Sharing Of Non-Consensual Deepfake Porn To Become Illegal In California
California is set to become the latest state or country to ban the sharing of non-consensual deepfake porn. An Assembly member there representing Westminster has introduced a bill that would make such proposed offences punishable by up to a year in jail. A similar bill is currently in the works in the United Kingdom. Like the Californian law, that too will make only the sharing of deepfake porn illegal, and not the creation or posession itself.
A California lawmaker introduced legislation that would criminalize using artificial intelligence to create pornography while using a person’s likeness without consent.
Assembly member Tri Ta, a Republican representing Westminster, California, introduced the legislation in February that aims to punish people up to $1,000, or a year in jail, if they distribute “deepfake” porn depicting an individual without their consent.
“This bill would make it a crime for a person to knowingly, and without the consent of the depicted individual, distribute to, exhibit to, or exchange with others, or offer to distribute to, exhibit to, or exchange with others audio or visual media that falsely depicts an individual engaging in sexual conduct that would appear to a reasonable observer to be an authentic record of the conduct. By creating a new crime, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program,” a legislative council’s digest of the bill states.
Ta told the Orange County Register that the bill, if passed, will help individuals “protect their lives” as AI technology grows at a rapid pace.
Laws against Deepfake porn in the West appear to be targetting only those guilty of sharing non-consensual deepfake porn, and with jail terms of up to one or two years. This is in contrast to South East Asia, which led the way in deepfake porn legislation, and where the punishments are much harsher. In South Korea, distributers of deepfake porn face up to five years in prison, and even the production of deepfake porn has been criminalized. Meanwhile in totalitarian China, the production of ANY Deepfake images has been made illegal.
