Last January, an explosion of AI-generated deepfake pornography featuring Taylor Swift became viral across social media. While Swift got the images taken down in coordination with social media companies, many others are not as lucky.
The problem of AI-generated nonconsensual pornography has affected not only celebrities but also ordinary women and girls. A few days ago, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), along with a bipartisan group of co-sponsors, introduced the TAKE IT DOWN Act as an answer to this crisis.
Deepfake technology has reached a point where ordinary people can easily create AI-generated images of themselves and others in just a few minutes. There are many available apps, with some even using sexually suggestive advertisements to market their product’s potential. One company monitoring and detecting AI-developed media, Sensity, estimates that 96% of deepfakes are sexually explicit and depict nonconsenting women.
The response before the TAKE IT DOWN Act has been a patchwork of state laws. Some states criminalized the distribution of these images, while others merely opened routes for victims to pursue civil action. In many cases, even recent laws targeting revenge pornography have not caught up to the capabilities of AI-generated pornographic images. Throughout the country, victims have struggled to have their images removed from social media and find justice against their victimizers.
The TAKE IT DOWN Act seeks to rectify many of these shortcomings. It criminalizes the creation and distribution of AI-generated “nonconsensual intimate imagery” and makes social media companies create avenues to remove these images within 48 hours of notification. It also explicitly protects lawful speech, using the “reasonable person” standard in discerning the nature of the prohibited images.
This act is a good response to a pressing matter facing the country. However, the response to this problem cannot end with this bill. Schools need to take on the responsibility of educating their students about the harmful consequences of deepfake pornography. The TAKE IT DOWN Act’s explicit criminalization of this topic will help to emphasize its seriousness.
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In conjunction with education for students, school administrators need to take the matter seriously. School administrators, like all bureaucrats, are incentivized to keep matters under their authority muted and opaque to the public. Unfortunately, several of the high-profile cases involving student usage of deepfake pornography depicting classmates have shown that administrators can fail to discipline perpetrators properly. Administrative guidelines, either through the federal Department of Education or state equivalents, need to establish ways to ensure the proper actions are taken to provide justice and safety in our schools.
The law has often struggled to keep up with the rapid technological changes of the digital age. The TAKE IT DOWN Act is a good step toward creating clear societal boundaries regarding AI-generated pornography. But it will take more than one bill to solve this problem.