Hacker News Reader

Comment by lilboiluvr69 | Hacker News Reader

But that's my point. Why would I care if somebody saw me naked?

Every society has different norms. The society I live in objectifies nude people, especially women and sex workers, as loose and not respectable. So, for us it is humilating and degrading (see how victims are talked about after sex tape scandals). It is worse when it shows you intimate with someone else. I've been looked at as an object of desire before instead of a human and it felt terrifying. And I was wearing clothes. All in all, nudity is not the problem but what happens after.

Isn’t the ubiquitousness of services like this an actual “cure”? If its easy to make those deep fake nudes and everybody has one, then it will not be as scary and shameful, And we can finally get on with our lives with one less thing to stress about? God knows we have enough other things to occupy us anyway.

To a certain degree it is true. More and more people know how photoshopped influencer posts are. Sadly, that is not the majority and even if they knew, they would not care. Those who want to oppress will shame others to exercise power, which is why the mindset of guilty until proven innocent is still prevalent. The cure to it is to reduce the power imbalance in society. How is difficult as violence has many forms and hidden behind a friendly facade (e.g. toxic positivy, forced diversity). So, from my perspective nudity itself is not the problem. As an example where nudity is accepted are nudity beaches in Germany.

As Lily Allen says in The Fear:

   And I'll take my clothes off and it will be shameless
  'Cause everyone knows that's how you get famous

We are such an odd society with so very many double standards.

It’s worse than that: why should you care if someone imagined you naked?

That’s all these things are, just imaginations.

I suspect you’d take a different tack if there were synthetic sexualized “photos” of your loved ones going around the internet.

Like by this logic synthesized nudity of real children shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Well of course it shouldn't. One should be able to draw whatever they wish. I'm really not comfortable saying there is a particular thing that someone just can't draw with a pencil.

Furthermore, I'd gladly donate bath time photos of myself as a prepubescent child if it means that some unlucky soul who has the misfortune of being born a pedophile can enjoy something he or she might consider sexually gratifying. Something that will keep him or her content instead of seeking non-consenting children IRL. We should all be feeding people like this synthesized (or donated) sexual material. The idea of withholding it for some messed up reason only serves to put innocent children at risk.

It's not about you.

I suppose not. But if I was in a very Muslim centric country and people were complaining that this software allows pictures of women without a hijab, my first thought would be the same: why is that such a bad thing?

I mean the article itself says people are willing to pay extortion money than risk even fictional depictions of their naked bodies.

Maybe its time we reassess our culture...

The problem is they don't consent to the depiction. Naked or no, it's not nice to depict people in ways they don't like, and it's _really_ not nice to do it ways they _strongly_ object to. You can argue that they shouldn't mind it and maybe that makes sense but that's not the world we live in.

I'm not arguing that extorting people or making them feel violated is right. I'm arguing that our social norms are what allow this sort of exploitation to happen and we should examine our collective responsibility for it.

That’s irrelevant. You’re being asked to accept that other people care if somebody sees them naked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com