Report from the New York Times
In Brief – The TAKE IT DOWN Act, bipartisan legislation criminalizing the posting online of nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) and forcing platforms to quickly take it down has been overwhelmingly passed by the US Congress and sent to President Trump. The measure, billed by backers as a response to so-called “deepfake” AI nudes, was first introduced last year by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and was passed by the Senate in the final days of the 118th Congress. This year, it was quickly refiled, passed the Senate in the opening weeks of the 119th Congress, won the backing of First Lady Melenia Trump, and President Trump called for the House of Representatives to pass the bill in his March address to Congress. Despite broad general agreement on the need to better address NCII, especially as AI-enabled image creation services have increased in availability, some free speech advocates criticized the bill, including the requirement for platforms to take down AI-generated fakes, the short 48-hour time window available to platforms to remove content challenged under the law, and claims that the bill could be used to challenge the use of strong end-to-end encryption by private messaging platforms.
Context – Non-consensual pornography and election “disinformation” are the most cited harms from AI-related technology tools that can create “deepfakes”. Although the biggest AI developers have agreed to identify and label AI-generated images created by their services, “watermarking” is considered of limited value by many experts because it can be circumvented and there are AI tools that don’t use the technology. More than 20 states have legislated in some way to prohibit election deepfakes, but none have been enforced, and California’s 2024 election deepfake law was quickly blocked by a federal judge after its enactment. X recently sued the State of Minnesota to block enforcement of its election content law. Many Take It Down Act backers are certain to try to build on their success in protecting teens from malicious AI uses and next protect teens from malicious social media uses.