Deepfake nude pics on hit list of states
Legislatures are on front lines of new form of sexual exploitation in schools
Caroline Mullet, a ninth grader at Issaquah High School near Seattle, went to her first homecoming dance last fall, a James Bond-themed bash with blackjack tables attended by hundreds of girls dressed up in party frocks.
A few weeks later, she and other female students learned that a male classmate was circulating fake nude images of girls who had attended the dance, sexually explicit pictures that he had fabricated using an artificial intelligence app designed to automatically “strip” clothed photos of real girls and women.
Mullet, 15, alerted her father, Mark, a Democratic Washington state senator. Although she was not among the girls in the pictures, she asked if something could be done to help her friends, who felt “extremely uncomfortable” that male classmates had seen simulated nude images of them. Soon, Mark Mullet and a colleague in the state House proposed legislation to prohibit the sharing of AI-generated sexuality explicit depictions of real minors.
“I hate the idea that I should have to worry about this happening again to any of my female friends, my sisters or even myself,” Caroline Mullet told state lawmakers during a hearing on the bill in January.
The state Legislature passed the bill without opposition. Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, signed it last month.
States are on the front lines of a rapidly spreading new form of peer sexual exploitation and harassment in schools. Boys across the United States have used widely available “nudification” apps to surreptitiously concoct sexually explicit images of their female classmates and then circulated the simulated nudes via group chats on apps like Snapchat and Instagram.
Now, spurred in part by troubling accounts from teenage girls like Mullet, federal and state lawmakers are rushing to enact protections in an effort to keep pace with exploitative AI apps.
Since early last year, at least two dozen states have introduced bills to combat AI-generated sexually explicit images — known as deepfakes — of people under 18, according to data compiled by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a nonprofit organization. And several states have enacted the measures.