Artificial intelligence has made remarkable advancements in the recent years. But one unwelcome innovation has come with AI-generated deepfake pornography.
“Deepfake” is a relatively new word that refers to imagery, video and audio that falsely display something that’s not real. Often, it’s a video clip of someone saying something they never said or being somewhere they never were.
And now it can be done with intimate videos, adding a new layer to the nightmare that is online sexual abuse.
“There are actually apps now where men can upload a picture of a woman that they know and then create deepfake nonconsensual pornography,” U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Newton, said. “It’s grotesque.”
Auchincloss has teamed up with Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson, who represents Iowa’s Second Congressional District, on a bill to push back against such internet abuses.
“She, like me, is a young parent, and this bill is meant to prevent and counter the surge in deep-fake pornography,” Auchincloss said.
The Intimacy Privacy Protection Act creates a duty for social media platforms to remove such content and then save all related data for potential criminal charges or civil litigation by the victim, Auchincloss explained.
The legislation is endorsed by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, the National Organization for Women, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, the Sexual Violence Prevention Association and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
“It also requires social media platforms to take down other toxic illegal content, like cyber-harassment, revenge porn, defamation,” he said.
The bill takes aim at Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which grants immunity to internet service providers for third-party content.
“In the 1990s, that may have been a good idea, as the internet was being born,” Auchincloss said. “The world’s different now. It’s not a good idea anymore. These trillion-dollar tech companies need to have a responsibility, particularly to their young users, to de-platform toxic content.”