The U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan bill this week that would let people sue if AI-generated intimate pictures of them were made without their consent. Many have criticized Elon Musk’s company X, which used to be Twitter, for letting the Grok AI chatbot make sexualized pictures of real people, including kids.
The bipartisan bill would also let people sue for having or making deepfake porn if they also planned to show the videos. The name of the bill is the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or DEFIANCE Act.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., who sponsored the bill and got everyone to agree to pass it without a roll call vote, said it would give victims of explicit deepfakes “the tools to fight back against those who would exploit them.”
He also said that the bill would build on the Take It Down Act, which made it a federal crime to knowingly publish nonconsensual intimate images of other people, even if they were made by artificial intelligence.
“Imagine losing control of your own likeness and identity. Imagine that happening to you when you were in high school. Imagine how powerless victims feel when they cannot remove illicit content, cannot prevent it from being reproduced repeatedly, and cannot prevent new images from being created. The consequences can be profound,” Durbin said on the Senate floor.
Durbin expressed concern that even after reporting exposed the use of Grok to create nonconsensual deepfakes, X did not prevent the bot from creating the “exploitive images.” After the backlash, X limited the capability to edit images to paid subscribers.
“That’s why this legislation is critical,” Durbin said, in order to hold X accountable. “This legislation says if they are guilty of such reckless misconduct, that they can be sued for it and held civilly liable for the damages.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and seven other senators, including Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Angus King, I-Maine; Mike Lee, R-Utah; Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.; Peter Welch, D-Vt.; and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., also supported the bill.
In 2024, the Senate passed a similar bill, but the House did not vote on it.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, is the sponsor of a similar bipartisan bill in the House that she introduced last May.
The House Judiciary Committee got that bill, but it hasn’t been marked up yet. She said in a statement about the bill’s introduction that it would “give victims the federal protections they deserve.”
She told reporters Tuesday that she’s “deeply encouraged” by the building of “bipartisan consensus around … trying to protect all sorts of people, especially children and victims of sexual assault, from nonconsensual, deepfake AI pornography.”
She added, “My belief is that we’ll be able to have some conversations” with House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
The bill is part of a bigger effort by Congress to keep kids safe online, even when they are using AI chatbots or are being sexually exploited online. The movement gained a lot of traction after First Lady Melania Trump’s “Take It Down Act,” which has been lauded and praised by many in various industries as a key first step.
Last year, Durbin said he would back bills that would change the rules for sentencing in cases of child sexual abuse material, apply the law to cases of sexual extortion of children, and make it a crime to force children to do violent things online.
On Monday, the House passed three bills by voice vote that would make it harder for people to get child sexual abuse materials and extortion online.
