Spurred by Teen Girls, States Move to Ban Deepfake Nudes

Caroline Mullet, a ninth grader at a high school near Seattle, attended her first homecoming dance last fall, which had a James Bond theme. Shortly after the event, she and other female students discovered that a male classmate was circulating fake nude images of girls who attended the dance. These images were created using an artificial intelligence app designed to remove clothing from photos of real girls and women. Mullet alerted her father, a Washington State senator, and together they proposed legislation to ban the sharing of AI-generated explicit images of minors. The bill was passed without opposition and signed into law by the governor. Similar incidents of peer sexual exploitation and harassment are occurring in schools across the United States, with boys using readily available apps to create and distribute simulated explicit images of their female classmates.