the way) knows that making deepfake images of their classmates is wrong, their education tells them that those girls won’t mind. Hell, they might even like it, the boys think, and if they don’t, well, what is the objection of an object compared to thrill, the high, of seeing a girl from their class posing naked or in the throes of some sex act?

For those boys, it was just too tempting to pass up.

So the boys did it. And though I understand why they did it, it doesn’t change the fact that it was a fucked up thing to do. I feel deep empathy for the families affected by this scandal.

I would be humiliated and upset if I knew that porn with my face was circulating at my school. I’d lose sleep imagining the friends and strangers reveling in my humiliation.

If my own child made the choices those boys made, I would be confused and horrified. I would lie awake at night, poring over every moment of my child’s life, trying to identify where I fucked up so badly that my child would do such things to other people.

And if a boy did that to my daughter, I would see a red as red as blood.

And though I don’t walk in the shoes of the victims or their families, I am still angry.

I’m angry that those two boys thought they could do whatever they liked to those girls with no repercussions. I’m angry that those girls are suffering emotional distress because others see them as less than human. I am angry that there are millions of people out there suffering abuse and heartache because a few rich men want to get richer by selling the human body like a single-use dixie cup.

I am pissed off and fired up and I would tear down the towers of those men brick by brick with my bare hands if it would protect our children from this kind of thing ever happening again.

But if we actually want to protect more young girls from abuse, we must address the root of the problem that makes this form of human suffering so commonplace. Unregulated AI tools are not the issue here and neither are flimsy reporting structures.

Porn is the issue.

Porn is the root cause of these and so, SO, many other problems. Porn has the same universal appeal and addictive qualities of hard drugs, it is endlessly accessible, it is virtually impossible to prevent underage people from finding it, and it is teaching generations of men and women that the female body is an object for sexual gratification. Almost every form of porn a person can find on the internet tells that story and a 2020 study in the Journal of Sex Research found that 91.5% of men and 60.2% of women report consuming porn in the past month. 91.5% of men spent some amount of time in the last 30 days learning how to use women as objects for sexual pleasure. 60.2% of women spent some amount of time in the last month learning that they should degrade themselves for a man’s pleasure.

And it shows. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), 1 in 5 women experience complete or attempted rape in their lifetime and a quarter of all young women who attend college will experience rape or sexual misconduct before they get their degree. A study done by Tulane in 2024 measured that 27% of women experience sexual assault, 31% of women experience cyber sexual harrassment, and 59% of women experience physically aggressive sexual harrassment, including unwanted sexual touching. It’s as though women have no choice but to play russian roulette with rape just by being born female.

In case I am not making myself clear, my point is this: watching porn encourages viewers to commit sexual abuses.

This is a PROBLEM. Those boys in Lancaster, PA, are not just bad eggs. This scandal is not a symptom of an unregulated AI landscape or of poor reporting. This is a symptom of a silent campaign by a money-hungry industry to turn generations of people into drooling addicts and latent sex offenders by selling the image of the female body as a commodity like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. Consume it and throw away the wrapper.

And VIRTUALLY NO ONE is talking about it!

We need to address parents directly about this issue. If the parents of those boys are anything like my own, they were not aware that simply watching porn can encourage sexual abuse and they were too chicken to look under the hood of those boys’ digital lives. They were afraid of finding something they didn’t know how to deal with and so they abandoned those boys to a predatory industry that hooked them on an addictive product and brainwashed them to treat girls like paper towels long before those boys had the chance to learn the proper way to be a man.

The two boys that callously created hundreds of deepfake porn images of their female classmates didn’t get there on their own. They made atrocious choices, but they knew not what they did, because they are victims, too. They are victims because our society’s infuriating tolerance for pornography enabled them to be exposed to extreme sexual content as children. They are victims because Big Porn tricked them into thinking that it’s okay to exploit women for sexual gratification. But when those boys made bad choices, they are the ones to pay. Those boys are taking all the heat and no one, least of all the media, is talking about the businesses and systems that encouraged their behavior.

This is a problem. We MUST start talking about porn. We MUST approach it with a serious and critical attitude. And we MUST be courageous.

As I have demonstrated, porn affects women most strongly, as they are typically the victims of the poor behavior that porn encourages. But men are porn’s top consumers. Most men consume porn at some point in their lifetime. For men under 40, that number is close to all. As men, we all have experience with it, thus it is our duty to talk openly about it.

And I get that it’s not a fun thing to talk about. Even I don’t enjoy talking about it. But here I am, talking about it.

And that is where Molt comes in. At Molt, we are raising awareness by talking openly about the impact porn has on the people that consume it. We are also equipping people with the tools to quit porn for good and to talk about porn intelligently. I want to help men and women break free from a cycle of using porn that harms them and their relationships, and I want to equip those same men and women to go out into their circles and help spread the word so that we, as a human race, can protect our children from abuse.

Things won’t get better until we address the root of the problem. Things won’t get better until we educate young people on the harms of pornography. And we have to get to them before the porn industry does. The only realistic way to do that is to educate parents. Parents have an opportunity to learn about this subject and educate their children before these kids see it for the first time on a friend’s phone. If we can do that, we help our children avoid things like what happened in Lancaster, PA, and we can disempower an industry that wins when things like that happen.

Learn more at www.moltrecovery.com.