A bill prohibiting so-called “revenge porn,” including images created with artificial intelligence, has been signed by US President Donald Trump.
The Take It Down Act, which was signed on Monday, makes it illegal to publish intimate photos of someone without their permission, and requires social media sites to take down those photos as soon as possible.
The legislation applies to both authentic photos and realistic-looking AI-created images, known as “deepfakes,” which were approved by the US Congress earlier this year with near-unanimous support.
“Numerous women have been harassed with deepfakes and other explicit images distributed against their will as a result of the rise of AI image generation.” At a signing ceremony held at the White House in Washington, DC, Trump declared, “This is wrong… just so horribly wrong.”
“We’re making it completely illegal today because it’s a very abusive situation.”
After her husband’s return to the White House, First Lady Melania Trump praised the legislation as a “powerful step forward in our efforts to ensure that every American, especially young people, can feel better protected from their image or identity being abused.”
The legislation attracted criticism from digital rights organizations on privacy and anti-censorship grounds despite enjoying rare bipartisan support and the backing of numerous organizations fighting sexual harassment and assault.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed that the law’s provisions for removing flagged content from the internet “risikoed free expression, user privacy, and due process, without addressing the problem it claims to solve”.
In a statement released in February, the group claimed that “lawful content, including satire, journalism, and political speech, could be unfairly censored.”
Source: Aljazeera
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