Legislation Introduced to Combat Deep Fake Porn

On Friday, Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) introduced legislation that would criminalize the nonconsensual creation and sharing of deep fake porn.

“The spread of A.I.-generated and altered images can cause irrevocable emotional, financial, and reputational harm—and unfortunately, women are disproportionately impacted,” Morelle said in a press release.

If passed, this bill will also establish that an individual’s consent to create an image does not translate to consent to share the image. The legislation will also “provide additional protections to preserve a plaintiff’s anonymity in civil actions.”

While experts say the rise in deep fakes will be an impending disaster for political elections, so far women have bared the brunt of the new technology’s abuse. A 2019 report found that 96 percent of deep fake videos depicted women engaging in pornographic activity.

MrDeepFakes is known for hosting thousands of pornographic deep fake videos for free. The site receives 17 million visitors a month, as reported by NBC News.

The face-swapping technology became available to consumers in 2018 and now dozens of apps and programs are free for anyone to access, as reported by NBC News.

In March, Breitbart reported that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, had allowed for an advertisement campaign for an A.I. face swap technology app that featured deep fakes of actresses Emma Watson and Scarlet Johansson in a suggestive manner.

And the technology is not just being weaponized against celebrities, in April, a New York man was sentenced to six months in prison after creating explicitly deep fake images of 14 former classmates, as reported by PIX11. However, he was not charged for the creation of the deep fakes as it is not illegal. Instead,  prosecutors charged him with positing a real unaltered image of an underage girl.

Last year, President Joe Biden signed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization Act, which would allow for victims of revenge porn to seek civil penalties in court, but this does not extend to deep fakes.