Younger Men More Likely To Oppose Anti-Deepfake Porn DEFIANCE Act

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A law to criminalize Deepfake porn is currently going through the Senate. The ‘Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits’ (DEFIANCE) Act would allow victims of deepfake porn to sue the creators in a civil court. Deepfake porn is defined under the act as any image of an identifiable person nude, or enaged in sexually explicit conduct or scenarios, created via software, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other computer-generated or technological means. The act is being primarily sponsored by the controversial ‘AOC’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Will The DEFIANCE Act Criminalize The Private Creation Of Deepfake Porn?

While the wording of the Act is a little ambigeous, the main aim in terms of legal redress is to give the ‘identifiable person’ the right to sue the source of the images for up to $150,000 in damages. However, the act also mentions the right to sue an individual possessing the images, and while this would appear to be constrained by the condition that there was an intent to distribute those images, the wording seems unclear to me (I am certainly not a legal expert). It also mentions the ‘soliciting’ of such images.

You can view the entire wording of the DEFIANCE Act here. Again, as a layperson with little expertise in law, let alone US law, it all seems very ambiguous and open to interpretation to me. ‘Intent to distribute’ could leave the company behind the AI porn generator or deepfake porn tool at risk of being sued by the victim, even if the images are only distributed to the person generating and downloading them for private viewing. The reference to soliciting could do the same for the person downloading the image he has created from the generator, even if again it is for his sole private use.

The intent of this act might be to stop the distribution and sharing on social media and the like of deepfake porn images, but as the hysteria builds and the public opposition to deepfake porn grows, then I can see its ambiguity being exploited to eventually allow individuals who have created images for their own private use to be sued by the ‘identifiable persons’.

For example, in five years time, we could see the offices of a popular AI porn company raided and the database of customers accessed, followed by the identifiable individuals in the photos or videos uploaded, traced, and contacted, and then invited to sue those customers, even if the deepfake images produced were for their own private use.

22% Of Young American Males Oppose The DEFIANCE Act

A recent survey by ‘Data For Progress‘ found that a significant percentage – 22% – of young American males were somewhat or strongly opposed to the DEFIANCE Act. This was significantly more than females. As a whole, males are almost twice as likely to oppose the DEFIANCE Act, although for both genders an overwhelming majority strongly support the act.

Younger men more likely to oppose DEFIANCE Act.

Image courtesy of 19thnews.org.

According to Danielle Deiseroth, the executive director of Data for Progress, the reason for the gender difference in attitudes is simply that women are the victims of deepfake porn. Of course, it could also be that younger males are going to be the ones fearing to be sued for $150,000 for privately generating a deepfake nude. Or it could even be that younger males are simply by nature more libertarian and therefore more likely to be against the government passing new laws restricting what people can and can’t do online.

“We can confidently say that women and men under 45 have diverging opinions on this policy,” Deiseroth said. “This is an issue that disproportionately impacts women, especially young women, who are more likely to be victims of revenge porn. And I think that’s really the root cause here.”

Another breakdown of the survey responses can be seen below.

data for progress survey DEFIANCE Act deepfake porn 2024

Interestingly, there are fairly significant differences in attitudes by race too, with almost twice as great a percentage of Hispanic respondents being opposed to the act as whites are. I wonder if Danielle Deiseroth also thinks this is because deepfake porn primarily affects white women?

Featured image generated with PornJoy.ai

About xhumanist

Xhumanist has been writing on porn/sex tech for nearly two decades, and has been predicting the rise of VR and AR porn, as well as AI porn, and their coming together to produce fully 'immersive porn', which would be indistinguishable from the real thing, and create a society of 'sexual abundance'. He identifies as a digisexual, and has been quoted in Wired Magazine.

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