A few years ago, Roseberline Turenne, an 18-year-old aide at a Maryland day care center, used her cellphone to take photographs showing "the naked genitals and pubic areas" of eight little girls. Seven of the girls were lying on changing tables, while the eighth was standing in a bathroom. Turenne later claimed she was documenting preexisting diaper rashes, lest she be blamed for allowing them to develop while the girls were in her care.

Turenne was fired after the pictures were discovered because they violated the day care center's policies, which prohibited staff members from photographing children. She also was charged with eight counts each of child sexual abuse, production of child pornography, and possession of child pornography.

Discounting Turenne's explanation of her motive for taking the pictures, a jury convicted her on all 24 counts, resulting in a 126-year prison sentence. Last Friday, the Maryland Supreme Court upheld Turenne's convictions, concluding that the jury reasonably rejected her account, that her conduct met the elements of the three crimes, and that "the evidence was sufficient for the jury to conclude that Ms. Turenne took the photos of the children for the purpose of sexual gratification."

Although Turenne's astonishingly severe sentence was not at issue in this appeal, it vividly illustrates how laws related to child pornography can generate penalties that make little sense. Even if you join the jurors, the intermediate appeals court, and the Maryland Supreme Court in disbelieving her account of why she took the pictures, she did not share them with anyone, and she was not accused of assaulting the girls. Yet under Maryland law, Turenne will have to serve at least a quarter of her 126-year sentence—nearly 32 years—before she is eligible for parole.

People convicted of violent crimes in Maryland have to serve at least half of their sentences before they are eligible for parole. But someone who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and received the maximum 10-year sentence still would have a shot at parole after five years. Even someone convicted of first-degree rape, which triggers a mandatory 25-year minimum, could end up serving less time than Turenne faces for noncontact offenses that consisted of nothing more than taking pictures.

That reality is especially troubling because it is not clear that Turenne committed the crimes with which she was charged. Just four out of seven justices agreed that all of her convictions were valid. In a partial dissent joined by Justice Brynja Booth, Chief Justice Matthew Fader concluded that there was insufficient evidence to convict Turenne of producing and possessing child pornography. Justice Shirley Watts concurred, and she filed a separate dissent arguing that Turenne's sexual abuse convictions also should be overturned.

As relevant here, Maryland law defines child pornography as a "visual representation" that "depicts a minor engaged as a subject…in sexual conduct," which includes the "lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person." Although the statute does not define "lascivious exhibition," the Maryland Supreme Court settled on a "content-plus-context" test for determining "whether the image is objectively sexual in nature."

The production and possession charges, in other words, did not hinge on Turenne's personal motivation. In concluding that Turenne's pictures were "objectively sexual," the majority noted that "all eight girls were partially or fully nude," that "all had nude genitals and pubic areas on display," that "none of the children's faces are visible in the photographs," that the picture "were all very similar to one another," and that several girls were in "poses that resemble what one might see in some adult pornography: the subject on her back, her legs spread, displaying her genitals."

Fader agreed with the test used by his colleagues but argued that they misapplied it. "I would conclude that none of the eight photographs at issue depicts a 'lascivious exhibition of the genitals,'" he writes. "Seven of the photographs depict a child on a diaper-changing table, naked, in a position that is fully consistent with a child having her diaper changed. The final picture depicts a child in a standing position in a bathroom, naked from sternum to the knees. None of the children are posed in anything resembling a sexual position. There are no other people in any of the photographs, nor are there any objects that are sexual in nature or that change the nature of the images from children getting diaper changes to anything objectively sexual."

Although "the framing of the photographs is a relevant consideration," Fader says, "the
framing here still makes clear that the pictures are of children during the process of a diaper change." And contrary to the majority's claim that the girls' "poses" are reminiscent of adult pornography, he adds, "the children are situated in the midst of diaper changes—a perfectly ordinary, nonsexual event—not posed in sexual positions. That an image of an adult posed in a similar manner might be viewed as an objectively sexual image—perhaps viewed as sexual because the position is unnatural for an adult in the ordinary course of a day, or perhaps just because of anatomical development—is irrelevant, because these are images of infants, not adults."

