Fighting AI-Generated Child Pornography in California: A Look at the 3 Bills Addressing Sexually Explicit Deepfakes

LOS ANGELES (KABC) — Governor Gavin Newsom signed three bills aimed at protecting California residents from sexually explicit AI photos being used and taken without consent and shared on social media.

SB 926 and SB 981, both authored by Senator Aisha Wahab, would put an end to online predators and expand revenge porn laws to include identity theft.

“Identity theft is often associated with fraud,” Wahab explained. “There are laws for credit card theft and financial crimes of innocent people, but we need to move on from the crimes of the 21st century.”

What is SB 926?

According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, SB 926 criminalizes the distribution of AI-generated sexually explicit images with the intent to cause serious emotional harm to the person depicted in the image.

Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Cybertipline received more than 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation online.

The non-profit Organization for Social Media Safety has been advocating for this type of legislation for years.

“We’ve seen pornographic deepfakes specifically targeting female entrepreneurs, women in child custody battles, and now young women in high school,” said Marc Berkman, CEO of the Organization for Social Media Safety. “It’s having a real psychological impact on the target of these videos, which is incredibly concerning. There’s potential reputational damage.”

What is SB 981?

SB 981 requires social media platforms to provide a reporting mechanism for people who are depicted in sexually explicit images and videos without their consent. It also requires them to immediately remove the content from their platforms.

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón held a press conference Tuesday in which he expressed support for the new legislation, calling it “cutting-edge legislation.”

“90 to 95 percent of the victims here are women and girls, so we want to make sure that AI-generated images are also part of the crime. We also want to tighten the law so that it says very clearly: ‘This is a crime,’” he said.

What is SB 942?

According to Newsom’s office, SB 942 is aimed at helping the public “more reliably identify AI-generated content.”

“It requires widely used generative AI systems to include provenance disclosures in the content they generate,” according to a press release on the governor’s website. “These disclosures, while invisible to humans, should be detectable by free tools provided with these systems. Users can use these tools to identify AI-generated content.”

The laws will come into effect next year.