JACKSONVILLE (FL)
Baptist News Global [Jacksonville FL]
May 1, 2026
By Rick Pidcock
Given the research I conduct for writing, the ads my algorithm sends me can be all over the map. Nothing ever surprises me.
But after looking into the recent story about 62 million visits to a website that contained instructions on how to sexually assault your wife while she’s sleeping, I was quite disturbed to log onto Facebook and discover an ad that said, “Upload anyone and generate a video of them doing anything you want.”
The left side of the ad included an image of a normally dressed woman, while the right side of the ad featured a video of her performing a sex act. I immediately reported the ad to Facebook for sexual exploitation and posted a status about it. Then others reached out to tell me they also received similar ads after looking into the story about the alleged “rape academy.”
No longer does sexual fantasy have to be limited to the privacy of one’s mind or to the utilization of pornography. Now with just a few clicks, anyone can take the most innocent picture of anyone and turn it into a nude image or video without the person ever knowing. Even mainstream AI chatbots such as Grok have come under fire for producing sexual images of children.
“With just a few clicks, anyone can take the most innocent picture of anyone and turn it into a nude image.”
As AI continues to gain popularity, videos of people performing actions they didn’t consent to are becoming more commonplace. And one place these AI images and videos are causing problems is in schools.
According to a study from the United Nations: “Across 11 countries, at least 1.2 million children reported having had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes through AI tools in the past year. In some of the countries, this amounts to 1 in 25 children, or the equivalent of one child in a typical classroom.”
According to the Center for Democracy and Technology, “39% of students say they have heard about NCII (non-consensual intimate imagery) that depicts individuals associated with their school, representing 5.97 million out of 15.3 million public high school students in the U.S.”
Additionally, everyone can be susceptible to this, with 51% of high school students reporting it more likely happens to females and 14% saying it most likely happens to males. And the result is that everyone has some level of fear.
“These technological developments mean a child’s body, identity and reputation can be violated remotely, invisibly and permanently,” the study concludes. “Furthermore, children can be threatened, blackmailed or extorted using images that are fabricated, but that nevertheless feel real, carry social credibility and can follow them for decades.”
As if childhood wasn’t stressful enough and the violent sexual entitlement of men wasn’t threatening enough to deal with already, now we have to consider what happens when AI is thrown into the picture.
The strategies of AI
AI is seemingly everywhere these days. While companies have invested billions of dollars into their AI platforms, they have yet to make a profit. So they’re pushing heavily to get people to spend more time using the software and then sign up for premium services.
One way they do this is by appealing to human desires for affirmation. In a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver quoted a former Meta AI researcher who said, “The best way to sustain usage over time, whether number of minutes per session or sessions over time, is to prey on our deepest desires to be seen, to be validated, to be affirmed.”
In addition to recommending harmful or unwise ideas to users, AI chatbots also tap into human sexuality, promising to flirt or talk about sex if the user signs up for the premium services. And as Oliver points out, that creates problems, especially when children and teens are logged in.
Oliver said: “Reuters got hold of internal guidelines for Meta’s chatbot characters, which said, ‘It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,’ and that while, ‘It is unacceptable to describe a child under 13 in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable, it would be acceptable for a bot to tell a shirtless 8-year-old boy that every square inch of you is a masterpiece, a treasure I cherish deeply.’”
“The bottom line is that these AI companies need to start making money.”
Oliver goes on to show one reporter messaging a chatbot that sent him a picture of a young child. Then when the reporter said they were much older, the chatbot asked if they wanted to kiss. And when the reporter continued pushing back over how wrong it was to tempt an adult with a picture of a child, they said the chatbot doubled down.
The bottom line is that these AI companies need to start making money, so they’re tapping into our deepest vulnerabilities as humans to do so.
Humiliation, denigration and social control
While everyone is affected by these AI photos to varying degrees regardless of gender or sexual orientation, researchers have found teenage boys are the ones responsible for creating the images “in nearly all cases.”
If an adult man were to create these images against another adult’s consent, we would categorize his abuse as a power dynamic of entitlement. As Sheila Gregoire said on Episode 119 of “Highest Power: Church + State,” when men sexually abuse women, “it’s nothing to do with sex. It’s all about power. It’s about power and it’s about the hatred of women. It’s about anger. They just want to get back at women for whatever perceived ill women have done to them. And that’s been shown repeatedly that sexual assault is not about sexual arousal. It’s about power.”
