Bipartisan measure introduced in the US senate will allow victims in ‘digital forgeries’ to seek civil penalty against perpetrators
A bipartisan group of US senators introduced a bill Tuesday that would criminalize the spread of nonconsensual, sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence. The measure comes in direct response to the proliferation of pornographic AI-made images of Taylor Swift on X, formerly Twitter, in recent days.
The measure would allow victims depicted in nude or sexually explicit “digital forgeries” to seek a civil penalty against “individuals who produced or possessed the forgery with intent to distribute it” or anyone who received the material knowing it was not made with consent. Dick Durbin, the US Senate majority whip, and senators Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley are behind the bill, known as the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act of 2024, or the “Defiance Act.”
Tragic that they were a celebrity that had to go through it for them to do something. But when children or others have it happened to them, they just shrug..
What a weird populist law tbh. There's already an established law framework that covers this: defamation. Not a lawyer but it seems like this should be addressed instead of writing up some new memes.
They'll use this as an opportunity to sneak in more government spyware/control is my guess.
I believe libel laws already exist, but when you're in Congress you must make laws in a reactionary way otherwise considered thought and reason might begin to permeate the law. We wouldn't want that.
Hot take, but I feel like this is entirely the wrong direction to take. I feel like this will go badly in one of many ways if passed, and I feel like leaning into this would lead to a better world
Women, especially teachers, lose their jobs because their nudes leaked. This technology is in the wild, it can't be put back in the box. It can be done at home by a technically gifted teenager with a gaming computer. While this is certainly true, I don't think the common person will understand this until it's everywhere.
Yeah, I get that it must feel horribly violating, but imagine the world where we go the other direction - where nude pictures have no power, because anyone could have whipped them up.
Where the response to seeing them is anger or disgust, not fear
But my biggest concern is the fact that most technical people don't understand generative AI... There's no way in hell Congress grasps the concept. I'm scared to read the full wording of this bill
So what happens if a person allows their likeness to be 3d modeled and textured for something like a video game, and that 3d model is used to create explicit images. Is that not a problem (or maybe a different kind of problem) because it's not a deepfake and instead a use of a digital asset?
This looks to be an absolute shitshow. I fear it’ll be made even worse before it passes. Maybe they’ll curtail the abuse potential. Then again, maybe not. It may be seen as hurting the right people.