Genuinely curious – if instead of AI these images were drawn by other children with photoshop would that be of equal concern?

I feel ashamed to admit this, but I didn't like one of my teachers in highschool and as a joke one evening I photoshopped her into some photos (a few of which were sexual in nature). But worse, I shared these images with a few of my friends as a joke. Obviously we didn't have AI back then, but I was okay at photoshop so the images look semi-realistic I suppose.

Looking back I didn't even think I was doing anything wrong because I had seen this done quite a bit. I didn't like my teacher and I was expressing my dislike for her with the mean images I created. If you look online you often find people doing similar things to politicians and celebs they dislike. I'd argue this should be illegal, but so long as the person is famous enough it seems this is a form of socially acceptable bullying which I've expressed some anger about on here before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36737515 Perhaps the most egregious example of this I can think of is in Kanye West's "Famous" music video in which he created a life-like naked mannequin of Taylor Swift without her consent seemingly just to be cruel. But I guess that's fine because she's and adult and famous.

Expanding on my point here, I think most of us can agree that it's acceptable to draw a picture of a naked child (or even take a photo of a naked child) depending on context. For example I think most people would agree there are appropriate artistic contexts for a drawing featuring a naked child, and similarly parents often take photos of their child in the bath or naked around the house.

Whenever I think about this issue I always feel the problem is purely the intention and whether or not it was consensual. If the intention is to cause hurt and it's not consensual then I think it is deeply wrong. It's got much less to do with whether the image contains a naked child because otherwise context wouldn't matter. I also don't see how anyone could argue that there is anything inherently wrong or shameful about the body of a child.

In which case I think treating this like child pornography would be inapporiate since the issue with child pornography is much more to do with the fact that a child is being coerced (or forced) into doing things which they cannot consent to for the content. This isn't happening here. In terms of harm this is far more similar to drawing a picture of someone naked against their will and sharing that drawing. However I do accept the realism here makes this worse and therefore should be punished more harshly, but either way this is still purely an issue of bullying.

Who ever did this deserves serious punishment, but treating them like a pedophile would be wrong – especially if it was a classmate of similar age who created these images. And I'll add if we want to stop kids doing this then we should probably not normalise the sharing of nonconsensual photos featuring adults either. It's utterly absurd that they could have created a naked photo of Taylor Swift with this AI and that would have been totally fine, but because it's someone from their class its a crime. Why?

I'd be interesting in hearing if and why others disagree with anything I've said here. I really do think we obsess about these issues when there's a child involved, meanwhile we're fine with adult women being victims of exactly the same behaviour. If this behaviour is wrong then let's stop it completely. You simply should not be allowed to share a photo of person without their consent. The only exception to this should be if that person was in public when the photo was taken.