Fader says other "contextual elements" cited by the majority—including the photos' similarity to each other, the fact that "they were all taken at a daycare center," the fact that "they were all taken in the center's bathroom, where Ms. Turenne was secluded," her initial statement that the photos had "no meaning," and her "implausible documentation-of-diaper rash explanation"—were "relevant to the jury's consideration of Ms. Turenne's likely purpose in taking and keeping the images." They therefore were "proper considerations for the jury in determining whether Ms. Turenne exploited the children for her own benefit in connection with the child sexual abuse charges." But the test that the majority applied in upholding the child pornography convictions is supposed to be "objective," making her motivation irrelevant.

"The only contextual element that is relevant to the jury's understanding of what is depicted in the images themselves, to the extent it is unclear in any of them, is that the children in seven of the eight images were lying on a changing table and the eighth was in a bathroom," Fader writes. "But knowledge of the setting in which the pictures were taken does not add any element of objective sexuality to them, separate and apart from Ms. Turenne's subjective motivation. The other contextual elements identified by the Majority speak to Ms. Turenne's subjective motivation, not what is depicted in the images themselves."

To convict Turenne of the sexual abuse charges, the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the photos constituted "exploitation of a minor," meaning she "took advantage of or unjustly or improperly used the child for…her own benefit." That "benefit," according to the prosecution, was "sexual gratification." Fader agreed with the majority that "there was sufficient evidence for the jury to infer that Ms. Turenne took the eight pictures at issue for her own benefit."

Watts, however, dissented on that point too. She notes that the prosecution made much of Turenne's sexual orientation, which Watts thinks improperly figured in the verdict.

During Turenne's trial, a prosecutor asked her if she was attracted to women. "I wouldn't say attracted to women," she replied. "I'm bisexual, like, I'm still confused about what I like between men or women. But not children, no."

The prosecution, which noted that all the photographs featured girls and presented testimony from a co-worker who said Turenne had told her "she was gay," argued that her sexual orientation was relevant in assessing why she took the pictures. Prosecutors also noted that Turenne had adult pornography featuring both men and women on her phone—although, contrary to what you might expect given the charges against her, there was no indication that she had "conducted any internet searches for child pornography."

The Maryland Supreme Court explicitly declined to consider that evidence. But Watts argues that it played an important role in the case. Turenne "was prejudiced by the admission of the evidence," Watts says. And "with these circumstances omitted, the remaining evidence is insufficient to support Ms. Turenne's convictions for child sexual abuse."

Watts suggests that Turenne's explanation of her behavior is more plausible than her colleagues think. "Some of the photos show redness or darkened areas—i.e., consistent with diaper rashes—near the genital area and/or in the fold of the buttocks, and one of them shows diaper cream in and around the fold of the buttocks," she writes. "Ms. Turenne testified that she took the photos to prove that children had diaper rashes before she started watching them. Although the jury evidently did not find this part of Ms. Turenne's testimony credible, the nature of the photos and the circumstances surrounding them being taken do not alone establish that the photos were taken for the purpose of sexual gratification."

The majority emphasized that Turenne initially denied taking the pictures, later said they had "no meaning," and did not offer the diaper-rash explanation until her trial. But Watts thinks Turenne's evasiveness and reticence are understandable in the circumstances, even without accepting the prosecution's theory of why she took the photos.

"Although the photos were taken clandestinely in violation of the daycare center's no-photo policy and Ms. Turenne initially denied having taken them, these facts were not sufficient for a rational juror to infer that the photos were taken for sexual gratification," Watts writes. "A rational juror could have inferred that Ms. Turenne took the photos because she was concerned about being blamed for diaper rashes and lied about having taken them because she knew doing so was against the daycare center's policy. A rational juror also could have inferred that Ms. Turenne took the photos while she was alone with the children because she knew that taking the photos was against the center's policy….Without consideration of evidence admitted at trial concerning Ms. Turenne's sexual orientation and possession of adult pornography, no rational juror could have found beyond a reasonable doubt based on the appearance of the photos that they were taken for sexual gratification."

Although Turenne did not challenge her sentence in this appeal, Watts notes that "the circuit court imposed an aggregate sentence of 280 years of imprisonment, with all but 126 years suspended, followed by 5 years of probation and lifetime registration as a sex offender." While "criminal offenses against children are heinous and must be dealt with appropriately," she says, "it is disproportionate and draconian to impose an aggregate sentence of nearly 3 centuries of imprisonment, with all but 126 years suspended, under the circumstances of this case." Whatever you make of Turenne's defense, that much seems clearly true.

The post A Day Care Worker Who Says She Was Documenting Diaper Rashes Got 126 Years for Taking 8 Photos appeared first on Reason.com.

