Senate passed the act This could give people who have discovered that their likeness has been deeply doctored into sexually explicit images without their consent a recent way to fight back.
The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Editing Act (DEFIANCE Act) would allow victims to sue the people who created the images for civil damages. The bill passed unanimously, meaning there was no roll call vote and no senators opposed its passage on Tuesday. It is to be based on the Take It Down Act – a law that criminalizes the distribution of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) and requires social media platforms to immediately remove them.
Senate Democrat Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), the bill’s lead sponsor, in remarks on the Senate floor alluded to Grok’s consensual undressing. “Even after pointing out these horrible, false and hurtful images to Grok and X, formerly Twitter, they do not respond. They do not remove the images from the Internet. They do not help the victims,” Durbin said. While the Take It Down Act, whose data deletion provision goes into full effect later this year, may have consequences for X, the DEFIANCE Act will impact individuals, such as Grok users who create deeply faked intimate images without their consent.
Governments around the world are creating recent safeguards against senseless images generated by artificial intelligence, spurred in part by the recent Grok controversy. For example, the UK recently pushed a law that criminalizes the creation of intimate bogus news with the user’s consent.
The DEFIANCE Act similarly passed the Senate in 2024 in the wake of another deepfake scandal on Platform X. Earlier this year, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift generated by artificial intelligence circulated on the platform. Durbin, along with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced a bill to expand a provision of the Violence Against Women Act of 2022 Reauthorization Act that would give people whose intimate AI-generated photos were shared without consent the right to sue. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who does found her own image digitally altered into meaningless, intimate fakes, he sponsored a bill in the House of Representatives. The bill stalled in the House without a vote last Congress, forcing the Senate to take it up again this year. Now the ball is back in the court of the House leadership; if they decide to bring the bill to a vote, it will need to be passed to reach the president’s desk.