“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.

  • @dohpaz42English
    14•1 month ago

    To improve rights to relief for individuals affected by non-consensual activities involving intimate digital forgeries, and for other purposes.

    Congress finds that:

    (1) Digital forgeries, often called deepfakes, are synthetic images and videos that look realistic. The technology to create digital forgeries is now ubiquitous and easy to use. Hundreds of apps are available that can quickly generate digital forgeries without the need for any technical expertise.

    (2) Digital forgeries can be wholly fictitious but can also manipulate images of real people to depict sexually intimate conduct that did not occur. For example, some digital forgeries will paste the face of an individual onto the body of a real or fictitious individual who is nude or who is engaging in sexual activity. Another example is a photograph of an individual that is manipulated to digitally remove the clothing of the individual so that the person appears to be nude.

    “(3) DIGITAL FORGERY.—

    “(A) IN GENERAL.—The term ‘digital forgery’ means any intimate visual depiction of an identifiable individual created through the use of software, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or any other computer-generated or technological means, including by adapting, modifying, manipulating, or altering an authentic visual depiction, that, when viewed as a whole by a reasonable person, is indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction of the individual.

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