“It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back,” says Sen. Dick Durbin as the DEFIANCE Act heads to the House.

THE SENATE UNANIMOUSLY passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes — or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence.

The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act — passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday.  The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House.

The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.

  • Lets_Eat_GrandmaEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I’m a bit lost on your last bit, however. Are you saying this law will further push AI into the hands of large corporations? I don’t see that, so much as see them being forced to implement stronger filters, while pushing users to the open source community in search to get around them. Horny people gonna horny and this law won’t stop that, it’d only stop public facing models from producing such content and stop individuals from distributing it.

    Remember how taxi medallions were worth millions and millions of dollars in NYC and Boston before uber? (1.2m was the peak per medallion in nyc. They dropped to like 35k at one point and are now around 140k.) Remember how uber got billions in VC money to fight the taxi industry lobbyists and effectively operates despite violating the systems that were in place for ages that prevented small independent operators from being taxis without having a bunch of seed money? Those billions of dollars let them win the legal fights and continue operating. You or I could never have challenged it.

    That’s the comparison I was making. If you regulate AI into the ground the only innovations and usage will come from big money interests, because they can eat the lawsuits. Individuals can’t eat the lawsuits. The law only applies to the small fries, the big guys cheat and get away with it because there is no transparency and a whole lot of pinky swears.