The California Legislature passed a bill aimed at combatingAIGenerated childrenSexual Contentofbill, a proposal that passed in the early stages Tuesday in Sacramento.
Source Note: The image is generated by AI, and the image is authorized by Midjourney
AB1831 passed the Assembly Public Safety Committee hearing and will be referred to the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee next week. The bill seeks to fillCaliforniaA loophole in current child pornography laws that prohibits the production, distribution or possession of child sexual abuse material as long as it involves actual children ignores computer-generated images that look like children. Supporters of the bill say that AI-generated content often uses the faces of actual children and victimizes them when those images are distributed.
Heather Timmins, a detective with the Orange County Sheriff's Office, said at Tuesday's hearing, "For these kids to go to school knowing that these images have gone viral on campus, itabsoluteIt's a humiliation." Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko, who co-drafted this new legislation, says this is just another side of AI that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later. "These images contain real minors, real victims, so the AI is by no means victimless simply because it's computer generated." Nasarenko told Eyewitness News. "AB1831 would prohibit the production, distribution and possession of computer-generated or AI-generated child sexual abuse material."
Kaylin Hayman, who worked as a child actor for the Disney Channel, also testified at the hearing. The now 16-year-old told committee members that she received a call from the FBI last year informing her of the discovery of AI-generated videos that used her likeness to participate in sexual activity. "A man possessed images that morphed my face onto someone's body to participate in a sexual act," she testified. "The thought of grown men seeing me in such a horrific situation felt violated and disgusting."
Several cases of sexual abuse involving AI have sprung up in Southern California. Last month, five eighth-graders at Beverly Hills View Middle School were expelled for using an AI to create nude images of classmates. A student at Calabasas High School was accused of engaging in similar behavior and distributing the images to others in the school. Just last week, Laguna Beach High School investigated a student for doing the same thing.