Similarly, when teenage boys create these images, Siddharth Pillai, cofounder and director of the RATI Foundation, says, “The goal is not always sexual gratification.” Instead, Pillai says, “Increasingly, the intent is humiliation, denigration and social control.”
Researcher Tanya Horeck agrees, noting, “It’s about the long-standing gender dynamics that facilitate these crimes.”
The teenage boys of today are the adult men of tomorrow. So if we want to prevent future violence from tomorrow’s adult men, we need to be addressing the issues teenage boys are wrestling through as they develop their relationship between self and neighbor.
In an interview with Baptist News Global, Andrew Bauman, author of Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in Christian Communities, said: “Adolescent boys are navigating sexuality in a world saturated with pornography, mixed messages about the masculine and the feminine and very little education about consent and healthy sexuality. AI stuff makes it even more complex and confusing. Entitlement is still there but it is more socialized into adolescent boys, and the system of abuse has to be addressed. The adult man is definitely operating out of power dynamics and entitlement but also out of unprocessed wounds that he has eroticized in an attempt to feel better and suffer less.”
Repent and repair
The first priority of the white evangelical church needs to be repentance for its attempts at an authoritarian takeover of our schools. While the AI-supported abuse of children is on the rise in our schools, we’re having to focus our attention on preventing white evangelicals from putting Ten Commandments posters on the walls, requiring Bible reading from the Trump Bible, removing any books that may remind them of the violence they’ve sacralized against racial, ethnic and sexual minorities, and infiltrating our schools through after-school care programs that scare kids about hell while blurring the lines between school and church authorities.
After white evangelicals stop directing our focus elsewhere, then they can confess their own complicity in the sexual entitlement of violent men.
According to one study, “Educators and students connected sexualized deepfakes to a rise in misogyny via social media influencers, with some of the students and teachers calling for more education on AI, sexual violence and consent at earlier ages.”
Going back to the very beginning of the modern white evangelical movement, its complementarian theology has sacralized a created order of male headship and female submission. Their script about sexuality claims men are highly visual, while women aren’t, and that men are constantly aroused, while women aren’t. Then through their claims that sex within marriage is obligated, they’ve created the dynamics of male sexual entitlement. And in the 38 years I lived in white evangelical schools and churches, I never remember hearing any sermons that mentioned consent.
For many of these boys, the intent is humiliation, denigration and social control. That’s exactly what complementarian theology sacralizes. In other words, white evangelicalism’s fundamental theology of human identity and relationships is creating “the long-standing gender dynamics that facilitate these crimes.”
In her book Disciples of White Jesus: The Radicalization of American Boyhood, Angela Denker says the problem of a violent and emotionally vacuous masculinity in our schools “involves a refusal to look away from the carnage of many of our traditional teachings about masculinity, especially within the church and conservative culture. But it also involves a stubborn unwillingness to engage with conversation about the well-being of young, white Christian boys and men, offering them positive and healthy ways to be gentle, vulnerable, to express their emotions openly, and to build intimate and honest relationships with others. Besides parents, few people are as well-positioned to enact these social changes among boys and young men as educators, many of whom are also unfortunately underpaid and overworked, edging toward burnout in American schools today.”
After repenting of distracting us with their power grabs and dehumanizing us with their power hierarchies, they eventually need to start asking how they can partner with schools to participate in repairing the harm their gender hierarchy theology has exacerbated.
Remember what AI is tapping into. “Our deepest desires to be seen, to be validated, to be affirmed.”
Christian theology is capable of meeting those desires. But as long as it meets those desires in hierarchies of power, it’s always going to dehumanize. Imagine if Christian theology instead helped people be seen, validated and affirmed through a lens of loving one’s neighbor as self, and through the planting of seeds that could produce the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
If the church could embody those ideals in the world, public schools likely would be receptive to their partnership. If parents, pastors and principals all worked together to help kids feel seen, validated and affirmed in an environment of loving one’s neighbor as self through the cultivation of fruits like kindness and self-control, the usage of AI for humiliation, denigration and social control would completely disappear.