Senate passes Defiance Act for a second time to address Grok deepfakes

The Senate has passed the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE ) Act with unanimous consent, according to the bill’s co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). The bill lets the subjects of nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes take civil action against the people who create and host them.

Deepfakes are a known issue online, but without the proper protections, easy access to AI-powered image and video generation tools has made it possible for anyone to create compromising content using another person's likeness. This has become a particular problem on X, where the integration of Grok, the AI assistant created by X's parent company xAI, makes it possible for anyone to turn the content of another person's post into an image-generating prompt. Over the last month, that's allowed users to create sexually explicit images of children, just by replying to a post ...