Sexually explicit deepfakes are everywhere in high schools.
Matteo Wong from the Atlantic about the power of AI:
This power has brought with it a tremendous dark side that many experts are only now beginning to contend with: AI is being used to create nonconsensual, sexually explicit images and videos of children. And not just in a handful of cases—perhaps millions of kids nationwide have been affected in some way by the emergence of this technology, either directly victimized themselves or made aware of other students who have been.
Kids as young as 9 are being exposed to this type of material:
Today’s report joins several others documenting the alarming prevalence of AI-generated NCII. In August, Thorn, a nonprofit that monitors and combats the spread of child-sexual-abuse material (CSAM), released a report finding that 11 percent of American children ages 9 to 17 know of a peer who has used AI to generate nude images of other kids.
The amount of AI-generated CSAM is also underreported:
Although the number of official reports related to AI-generated CSAM are relatively small—roughly 5,000 tips in 2023 to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, compared with tens of millions of reports about other abusive images involving children that same year—those figures were possibly underestimated and have been growing. It’s now likely that “there are thousands of new [CSAM] images being generated a day,” David Thiel, who studies AI-generated CSAM at Stanford, told me. This summer, the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation found that in a one-month span in the spring, more than 3,500 examples of AI-generated CSAM were uploaded to a single dark-web forum—an increase from the 2,978 uploaded during the previous September.
Most of these victims naturally are female, which should not be a surprise.
Share this with Muslim parents (heck, all parents) who still think public schools are safe and OK, especially for their daughters.
You will fail to achieve ultimate happiness, and that failure should make you happy.
I remember driving to college back in the early 2000s, and I was just hoping to already be in the future.
I didn’t want to go through the struggles of going through college, another 4 years or more of tests, papers, etc.
I just wanted to start working and get married...
Why Muslim men need to be fit.
I’ve heard many podcasts about this topic, and it’s nice to see one from a Muslim perspective, Allahumma barik. Check out this video, and here’s a serious but funny clip from the show 😅.
Cutting off your parents is now becoming more acceptable.
Anna Russell from The New Yorker, writes about how many people are going “no contact” with their parents. She goes through a detailed story of a girl named Amy, and it is quite chilling how this can be a reflection of the Muslim family breakdown as well:
The Death of Parenting?
Al-Farsi from MuslimSkeptic describing the death of parenting:
From the moment they are born, they are subjected to medical procedures, poked, bled, prodded, injected, and handled by uniformed strangers who usher them into their new life. At the tender age of three or four, they are torn from the loving embrace of their mothers, their lips barely dry from the final taste of their mother’s milk, and they are thrust into the cold hands of an education system...
How to live your life so your children can be successful.
Surah Kahf has so many hidden gems inside of it, and the one that really stuck with me today was about the righteous father who left behind two orphan boys.
This father who passed away, he did two important things:
Will your kids resent you?
If you don’t teach your kids about Islam, and make it a part of their life, they might resent you. Of course there should always be respect and good manners towards parents, but sometimes thoughts still creep in and if a parent deprives their child of sound Islamic knowledge, that child will always feel behind once they start practicing Islam.
Not only that, but it can lead to families bickering and even splitting apart, especially if they are on different wavelengths in terms of following the religion.
If you practice, and you teach your kids to practice, your relationship in sha Allah will be fruitful, blessed, and strong.
Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of people like this sister here asking this question.
Tips for a successful marriage.
Sr. Na’ima Robert talks about an important discussion that was very beneficial not only for prospective Muslims who want to get married, but also for those who have been married for years.
A good listen, especially the first 10-15 minutes where she talks about her personal story of marriage, loss, and shukr (thankfulness).
If there’s one thing I can say about this video, it is to watch the first 10-15 minutes about shukr and what to do when you go through a tragic loss. The formula that she was told by a friend was nothing short of genius and total submission to Allah.
Generative AI and “nudify” apps
Matt Burgess, from Wired.com (on arstechnica):
Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful “undress” websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be “nude” without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months.