I am reproducing this plea from a critcal thinker, Robert L Arnold, whose intelligence sparkles and illuminates the wrongs which must be righted. It stems from his observation that AI is used to harm young people and yet no law to protect their rights has been built with ‘belt and braces’ moral strength.
There are moments as a parent when the future doesn’t arrive gradually. It arrives all at once.
Sometimes it’s the first day of school. Sometimes it’s watching them wobble down the driveway on a bicycle before realizing they no longer need you to steady the seat. Sometimes it’s carrying them to bed one last time before they become too big for your arms and you don’t even realize it was the last time until years later.
And then there are the moments that remind you the world has changed while you were busy raising your children.
I have a daughter.
Like every parent, I’ve spent years worrying about the things I cannot control… the people she’ll meet, the mistakes she’ll make, the heartbreak that eventually finds every life worth living. Those are the fears every generation inherits.
This one is different.
This danger wasn’t inevitable.
We built it.
Today, young women are discovering fabricated nude images of themselves circulating through schools. Families are learning that a yearbook photograph, a soccer portrait, or a picture from social media has become the raw material for pornography they never created and never consented to. Teenagers are being asked to defend themselves against something that never happened while enduring the humiliation as though it had.
Children are becoming victims of technology before they’re old enough to understand the technology being used against them.
That isn’t tomorrow.
That is the world our children already inhabit.
What troubles me most is that we continue to frame this primarily as a conversation about artificial intelligence.
It isn’t.
Artificial intelligence is simply the instrument.
The real question is much older than silicon chips and neural networks. It is the same question civilization has wrestled with for centuries.
What responsibility accompanies power?
Every meaningful advancement in human history has eventually arrived at that crossroads. The automobile transformed transportation, but we required seatbelts, driver’s licenses, and safety standards. Pharmaceuticals revolutionized medicine, but we demanded clinical trials before they reached the public. Banks became indispensable to modern economies, but we required safeguards against fraud because we understood the damage that could be done when trust was abused.
None of those industries were asked to eliminate every conceivable risk.
They were asked to exercise reasonable care.
Law has long recognized a simple principle. When harm is foreseeable, and reasonable steps exist to reduce that harm, failing to take those steps creates responsibility. Lawyers call it a duty of care.
I prefer something plainer.
A duty to reduce harm.
Not eliminate it.
Reduce it.
That distinction matters because perfection has never been the standard. Responsibility has.
Somewhere along the way we’ve accepted the strange idea that technology should move faster than accountability. That because innovation is difficult, responsibility should somehow become optional.
History has never worked that way.
Power has always carried obligations alongside its privileges.
If we believe artificial intelligence is capable of diagnosing disease, accelerating scientific discovery, writing software, reshaping education, and transforming entire economies, then surely we should also believe the companies building these systems are capable of making it substantially harder to generate non-consensual sexual images of real people.
To argue otherwise isn’t a technological limitation.
It’s a choice.
Markets are extraordinarily effective at solving problems… until someone else is forced to absorb the cost. Economists call those costs externalities. Pollution is one. Financial fraud is another. The destruction of a young person’s reputation through AI-generated pornography belongs in the same category.
If companies bear none of that cost, then the market rewards greater capability while underpricing safety. That’s not an indictment of capitalism. It’s evidence that markets, left entirely to themselves, cannot price harms they never have to pay for.
That is precisely why government exists.
Not to stop innovation.
To ensure innovation serves the common good.
John Locke argued that governments are instituted to secure and protect our rights.
Liberty without responsibility eventually ceases to be liberty for everyone else.
The responsibility of individuals is obvious.
Anyone who knowingly creates non-consensual intimate images of another person should be held accountable.
Anyone who distributes those images should be held accountable.
Anyone who profits from them should be held accountable.
But accountability cannot stop with the individual who presses “generate.”
That approach asks the law to arrive after the damage is already done.
It asks a fourteen-year-old girl to prove an image is fake after it’s spread through her school.
It asks parents to rebuild a reputation that never should have been attacked.
It asks victims to shoulder burdens that belong, at least in part, to the people who designed systems knowing exactly how they could be abused.
That isn’t justice.
It’s surrender.
Today this conversation has become impossible to ignore because of Grok. Public reporting has documented repeated instances in which it has been used to generate sexualized images of identifiable women, demonstrating how quickly these systems can be weaponized when safeguards fail or prove insufficient.
Grok isn’t unique.
Nor will it be the last.
It is simply the clearest evidence that this debate is no longer theoretical.
The harm exists.
The victims exist.
The technology already exists.
Now the law has to catch up.
Across the country lawmakers are beginning to wrestle with that reality. Alabama has considered legislation requiring stronger safeguards for AI systems. Vermont continues debating liability standards for AI developers. Florida proposed an Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights before it stalled.
These conversations are happening.
They’re simply happening too slowly.
Technology companies have lobbyists.
They have attorneys.
They have billions of dollars invested in shaping the laws that will govern their industry.
The fourteen-year-old girl whose face was stolen by a machine has none of those things.
She has her parents.
She has whatever teacher chooses to believe her.
And she has us.
That’s why citizenship matters.
Call your state representative.
Call your state senator.
Ask one question.
Do you believe companies that build artificial intelligence have a legal duty to reduce foreseeable harm?
If the answer is yes, ask what legislation they’re supporting.
If the answer is no, ask why the most powerful technology companies in human history should be exempt from responsibilities we’ve required of nearly every other industry.
Demand an answer.
Then demand action.
Because every month we spend debating whether responsibility exists is another month these systems become faster, cheaper, more convincing, and more accessible.
Technology will not wait for another committee hearing.
It will not pause while another bill quietly dies.
It will simply continue doing what technology has always done…
Moving forward.
The question is whether our wisdom moves with it.
One day my children will inherit whatever kind of country we decide to leave behind.
They won’t remember quarterly earnings reports.
They won’t remember which company briefly dominated the AI market.
They won’t remember the lobbyists who insisted responsibility would slow progress.
They will simply live inside the consequences of the choices we made while we still had the opportunity to make them.
Every generation inherits tools it did not invent.
Fire.
Electricity.
The automobile.
The internet.
Artificial intelligence is simply the newest inheritance.
Our measure will never be whether we invented it.
Our measure will be whether we possessed enough wisdom to govern it before asking our children to live with the consequences.
The purpose of law has never been to protect power from accountability.
Its highest purpose has always been to stand between power and the people who have the least of it.
Every Country That Banned or Investigated Grok Over Deepfakes: The Full Regulatory Map
At least 14 countries and regulators have banned, blocked, investigated, or sued xAI over Grok deepfakes in 2026. Malaysia and Indonesia blocked access entirely. The EU, UK, France, Netherlands, and 35 US attorneys general launched formal proceedings.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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