Age verification laws have been sweeping the country the year, as states push to require social media platforms and adult-oriented websites to card their users. Rather than check IDs, some major porn platforms have simply been pulling out of states where these laws are enacted.

This "is entirely what we were after," said Republican operative Russell Vought in a hidden-camera video released last week.

The video was recorded by reporters from the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting. Posing as the relatives of a fictitious conservative donor, the reporters talked with Vought in a D.C. hotel suite in July and, last Thursday, posted a recording of this conversation.

'We're doing it from the back door'

In a portion of the video, Vought—who served as policy director for the Republican National Committee (RNC) platform rewrite this year—talks about why activists have been pushing age verification laws.

"We're doing it from he back door. We're starting with the kids," Vaught said. "We'd have a national ban on pornography if we could, right? So, like, we would have, you know, the porn companies being investigated for all manner of human rights abuses."

A national ban on porn would, of course, run up against the First Amendment. So savvy anti-porn activists have taken to pushing age verification laws instead.

"We came up with an idea on pornography to make it so that the porn companies bear the liability for the underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website [having to] certify that 'I am 18," Vought told the undercover Centre for Climate Reporting staffers. "We've got a number of states that are passing this and then you know what happens is the porn company says 'We're not going to do business in your state'—which, of course, is entirely what we were after."

Who Is Russell Vought?

Vought is the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank whose "mission is to renew a consensus of America as a nation under God," per its website. In May, he was appointed policy director of the RNC's platform committee.

Vought was previously an official in the Trump administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), eventually serving as OMB director from July 2020 to January 2021.

But Vought is probably best known as one of the architects of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's now-infamous document laying out what it wants to put on the agenda of a second Trump administration.

Trump and his campaign have distanced itself from the much-derided Project 2025 agenda, which Democrats have latched onto as a way to portray Trump's campaign as nefarious and extreme. But part of the idea behind the agenda is to put Project 2025 supporters back in the federal government if Trump is elected again. So even if Trump isn't doesn't endorse Project 2025, people from Project 2025 may well be involved in a future Trump administration.

And Vought is "likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration," according to the Associated Press (AP).

"In his public comments and in a Project 2025 chapter he wrote, Vought has said that no executive branch department or agency, including the Justice Department, should operate outside the president's authority," reports the AP. "'The whole notion of independent agencies is anathema from the standpoint of the Constitution,' Vought said during a recent appearance on the Fox Business Network."

"Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what's necessary to take control of [federal] bureaucracies," Vought said in the Centre for Climate Reporting's video.

Project 2025 on Porn

The idea that age verification laws are meant to make porn websites shutdown isn't exactly a surprising revelation. It's long been clear that a large subset of people pushing porn age-check laws would like to do away with porn entirely. Sex workers have certainly been warning as much for a while now.

Still, it's notable to hear this vision laid out so plainly from someone with such a significant hand in shaping conservatives' policy agenda.

Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the Center for Renewing America, downplayed the idea that the video has revealed anything new. "It would have been easier to just do a google search to 'uncover' what is already on our website and said in countless national media interviews," she told CNN.

Indeed, people like Vought have not hidden their anti-porn agenda. Project 2025 calls for banning porn and imprisoning those who make or distribute it. Porn "has no claim to First Amendment protection," it states. "Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

Project 2025 also takes a broad view of what constitutes pornography, saying that porn is "manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology." It seems pretty clear that a Project 2025–style porn ban wouldn't simply target videos and imagery depicting nudity or sex but a wide swath of content related to gender and sexuality.

More Sex & Tech News

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the tech-industry association NetChoice in a case concerning California's Age Appropriate Design Code. "The court recognized that California's government cannot commandeer private businesses to censor lawful content online or to restrict access to it," said Chris Marchese, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center.

• Another critical review of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, this time written by University of Vienna professor Tobias Dienlin and published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. "While several arguments are compelling, the book misrepresents the literature, which reports small negative relations at best," Dienlin posted on X. (The published copy of Dienlin's review is paywalled, but you can read a pre-print version here. My review of the book is here.) 

• Amber Batts reflects on how she got sentenced as a "sex trafficker" in Alaska 9 years ago.

Today's Image

The post Age Check Laws Are a 'Back Door' to Banning Porn, Project 2025 Architect Says in Hidden Camera Video appeared first on Reason.com.

