The Futility of Trying to Stop AI Bikini Pics

As a trained computer scientist, I have watched the political Establishment’s attempts to manage technology with an ever-increasing sense of bemusement. Many politicos seeming still think the internet is a ‘series of tubes’, despite that description being of some 20 years vintage.

This brings me to the latest curiosity (no pun intended). A UK Labour MP, Jess Asato, has decided to sue to prevent AI making bikini pics that appear to be of her. Perhaps predictably, her complaint is only against X and Grok, the bête noire of today’s censorship caste. Sir Keir Starmer, the UK’s departing Prime Minister, says he is “100% behind” her. The apparent legal claim is the misuse of private information and claimed breaches of the Data Protection Act. Yet, assuming the court has a technologically literate judge, she must lose – although as the Horizon Scandal shows, such judges might be in short supply. Certainly, Asato’s lawyer doesn’t get it.

Here’s why. There is nothing private about a face (especially of a public figure) – so it is unclear what her cause of action can be, at least in the real world. As for the bikini, that isn’t a picture of her per se but of a random body in a bikini. Distributing it might not be very nice, but Grok and X aren’t responsible for creating it, as she claims. She argues this is due to bad design choices by Grok and xAI. Would she say the same for Photoshop? After all, Photoshop has long been capable of doing the same thing. Why not sue Adobe to make sure everyone is safe? Perhaps she should sue Microsoft for create MS Paint whilst she is at it.

Now time for some reality. The models that can ‘nudify’ someone are all available freely on the internet. One can simply download them from Hugging Face or any other repository. They are just a set of numbers, called model weights. When you have those model weights, anyone can run the model on their computer – the only difference is speed and having enough storage space. This is something that can be done using open-source software, even if a computer lacks sufficient memory. Now a cheap computer is enough for the largest of models, as long as you are prepared to wait.

Because it is just a (large) set of numbers, any attempt to try and stop them from being shared is utterly futile. This is nothing new – it is the same issue as piracy of movies and TV programmes (including porn), which has been a hardy perennial for the last three decades. The truth is everyone can download whatever they are interested in using BitTorrent and providing they hide their IP (e.g. with a VPN), they’ll get away with it – even if the Government tells Hugging Face to take them down. As it happens, these models are even less protected than videos: studios use steganography to embed a hidden watermark (unique to each copy), so at least one knows where the film was stolen from. Because these models are deliberately open to everyone, then there won’t even be that watermark.

What about the outputs arising someone using this model – i.e., the end product of the bikini image? The problem is that it is very hard to prove that a particular image was AI generated, let alone who generated it, so that realistically goes nowhere. As creation isn’t going to work, what about distribution of someone’s purported nudes without their consent? That doesn’t work either: we have eight billion people on the planet, so any AI generated nude, or even a work of art made by more traditional means (there has always been some speculation here!) leaves doubt as to who is being depicted. The only thing that might work is barring the distribution of nudes. But Asato is also opposed to bikini pictures, not just nudes – if she gets her way, there will be no more pictures of Brighton beachgoers. The truth is that short of shifting to the modesty standards of conservative Islam, there isn’t much that can be done for adults who are as sensitive as Asato is (and to be clear, I’m not a proponent of implementing something like this).

There is one part that is most troubling, yet Asato has little say about this. For child abuse depiction, the criminal law still works, but only up to a point. An image that is abstracted somewhat in terms of its age is unlikely to be criminalisable. Individual victims will find it considerably harder to sue as they will be less clearly identifiable, thus depriving them of compensation they deserve. Yet there is no serious discussion of this consideration, even though there is considerable risk. That perhaps isn’t surprising, given how little many politicians seem to care for this group, with many UK victims still not being heard.

Against this context, Asato’s legal claim seems a tad narcissistic and avoiding the real issues. There is an upshot. Censorious Ms Asato (who claims also to be “proud” of her work on the UK’s notorious Online Safety Act) will hopefully be booted out of Parliament due to the legal costs X Corp should receive for responding to her lawsuit (becoming bankrupt is not compatible with being an MP).

More generally, for those who don’t like Labour’s internet censorship (and their fellow travellers elsewhere), this latest distraction is a thoroughly good thing. If our censorious governments want to distract themselves with impossible censorship, then all to the good. It is perhaps worth writing to the most censorious politicians and encourage them to continue down the rabbit hole! At the same time, you might ask them what they are doing for genuine abuse victims and see if they can give you a good answer to that. But don’t hold your breath.

Dr Reuben Kirkham is a Director of the Free Speech Union of Australia, as well as being the Director of the technology consultancy Legal Technologies. Before co-founding the Free Speech Union, Reuben was a computer science academic.