Legislation criminalizes the publication of intimate images, including the “depths” created by AI, without the consent of a person.
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has signed a bill prohibiting the so-called “revenge porn”, including images created using artificial intelligence.
The Take It Down law, signed on Monday, makes it a federal crime to publish intimate images of a person without their consent, and obliges social media platforms to remove these images within 48 hours at the request of the victims.
The legislation, which adopted the US Congress earlier this year with almost unanimous support, applies to realistic images created by AI, called “deep”, as well as authentic photos.
“With the rise of the generation of IA images, countless women were harassed with deep buttocks and other explicit images distributed against their will. It is … bad … so horribly false,” Trump told a signature ceremony in the White House in Washington, DC.
“It is a very abusive situation … and today we make it completely illegal.”
The first lady Melania Trump, who defended the legislation after her husband’s return to the White House, described the law as a “powerful step forward in our efforts to guarantee that each American, especially young people, can feel better protected against their image or their identity”.
While benefiting from rare bipartite support and the support of many organizations dedicated to the fight against harassment and sexual assault, legislation has aroused criticism of digital rights groups for reasons of confidentiality and anti-censure.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said that the provisions of the law to remove the reported material from the Internet laid risks to “freedom of expression, user confidentiality and regular procedure, without solving the problem it claims to solve”.
“Legal content – including satire, journalism and political discourse – could be wrongly censored,” the group said in a statement in February.
“The tight period of the legislation requires that the applications and websites delete the content within 48 hours, which means that online service providers, especially the little ones, will have to comply so quickly to avoid the legal risks that they are unable to check the assertions. Instead, automated filters will be used to catch duplicates, but these systems are infamous to report legal content, fair comments.
