Paris Hilton joined House members on Capitol Hill on Thursday to advocate Senate-passed, bipartisan legislation aimed at allowing victims to take civil action against fake, artificial intelligence pornography.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Laurel Lee (R-FL) held a bipartisan press conference with Hilton on Thursday, urging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to bring the bill up for a vote. The legislation, dubbed the DEFIANCE Act, passed the Senate unanimously earlier this month.
“For too long, our laws have lagged behind this technology,” Lee said at the press conference. “Victims have been left without clear, consistent legal tools when their likeness is stolen and weaponized without their consent. The DEFIANCE Act closes that gap.”
The legislation would allow individuals whose likeness has been used by AI to generate pornographic photos and videos without their consent to sue those responsible for generating or disseminating the content for upward of $150,000. It has passed the Senate unanimously twice — earlier this month and in July 2024.
“Honestly, when DEFIANCE passed at the end of 2024, it happened very close to the end of the term, so we were having real breakthroughs, but the Congress ended,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Examiner.
Ocasio-Cortez added that the legislation passing “much earlier in the term” allows the “reception to be much better.” She said they addressed concerns raised by the 2024 legislation to “sufficiency.”
When asked if the legislation has received any pushback from tech companies, the New York Democrat said they are “OK on that front,” after working through discussion and giving victims the “right to advocate for themself.” Ocasio-Cortez said if there were to be a signing ceremony at the White House, if the bill passes the House, she would be “more than willing to put aside any differences to come together and advocate for victims and survivors of sexual harassment and assault” and attend.
The latest push for passage of the DEFIANCE Act comes after Elon Musk’s AI bot Grok has been criticized for a feature added late last year that allows it to edit images and videos.
The feature has faced criticism for allegedly not having sufficient guardrails in place to prevent users from having Grok create explicit images and videos based on photos of real people, including minors. The allegations have led to investigations in California, the European Union, Australia, and India, among other jurisdictions.
“AI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deep fake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the internet, including via the social media platform X,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said earlier this month when launching his investigation into the company.
Musk, for his part, has said he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.”
“Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images; it does so only according to user requests. When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” Musk said in a recent post on X. “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”
AI also recently limited Grok’s “image generation and editing” feature to paying subscribers only.
Last year, lawmakers approved a separate bill targeting deep fakes, called the Take It Down Act, which makes it a federal crime to share sexually explicit AI-generated images without someone’s consent, but does not provide compensation to victims. President Donald Trump signed it into law in May.
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“It is not enough to take down content,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the press conference. “We have to give victims a civil right of action. Take It Down gave us removal, and DEFIANCE will give us recourse and restitution.”
House Republican leadership did not respond to a request for comment by the Washington Examiner.