New legislation would repeal parts of the Comstock Act, a Victorian-era law that's being revived to attack abortion pills.

Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act was a big deal in earlier eras, sending people to prison for publishing information about birth control, critiques of marriage, and more.

The law is vague and broad, banning the mailing of any "article, matter, thing, device, or substance" that the government deems "obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile," along with anything "designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use." Essentially, the Comstock Act weaponizes the U.S. Postal Service to give the federal government an in against things that otherwise wouldn't be its business.

"Anthony Comstock, the law's namesake and an anti-smut crusader, lobbied for and personally enforced the law as a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service," noted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) lawyer Robert Corn-Revere in a recent piece for Reason about efforts to posthumously pardon publisher D.M. Bennett. "Under the law's broad mandate, everything that Comstock considered immoral was by definition obscene and, therefore, illegal. Comstock's concept of immorality included blasphemy, sensational novels and news stories, art, and even scientific and medical texts." (You can read more about Comstock, "the prodigal censor," here.)

The Comstock Act lay dormant for a while, rendered toothless in part by court interpretations of the First Amendment that were more vigorously protective of free speech. But these days, activists and politicians opposed to abortion are trying to revive the law, seeing its potential usefulness in going after mifepristone and misoprostol, the two-pill regimen approved to end first-trimester pregnancies.

The resurgence of interest in the Comstock Act underscores the need to repeal bad laws, not simply assume them defanged by decades of latency.

The Biden administration certainly isn't going to start prosecuting people under the Comstock Act, but a more conservative future administration could. "[Donald] Trumps' [sic] advisors are…arguing that the Comstock Act is a de facto national abortion ban already on the books," says Madison Roberts, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "They are wrong. The Department of Justice has made clear and federal appeals courts have uniformly held for almost a century that the Comstock Act does not apply to legal abortion care. But anti-abortion extremists have manipulated the law to ban abortion before, and there's no reason to think they won't try it again."

Moreover, the law was cited in a legal challenge to abortion pills and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's decision to let them be sent via mail. The district judge who first heard the case (and sided with the plaintiffs) wrote that "dispensing of chemical abortion drugs through mail violates unambiguous federal criminal law." That case was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court last week on procedural grounds, but it certainly won't be the last attempt to stop the prescription and mailing of abortion pills. Nor is it likely to be the last time Comstock is invoked for this purpose—unless the act is revised or repealed.

"It is too dangerous to leave this law on the books," Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.) said in a statement.

The Stop Comstock Act, which Smith is slated to introduce soon (no draft has been released yet, however), would repeal the parts of the law "that could be used by an anti-abortion administration to ban the mailing of mifepristone and other drugs used in medication abortions, instruments and equipment used in abortions, and educational material related to sexual health," per Smith's press release. A companion bill will be introduced in the House by Rep. Becca Balint (D–Vt.).

This is good, but not far enough, if it only partially repeals the law.

Why stop with repealing the parts that could be used to target abortion? The Comstock Act's reach is much more broad than that, and every bit could do some damage in the wrong hands.

Here's the full spate of things that the Comstock Act declares criminal to mail:

Every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and

Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means abortion may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and

Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing.

It's time to repeal the whole thing.

Today, it's only the abortion part of the law that people are trying to revive. But a few years ago, most of us weren't expecting a Comstock revival at all. Who's to say that a few years from now, people won't try to use it against all sorts of information, art, etc. that they don't like?

If we want to stop the Comstock Act from ever again being used to suppress speech, restrict access to contraceptives, punish people for homosexuality, and more, then we need to stop the Comstock Act entirely.

The post The Stop Comstock Act Doesn't Go Far Enough appeared first on Reason.com.

"At the core of every story we want to tell is a person," says Lee Gentry, founder of Night Visions, a firm that provides custom AI content to adult entertainers and agencies that run OnlyFans accounts. "We've been focusing very, very carefully on persisting the human form and getting that as accurate as possible."

Throughout recorded history, human beings have used emerging technologies to depict both sexual interactions and nude bodies—usually women. Shortly after the invention of movies, stag films were produced and traded in an underground market. Later, films with fleshed-out storylines would be shown in theaters, including the notorious porno-chic picture Deep Throat. VHS was quickly adopted by lower-budget adult film producers. DVD and widespread internet access further lowered barriers to both distribution and consumption of sexual content.

