A teacher and researcher has warned that sexually explicit material being facilitated and funnelled by social media platforms is ruining children's lives because "it is turning what they understand sex to be into sexual violence".
Eoghan Cleary said based on his research with the Sexual Exploitation Research and Policy (SERP) Institute, AI 'nudification' apps and so-called AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends are being advertised on every social media platform that young people are engaging with.
However, the secondary school teacher said that young people are not to blame.
"I think it's really important that we don't blame young people for this and that in particular we don't blame teenage boys for this. They are going through one of the most difficult times in the history of the world, to be a teenage boy or to be a teenager in general and the online world is making it increasingly difficult for them to do that.
"They are being targeted by the porn industry and now they're being targeted by these AI sex-simulating [entities]....They depict very realistic, often violent and aggressive sexual acts using AI-generated imagery or imagery of somebody that you know, if you have uploaded an image of somebody you know to the site."
Mr Cleary said this is contributing to misogyny at a very fundamental level in a number of ways and that children cannot be raised in a world where their first sexual interactions are with somebody that they get to control and dictate.
"What if you're a 14-year-old boy and you've got a crush on the girl beside you in class and you don't have the wherewithal socially to be able to talk to her yet, so you access her social media and you upload a picture of her to one of these sites and you start engaging with her in a sexually explicit way, and then are encouraged because of the nature of the apps to become more and more violent with your interactions with her.
"What if then, all your dreams come true and she asks you out, or if you ask her out and she says yes? And then you think that what you are expected to do with this new romantic partner is all of the things that you have been taught to do by this AI app."
It comes as Taoiseach Micheál Martin described reports of the Grok artificial intelligence tool being used to create sexually explicit images of adults and children on social media site X as "unacceptable" and "shocking".
Media regulator Coimisiún na Meán said that it is engaging with the European Commission over concerns that Elon Musk's AI chatbot is responding to user prompts asking it to remove the clothing from images of people, including minors, to further post them on X.
Mr Cleary said that from his research, on a frequent basis he hears from girls about the things they feel they are expected to consent to are becoming more and more violent and more and more degrading.
"What they tell me in class when I run the programme that I run in schools, is that what they expect from sex is violent."
Mr Cleary said that a space needs to be created for young people to talk about the issue because it is much too late to be able to protect this generation from it.
"It's happened. We need to be able to create spaces in our classrooms and in our families for young people to be able to discuss what positive sexual interactions look like.
"We need to protect our young people online, specifically from the impact of porn, specifically from the impact of nudification and apps and AI simulating entities. They need to be banned.
"The UK is banning them, they have announced that France is trying to do the same. Countries across the world are trying to do the same, we can do the same."
