The National Police investigates seven minors in Almendralejo, (Extremadura) for creating nudes with an artificial intelligence (AI) app using the faces of twenty girls between 11 and 17 years old from their municipality and surrounding areas. The case, which is already in the hands of the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office, is the first of a massive complaint in Spain of non-consensual AI porn that affects underage girls, but this practice is becoming more common every day against many women.
Miriam Al Adib, mother of two of the girls affected by the dissemination of her created ‘nudes’, aged 14 and 17, and spokesperson for the group of 27 mothers from Almendralejo confirm 20 minutes that all those investigated, “those who are behind the photos that have harmed our daughters”, are minors. He confesses to Al Adib that they do not yet know what their legal strategy will be, that they do not even have a lawyer, but requests that the facts be thoroughly investigated. He assures that what the mothers who have come together to publicize their complaints are looking for is “a wave of indignation”, but above all “that those who have done it and the rest of the young people know that this is a crime and learn. “That at an educational level we can clarify something to improve.”
Spain does not have a specific law that regulates non-consensual porn created through Artificial Intelligence, also called ‘deepfake‘. A situation that only this summer several celebrities have denounced, such as Laura Escanes or RosalÃa, and which consists of create highly credible nudes using real body parts of the victims.
In the parliamentary processing of the Yes is Yes Law, at the request of Pilar Calvo, from Junts, an attempt was made to introduce a modification in the Penal Code that would include a prison sentence of six months to two years for anyone who uses non-consensual porn created with AI, but the request was rejected by a PP-PSOE majority that did not consider it appropriate.
The EU has also not legislated on these sexual deepfakes created and spread without consent, leaving the decision up to each state until now. In the US, however, Territories such as Virginia, New York, California or Minnesota have laws that impose a fine of one year in prison and $2,500. anyone who “with intent to coerce, harass or intimidate” spreads false nudes of real women.
The fact that there is no law that persecutes this technology does not mean that minors from Extremadura who made porn with photos of local girls and disseminated them, in some cases with extortionist intent, come out unscathed. But what crimes would they have committed?
There are jurists who defend that, specifically this case, could be considered a crime of “pseudo child pornography.”
In the call pseudo child pornography the minor is not really used, but their image is abused by manipulating it with technical devices, says the law. Specifically, it affects anyone who produces, sells, distributes, exhibits or facilitates by any means pornographic material in which minors have not been used directly, but their altered or modified image is used.
“The crime, contemplated in article 189 of the penal code, establishes sentences of up to nine years in prison for pseudopornography with the aggravating factor that some victims are under 16 years of age,” explains Borja Adsuara, expert lawyer in digital law. “Of course, since the perpetrators are also minors, and they do not go to prison until they are 18, at most they will go to a center for juvenile delinquents.”
However, the State Attorney General’s Office establishes that “in any case, in order to consider this type of material criminally significant, It will be necessary, as in the case of virtual pornography, to be realistic, to try to approximate reality.excluding from the concept of child pornography materials that, due to their crudeness, reveal their montage status.”
On the other hand, the fact that there was used those images for extortion, which is the case of at least one victim among the complainants in Almendralejo, also commits the crime contemplated in article 243 of the Penal Code, adds Adsuara.
“Now the lawyers will be the ones to raise all the crimes that may arise from the facts, according to the rights violated (revealed secrets, art. 197, moral integrity, art. 173, the right to image, honor, insults or freedom if they extort you…) and the judge will finally rule what applies,” explains Adsuara. “Even if the montage is crude, it is insulting, because it offends you. The right to one’s own image exists. And if caricature, within social customs, is admitted, this in no case, because it is insulting,” he insists.
In addition to criminal proceedings, the mothers of Almendralejo could resort to administrative proceedings under the protection of the Data Protection Law. Sources from the Spanish Data Protection Association (AEPD) explain to 20minutos “that fathers and mothers and even the minors themselves can report it in the Priority Channel indicating the URLs where these images are posted, so that the Agency can demand their urgent removal.”
The crucial issue for the agency is that The girls’ faces have been used, “which is personal data”, they explain. The urgent removal of the images is independent of the complaint filed with the Police. If a sanctioning procedure is subsequently initiated as a result of specific events, the perpetrators could be fined up to 10,000 euros, which If the authors are minors, their parents must pay.
Background with famous people
The jurists explain that No case for non-consensual porn created with Artificial Intelligence has yet reached the Supreme Court, so there is no jurisprudence. However, montages with women’s bodies have been done for years. “In the nineties, Shakira had photoshopped photos and she herself, with advice, decided not to report them so as not to spread them further,” Adsuara recalls.
Only this summer, Laura Escanes and RosalÃa have denounced the publication of nudes faked with AI. Escanes, like the girls from Almendralejo, have found it ugly to upload sexy photos on their social networks. Escanes made it clear that The relevant thing is that the images created do not have your consent. The digital law expert Borja Adsuara gives as the closest example of jurisprudence the case of a soldier who was convicted by the Supreme Court in 2020 for sharing a photo of a woman who She looked a lot like a colleague in a WhatsApp group.
