Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is supporting legislation to enforce stricter penalties for deepfake digital sexual assault.
Tong is supporting a bill that expands the law further to address the problem of AI-generated pornography. In some cases involving children. The bill, House Bill No. 5312, would impose criminal penalties and empower the Office of the Attorney General to pursue civil injunctions and penalties against the platforms and companies on which the content was posted.
The bill would build on the 2015 state law that made it a crime to disseminate intimate images in an attempt to harm or harass. Last year, legislators added to a law about unauthorized intimate or sexual images to include digitally created images, or deep fakes.
“This is not just a brave new world or frontier, but it is a new world that isn't going to happen tomorrow, or soon, it's happening now,” Tong said. “The rate at which our world is changing is making it more unsafe for people who are victims of this type of activity and crime.”
If passed, the bill would also allow victims to take civil action against abusers and platforms that share the content. Tong said it's important for law enforcement to keep up with new technological threats to protect people online.
“If somebody makes a complaint and wants an image or a video removed and we believe it's actionable, we can reach out to a company and they have to take it down within 48 hours. And if they don’t, we would take action $25,000 per action, per day,” Tong said.
In January, Tong was part of a coalition of attorneys general that sent a letter to XAI, the company that owns X and Grok, its built-in artificial intelligence chatbot. In it, they demanded that platform X stop Grok from creating nonconsensual sexual images. Users with access to the AI assistant have repeatedly prompted it to “undress” women and children or place them in sexualized contexts.
State Rep. Craig Fishbein is the House Chair of the Judiciary Committee. Tong said he partnered with Fishbein to move the bill forward. Fishbein said there have been instances in which victims of the crimes have died by suicide. He stressed the importance of the bill's passage and that it was a bipartisan effort.
“This is good sense practice tools to put in the crux of our attorney general's arm so he can use it to save not only children but adults also from this scourge that is unfortunately overtaking,” Fishbein said. “Hopefully, we can get it to stop, but currently it is a large problem.”
