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

The Senate has handed the Disrupt Express Cast Photos and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE ) Act with unanimous consent, based on the invoice’s co-sponsor Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). The invoice lets the themes of nonconsensual, sexually specific deepfakes take civil motion towards the individuals who create and host them.

Deepfakes are a recognized problem on-line, however with out the correct protections, easy accessibility to AI-powered picture and video era instruments has made it potential for anybody to create compromising content material utilizing one other particular person’s likeness. This has grow to be a particular problem on X, the place the combination of Grok, the AI assistant created by X’s parent company xAI, makes it potential for anybody to show the content material of one other particular person’s publish into an image-generating immediate. Over the past month, that is allowed customers to create sexually specific photographs of youngsters, simply by replying to a publish with @grok and a request.

In response, Ofcom, the UK’s media regulator, has already opened an investigation into X for probably violating the Online Safety Act. The chatbot has additionally been outright blocked in Malaysia and Indonesia. The DEFIANCE Act will not stop Grok or different AI instruments from producing nonconsensual deepfakes, however it will make creating or internet hosting that content material probably very costly for anybody on the receiving finish of a lawsuit.

The Senate handed an earlier version of the DEFIANCE Act in 2024, however it stalled within the Home. Given the urgency of Grok’s deepfake downside, the hope is that this new version of the bill will not see the identical resistance. Congress handed an earlier piece of deepfake regulation final 12 months, the Take It Down Act, with bipartisan assist. That invoice was targeted on the businesses who host nonconsensual, sexually specific content material, slightly than the individuals exploited by it.