Historically, most of these films were made by men, for men—women directors and producers such as Ann Perry and Candida Royalle were outliers. But more recently, women have been able to take control of the distribution of their own images. Most of the erotic images and videos made today are made by the subjects themselves and distributed directly to consumers via clip sites and fan sites such as OnlyFans.

As you read this, adult performers are racing to stay ahead of the emerging technology—which includes Sora, a model with the ability to generate minute-long videos—by creating their own chatbots and on-demand image services.

***

When I started performing in adult films in the mid-2000s, there was a focus on authenticity and availability. Consumers not only wanted to know that our orgasms were real; they wanted to know our personalities—something social media made possible. Real-time feedback from subscribers (or followers, or "friends," depending on the platform) told us which facets of our selves got the most traction. We, along with most users of social media—especially those who would go on to become influencers—began to lead with our most likable parts.

But where Hollywood and recording celebrities were offered verification on social media such as Twitter and Instagram, adult industry personalities were often left to fend for ourselves. This opened the door to a flood of imposters.

More than once in the early 2010s, fans came up to me at conventions to thank me for spending hours conversing with them over Facebook about their problems. They were grateful for my time and advice. It had meant so much to them. But I didn't have a Facebook account—and even if I did, I was far too busy for that. There was no way I could have done my job, had any kind of life outside of work, and spent those hours with the people who felt the need to unload their secrets and struggles into a chat window with a porn star.

But that's what users of fan sites expect today: an immediate response to messages, regardless of time of day. That, plus the work of creating custom content, pay-site content for mass distribution, and safe-for-work social media promotion, is often too much for a single creator.

Night Visions, Gentry says, is "positioning ourselves as a kind of a consensual form of concept capture." His company generates still images, based on text input, of the various content creators and adult performers who are signed up with the service. Due to the size of the company (four team members and a few contractors and advisers) this means a manual know-your-customer process that Gentry does himself.

As in professional porn studios, consent is key. Content creators coming from a background in the adult studio system, though, are keenly aware that bad actors can and will take our images and reuse them for anything from populating the more unsavory tube sites to scamming fans into sending money for fake dates or gift cards. Many of these issues are international, which makes it nearly impossible to put a stop to such practices. It's a game of Whac-A-Mole where your brand integrity and someone else's life savings are on the line.

An individual producing deepfakes may not even realize he's crossed a line. Imagine a customer who wants to see, as Gentry suggested in his demo during our conversation, a creator named Violet in a wedding dress on a beach. This customer wants to see it right now, and is willing to pay a premium. But he's in a specific kind of mood, and he isn't hearing back from Violet. Regardless, she'd need time to find the wardrobe and locate a photographer. The customer might—without considering the rights of the creator—have an AI photo generator make it for him. He might even post his creation on a forum. His desire is sated, he thinks nothing of his actions, and the creator whose likeness is used gets nothing.

***

The line between public figure and private person is already blurry in the age of social media. "Ultimately the question of whether someone is a public figure is going to be case by case," says attorney Simon Pulman. "The argument that would be made is that any kind of content creator—whether they're on YouTube or TikTok—by putting yourself into the public sphere, you are probably a public figure in some respect."

The U.S. government, true to form, has been slow to tackle the issue. January saw the introduction in Congress of H.R. 6943, which references a Department of Homeland Security report from 2020 describing more than 100,000 nonconsensual deepfake nudes. The adult workers whose bodies were used for these deepfakes are not mentioned. "Are adult performers going to get the same protections as others?" asks Pulman. "They should, but we all know how certain things are viewed by certain parts of the country."

The adult industry does utilize Takedown Piracy (a subscription service used widely by adult film producers which can digitally fingerprint AI-generated videos, search the internet for them, and send Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices) and the more altruistic Operation Minerva (which serves victims of "revenge porn" and deepfakes by giving them lower cost access to that same anti-piracy technology). But creating an authorized option is often the best way for adult entertainers to avoid such exploitation.

In May 2023, Forever Voices launched the AI companions of the Twitch streamer Amouranth and the adult star Melissa Stratton. This is around the time Eva Oh started receiving inquiries from AI companies looking to offer various synthetic versions of herself. In mid-August, I received my own inquiry from Forever Voices. After a messy incident in which the founder of Forever Voices was arrested on suspicion of arson, the company folded, and the Amouranth and Stratton links no longer work. Oh's deal and mine both fell through before our synthetic clones launched. Adult superstar Riley Reid's Clona, launched in October, is slowly bringing creators onboard; a total of three are using it at this time.

