Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Clickbait" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 16, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Thursday, October 16) I watched three episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise shows in a row, including a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “Clickbait,” that turned out to be one of their very best recent episodes. It begins with a scene in which a school bus full of kids out for a field trip is hit by a car and crashes. One of the girls on the bus, Penny Wilson (Vaughan Riley), starts hemorrhaging in the hospital and nearly dies from her injuries. Later it turns out that she was eight months pregnant until the shock of the accident caused her to have a miscarriage. The SVU detectives find that sexually explicit photos of their victim have been circulating among her schoolmates, many of which show her in compromising positions with the school’s music teacher, a 32-year-old who was driven out of a previous school assignment by accusations that he was sexually inappropriate with a student. Of course the cops suspect Huxley is up to his old tricks again (in more ways than one), but he protests his innocence – and the medical examiner orders DNA tests that prove that Huxley was not the father of Penny’s unborn child. The actual father was Bryce Cole (Jon Martens), a schoolmate who broke up with Penny shortly after he knocked her up, and his new girlfriend, Haley (Alayna Martus), put him up to downloading an AI program to generate fake images of Penny exposing herself and having sex with her music teacher in order to humiliate her. The cops decide to prosecute the creator of the AI program Bryce used, Daniel Huxley (Matias de la Flor), for producing child pornography and allowing its dissemination. They actually win a jury verdict against him after his former business partner, Samit Junger (Owais Ahmed), agrees to break the non-disclosure agreement Huxley got out of him when he quit the company out of his disgust that Huxley was deliberately advertising his AI platform as one which could be used to create sexually explicit images. One particularly demeaning ad for the site showed a hot young woman, and the slogan was, in effect, why bother to date her when you can just undress her with AI and fantasize about her to your heart’s content? But the judge in the case uses the rarely employed power of judges to set aside a jury verdict, in this case because even though Huxley’s conduct was reprehensible, it’s not illegal under the laws as they currently stand. The judge announces that if the state’s prosecutors want a remedy, they need to persuade the legislators in Albany to change the law – and I immediately thought, “Good luck with that.” The tech entrepreneurs have become the biggest spenders on lobbying efforts of anyone in the U.S., and they’re using that money to ensure that they can do whatever they want to do with implementing AI, including facilitating the creation and distribution of fake child porn that implicates real people. Donald Trump regularly hosts big-tech CEO’s like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta, Tim Cook of Apple, and Sundar Pichai of Google, to the White House, and he’s made it clear to them that as long as they play ball with him and don’t do anything to threaten his authority (like take down Right-wing hate speech off their platforms), he’ll give them total control to implement AI however they want.