U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace wants Congress to immediately take up a measure criminalizing the creation of deepfake porn. And as Governor of South Carolina, she said she would sign stricter rules at the state level as well.
The Charleston Republican attended a press conference alongside social media and reality star Paris Hilton to advocate for a bipartisan bill, the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act (HR 3562).
Like many of the congresswomen and public figures at the event, Mace said she has become the victim of artificial intelligence-generated exploitation herself.
“I just had to have grok take down a sexual image last week that was totally inappropriate,” she told Southeast Politics. “This is rampant. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening to underage children, and we need to stop it. It’s a human rights issue. It’s not a political issue.”
Indeed, the bill is being championed by a Democrat, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and a Republican, U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida. The legislation currently boasts 24 Republican co-sponsors and 25 Democrats in the U.S. House.
The Senate has already passed a bill, and lawmakers are pushing the House to take up the measure, although free speech concerns have been raised as possible obstacles.
Mace said those should not be a concern because it focuses on creation and distribution of the faked pornography. While not in this bill, she said she would like explore incentives for tech companies and creators to mitigate use of their products in pornographic deepfakes.
“The accountability is on the people who are making the prompts for AI,” Mace noted. “There needs to be, maybe potentially, some financial incentive for companies to put up the necessary guardrails so it doesn’t happen. And I’m open to that conversation, but it’s more complicated.”
Mace also said she would back a state law to that effect.
She noted ongoing litigation with an ex-partner she alleges filmed intimate moments without her consent. That’s something she has in common with Hilton. The hotel heiress infamously appeared in a sex tape filmed by an ex-boyfriend who then sold the content, something Hilton called “abuse” at the press conference.
But Hilton said Thursday, she also gets featured without her consent in pornography where she played no role at all. Experts estimate some 100,000 known deepfakes of Hilton exist. The public availability of AI tools, she said, has made it far easier to exploit both celebrities and everyday people.
“Before, someone had to betray your trust and steal something real,” Hilton said. “Now, all it takes is a computer and a stranger’s imagination.”
Indeed, the press conference also featured Francesca Mani, an 18-year-old from New Jersey, who said she was exploited when she was 14 when deepfakes of her were distributed at her school. There was no criminal accountability, and Mani lobbied lawmakers across the country to add protections in all 50 states.
“The administration told me there couldn’t be any accountability because no laws existed,” she said. “So I told them, I will bring you a law.”
But still, no federal guidelines exist. While Congress passed a law last year requiring platforms to take down content at victims’ demand, there remain no federal laws making it a crime to create and share the content in the first place.
Mace said Speaker Mike Johnson should bring the federal legislation to the floor “sooner rather than later.”
“This better pass soon,” she said.
