Sharing Of Deepfake Porn Set To Become Illegal Across The USA
The sharing of non-consensual deepfake porn is finally set to become illegal across the entire US soon, after Congressman Joe Morelle introduced a new piece of legislation targetting such content last week. The emotive issue of deepfake porn has reached new heights of hysteria in recent months, after a live Twitch gaming streamer had her face infamously swapped with that of a pornographic actress, and the video posted online and widely shared. On top of that, fears of the technology have been further heightened by the sudden rise of AI image generators that allow you to create realistic adult pictures simply by choosing various tag prompts.
A new piece of legislation being introduced this week would make sharing non-consensual AI-generated pornography illegal in the United States, and open up new legal avenues for those impacted.
“This bill aims to make sure there are both criminal penalties, as well as civil liability for anyone who posts, without someone’s consent, images of them appearing to be involved in pornography,” explained Congressman Joe Morelle who authored the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act.
The rise of AI-generated content has exploded in recent years due to the accessibility and ease of use of tools that allow users to create hyper-realistic synthetic media.
Although a fabricated image of Pope Francis in a puffer jacket grabbed international headlines earlier this year, there’s a dark underbelly that doesn’t always make it into the public sphere — a large percentage of deepfakes are pornographic, non-consensual, and involve primarily women.
The ABC News article quoted above goes on to claim that their is such widespread public fear regading becoming the victim of deepfake porn, that women and girls are even changing the way they go to work or school, lest they have their photographs taken to be used on deepfake porn websites.
“It is not just the psychological harm, the intense depression, the anxiety, but also the economic consequences, because it can lead to further harassment online, online and offline harassment, requiring a lot of victims to invest in security systems or change the way that they go to work or go to school,” she added.
That seems unlikely to me, and I would have thought that the remote possibility of being put on a deepfake porn site (which nearly always contain only celebrity deepfakes) is well down the list of concerns that the average young women has in 2023. But it is an indication of the intense hysteria that the media are generating over deepfake porn, and in that case it is quite reassuring that the legal response in the USA is going to be quite measured and reasonable, with only the sharing of non-consnesual deepfake porn set to be illegal.
