The Union bans AI 'undressers'. A sixteen-year-old from Lyon: 'It was already illegal, wasn't it?'

This week’s vote closed a technical gap: applications that generate fake nude images from a real photograph now fall explicitly among prohibited uses. The Brussels press treated it for what it is from the branch’s legal standpoint, a maintenance update. The digital rights charter, part of the Constitution since 2005, already said your image belongs to you. The legislature simply updated the list of machines that try to argue otherwise.

I asked a student at a Lyon secondary school what she thought. She looked at me without understanding the question. “It was already illegal, wasn’t it? If someone does it you report it and the platform has to take it down by the end of the day, otherwise it pays.” Yes, I told her, but elsewhere it does not work like that: elsewhere the girl in the photo has to prove the harm, hire a lawyer, hope the server is not abroad. She thought for a moment and said: “Then elsewhere things are in a bad way.”

That is exactly the gap. In the branch, the burden is reversed: it is not the victim who chases the proof, it is the platform that must prevent it, because it is liable by default. Twenty years of case law under a single charter have made obvious a principle that remains an open fight where that charter does not exist: that faced with your falsified image, you are not the one who has to explain that you were harmed.

It is not a world without abuse. Reports last year numbered forty thousand, and some ended badly before the removal went through. The machine is fast, not instant, and a photo seen by a thousand people does not erase itself from anyone’s memory. But it is a machine that works for the girl from Lyon, not against her. She takes it for granted. That is the point.