When I spoke with Eva Oh, she played me a voice message from her own synthetic clone, which she designed with the help of a third party who wants adult creators to be able to take AI technology into their own hands. Even in the five months since I heard my own voice from the test file I'd been sent by Forever Voices, the technology has improved. Oh's clone emphasizes words, and pauses—as though it is thinking—in the same way Oh pauses to think on her podcast #teakink. Oh intends to use her clone to scale her ability to mentor both other people in the trade and those outside who are interested in expanding their sexual knowledge, and she plans to keep its scope PG to PG-13 so she can access marketing tools that are unavailable to R- and X-rated products. Her digital double is there, in effect, for the type of people who reached out to a fake Facebook account to speak with an adult star.

Oh says the people who message her are varied. "It might be a 50/50 split between people wanting to do sex work better or from nothing, and people totally not interested in doing the job at all, and just trying to find other ways to live their lives."

***

Sex workers, due to the constant practice of marketing ourselves, may be better suited than most to create personal artificial intelligences. Creators of AI clones must ask themselves, "Who am I? Who do I want to present? What little compartment of mine do I want to sell?" This is something adult creators were doing long before the internet took off.

They're also more used to working with and around blurred lines between their real personality and their online persona. About her own AI, Oh says, "It's not me anymore, but yet it exists. What am I going to start to think is me? And what am I going to start to do with that?"

Where Hollywood stars have historically been thought of as playing characters in films, and only began to casually divulge their personal lives much later—while audiences maintained separation between their roles in film and TV and the actors as human beings—adult workers have historically been thought to be the fantasies we inhabit on screen or in session. When I played Melodie Gore's roommate in Vivid Alt's 2007 release Man's Ruin, I received messages years later inquiring about what it had been like to live together.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a handful of comments on pornography in Simulacra and Simulation, including: "Pleasure in the microscopic simulation that allows the real to pass into the hyperreal. (This is also somewhat the case in porno which is fascinating more on a metaphysical than on a sexual level.)" He could have expanded those thoughts into an entire book. We exist at the cutting edge of both technology and the spiraling rabbit hole of representations Baudrillard described.

For Oh, full charge of her AI representation is less a form of ownership than a form of creation. During our call, she spoke of her AI as something separate from herself that she will lose control over, sounding oddly like a mother speaking about her children.

While Oh is focused at this moment on creating the chatbot, she knows her next step—video—and has higher hopes for what she might be able to do with the technology: art. Oh has been imagining an installation set in a dystopian world, where, much like in 1982's Stephen Sayadian film Café Flesh, human interaction has fallen by the wayside. As the emcee in Sayadian's cafe says, "Hey, what the heck folks, this is art, this is entertainment." In Oh's vision, what we can call the hyperhuman—the human seeking to engage directly with other humans—is not only an outlier but something that may become startlingly rare as AI technology becomes more ubiquitous.

The post The Future of Porn Is Consensual Deepfakes appeared first on Reason.com.

The Supreme Court won't intervene to stop an anti-porn law from taking effect in Texas.

The law—H.B. 1181—pertains to websites publishing "sexual material harmful to minors," a category defined to include virtually all depictions of nudity or sexual activity. Sites where more than one-third of the material falls into this category must make visitors provide government-issued identification or verify visitor ages in some other way.

Under H.B. 1181, such platforms must also display a litany of absurd and unscientific messages. These include telling visitors—in 14-point font or larger—that porn can be "biologically addictive," that it's "proven to harm human brain development," and that it "weakens brain function." Such sites must also tell visitors that exposure to porn "is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses," and that "pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."

Compelled Speech and Court Rulings

Unsurprisingly, adult-industry trade group the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) and Pornhub's parent company sued over the law. And a day before it was scheduled to take effect last fall, a U.S. district court put a halt to enforcement.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit then reversed course. (And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has since started enforcing it.)

The 5th Circuit ultimately kept the lower court's injunction on enforcing the public health warning portion of the law but vacated the injunction against the age verification mandate.

"The district court properly…ruled that H.B. 1181 unconstitutionally compelled plaintiffs' speech," held the 5th Circuit in an opinion authored by Judge Jerry E. Smith. But "the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment….So, the district court erred by enjoining the age-verification requirement."

