AI-generated sexual content is rapidly remaking young people’s lives as they confront sex and dating — and the effects are as sweeping as they are poorly understood.
That’s according to a new survey from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, in which researchers dug into how youth are interacting with these new technologies. What they found suggests that the proliferation of this kind of content — and the harm it’s already causing — demand urgent attention.
The nationally representative survey drew on insights from 1,314 teenagers aged 13 to 17, as well as additional data from interviews and focus groups, and defines AI-generated sexual content as deepfaked nude images or pornographic material of real people, AI images and videos of people depicted in revealing or sexually explicit scenarios, or “any other sexual content made by AI.” It comes as middle and high schools around the country grapple with an explosion of nonconsensual deepfakes of minors that have largely been created and disseminated by their peers.
“For a good chunk of teens, one, they’re being exposed to this content — but two, they are creating and sharing this content,” Supreet Mann, Common Sense Media’s director of research and the lead author of the report, told Futurism. “And when they’re doing that, it’s very often of people they know personally or themselves.”
