Republicans and Democrats should work to ensure that current state restrictions on AI-generated child pornography are held.
Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill sure is big, but it’s not very beautiful.
As with any other piece of legislation that exceeds 1,000 pages, the bill (which is supposed to be about the budget) contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. One provision that has flown under the radar deserves more attention.
In Section 43201, titled the “Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Modernization Initiative,” the bill states:
No State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce.
This may seem like a commonsense provision. Certainly, a patchwork of state-by-state AI regulations would be a nightmare to both follow and enforce. In this sense, there are obvious benefits to federal regulatory control over AI. However, as of today, there are almost no federal regulations regarding this new technology. (One notable exception is the Take It Down Act, which the president signed into law last month.)
AI pornography — depicting adults and children alike — is on the rise. As Congress works at a pace that could rival snails, a decade could pass before the federal government produces any real barriers to AI malfeasance — barriers that states have already put into place.
More than 30 states have passed a resolution or enacted legislation on AI. Given America’s federalist system, states are, of course, the laboratories of democracy. The federal government can look to the states to see what legislation has proven effective in curbing the worst dangers of AI.
Many red states have led the charge in enacting prudent AI legislation.
Florida passed HB 919, which requires political advertisements made with AI to include a specified disclaimer. For example, the bill criminalizes the deceptive propagation of deepfakes of a political candidate. (If Tom Jefferson is running against Jack Adams, Tom can’t disperse deepfake videos of Jack claiming to love Hitler without a disclaimer.) SB 1680, also passed in Florida, prohibits a person from knowingly possessing, controlling, or intentionally viewing AI-generated child pornography under threat of criminal penalties.
North Carolina’s HB 591 places nonconsensual explicit images created with AI under the definition of “sexual exploitation” and doles out harsher consequences when images represent identifiable minors. SB 79 in South Dakota similarly expands the definition of child pornography to include AI-generated images of identifiable minors. The Alabama Child Protection Act of 2024 asserts that “actual and artificially-generated child sexual abuse material, which are virtually indistinguishable, must now be considered legally indistinguishable and subject to the criminal penalties provided in current law.”
One can sense a theme.
Much of state-based AI legislation provides criminal penalties for those who deal with and in AI-generated child pornography. The Big, Beautiful Bill’s moratorium on state-based AI regulation would annihilate these penalties and empower the creators and viewers of AI-generated child porn.
The ten-year ban has already seen some pushback from the left. Senate Democrats will likely challenge this moratorium of state-based AI regulation under the pretext of the Byrd Rule, which prohibits the inclusion of “extraneous matter” (i.e., provisions unrelated to the budget) in reconciliation legislation.
Republicans and Democrats alike should work to ensure that current state-based restrictions on AI-generated child pornography are held — and that other states can follow suit.