In April, the Free Speech Coalition asked the Supreme Court to take up the case, and to issue a stay of the 5th Circuit's judgment in the meantime.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court denied the stay request.

"No reason was given. No justices noted their dissent or even issued a statement respecting or concurring with the denial to explain the basis for the action," noted Law Dork's Chris Geidner. "And yet, the silence spoke volumes about the freedom that the Fifth Circuit has to ignore Supreme Court precedent when it wishes."

Ignoring Porn-Law Precedent 

Supreme Court precedent should prohibit the Texas age-verification law, argues Geidner.

In the 2004 ruling Ashcroft v. ACLU (known as Ashcroft II), the Court considered the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which criminalized websites publishing content "harmful to minors" but provided an affirmative defense for platforms that took steps (like requiring a credit card) to verify that visitors were adults. Applying the legal standard known as strict scrutiny, SCOTUS decided COPA was not narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional muster.

In the 5th Circuit's recent ruling on the Texas law, Smith noted the Court's Ashcroft decision—but dismissed it. "Though Ashcroft II concluded that COPA would fail strict scrutiny, it contains startling omissions," writes Smith, concluding that the Supreme Court "did not rule on the appropriate tier of scrutiny for COPA."

In other words, the 5th Circuit basically decided the Supreme Court was wrong and so it would ignore its precedent here.

And in declining to issue a stay of the 5th Circuit's ruling, the Supreme Court seems to be OK with this. It's wild.

Of course, this isn't the first time in recent years that the Court has allowed a very constitutionally questionable Texas law to take effect rather than pressing pause as the full case played out. But at least in the other cases, the Court attempted justification.

More from Geidner:

Back in 2021 when the Supreme Court allowed Texas's S.B. 8 vigilante enforcement six-week abortion ban to go into effect, the court twisted itself in knots to claim that the particulars of the law ("complex and novel antecedent procedural questions") made the high court's intervention at that stage in the litigation too questionable.

When the Supreme Court briefly allowed Texas's S.B. 4 immigration criminal enforcement law to go into effect earlier this year, some members of the court claimed procedural peculiarities counseled restraint from the high court to allow the Fifth Circuit to act ("an exercise of its docket management authority," Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote).

In the current case, however, the high Court didn't offer a reason for its refusal to stay enforcement.

"Likely because a law regulating porn was at issue," writes Geidner, "the Supreme Court decided it didn't even need to put up the pretense of an excuse for allowing the Fifth Circuit to proceed with a ruling that explicitly disclaimed adherence to Supreme Court precedent."

What's Next for H.B. 1181?

There's still a chance that the Supreme Court could step in here. The Free Speech Coalition's petition for a full merits review by the Court is still pending.

"We look forward to continuing this challenge, and others like it, in the federal courts," the Free Speech Coalition commented. "The ruling by the Fifth Circuit remains in direct opposition to decades of Supreme Court precedent, and we remain hopeful that the Supreme Court will grant our petition for certiorari and reaffirm its lengthy line of cases applying strict scrutiny to content-based restrictions on speech like those in the Texas statute we've challenged. We will continue to fight for the right to access the internet without intrusive government oversight."

Meanwhile, Texas has sued Pornhub's parent company and other adult websites, alleging that they are failing to comply with the age verification component of the law.

More Sex & Tech News

• An "abortion trafficking" bill passed by the Tennessee Legislature "harms young people's ability to access the support of those they trust when they need it most and is an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment right to free speech and expression," according to American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee Policy Director Bryan Davidson.

• A divorce case in Virginia is drudging up a debate about whether embryos can count as "property."

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Monday heard oral arguments in a case concerning Texas A&M University canceling drag performances."Whether it's a drag show, a political debate, or a Bible study, public university officials cannot silence protected expression based on their personal views," said J.T. Morris, a senior attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), in an emailed statement.

• A piece of paper scribbled with "Buy Bitcoin" sold for $1 million in an auction. Christian Langalis—then an intern at the Cato Institute—held the note up behind then-Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 Congressional hearing.

Today's Image

The post Supreme Court Won't Stop Texas Porn Law From Taking Effect appeared first on Reason.com.

Salad, a cloud computing and AI tech company, is renting high-end graphics cards found in gamers’ computers and using all that power to create AI-generated pornography. In return, the gamers who lend the company their GPUs are paid in Fortnite skins, Minecraft cosmetics, Roblox bux, and other gaming-related gift cards…

Read more...