A bipartisan group of US senators introduced a bill Tuesday that would criminalize the spread of nonconsensual, sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence. The measure comes in direct response to the proliferation of pornographic AI-made images of Taylor Swift on X, formerly Twitter, in recent days.
The measure would allow victims depicted in nude or sexually explicit “digital forgeries” to seek a civil penalty against “individuals who produced or possessed the forgery with intent to distribute it” or anyone who received the material knowing it was not made with consent. Dick Durbin, the US Senate majority whip, and senators Lindsey Graham, Amy Klobuchar and Josh Hawley are behind the bill, known as the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act of 2024, or the “Defiance Act.”
Hot take, but I feel like this is entirely the wrong direction to take. I feel like this will go badly in one of many ways if passed, and I feel like leaning into this would lead to a better world
Women, especially teachers, lose their jobs because their nudes leaked. This technology is in the wild, it can’t be put back in the box. It can be done at home by a technically gifted teenager with a gaming computer. While this is certainly true, I don’t think the common person will understand this until it’s everywhere.
Yeah, I get that it must feel horribly violating, but imagine the world where we go the other direction - where nude pictures have no power, because anyone could have whipped them up.
Where the response to seeing them is anger or disgust, not fear
But my biggest concern is the fact that most technical people don’t understand generative AI… There’s no way in hell Congress grasps the concept. I’m scared to read the full wording of this bill
I agree. There should be good laws already in place for this. Defamation should do it.
A “technically gifted teenager” is someone with an attention span longer than 5 minutes and a computer with a decent GPU. While definitely a scarce resource, not super scarce.
Running stable diffusion locally is getting easier and easier. Took me about 15 mins last time. I just followed the readme. It won’t be long until it’s just a one-click setup and everyone can do it.