While there are effective laws outlawing the sharing of nonconsensual deepfake porn in some states, such as Virginia and California, the US needs a federal law
I wasn't surprised, but I *am* frustrated with policymakers … Bluesky: Amanda Marcotte / @amandamarcotte.bsky.social : This shows why the hysteria over AI is focused on the wrong issues. The fear is that it will successfully fool people into thinking it's real. But most uses of it assume that audiences know it's fake. — https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Twitter: Michael Colborne / @colbornemichael : Deepfake porn “has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life,” writes @wiczipedia, “to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Nina Jankowicz / @wiczipedia : I wrote about learning I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn't surprised, but I *was* frustrated with policymakers who have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Van Badham / @vanbadham : How would you feel if you woke up to notifications that your face had been stolen and you were now the subject of deepfake porn? This happened to my friend @wiczipedia. This is her story. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Kat Tenbarge / @kattenbarge : A heart-wrenching entry into modern tech history is @wiczipedia's account of finding deepfake porn of herself online. While pundits hand-wring about the “future” of AI, that dystopia is already here for women. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The argument lands at the end of a five-year escalation documented across this coverage: what began as harassment tooling in 2018 reporting on weaponized face-swap videos had become, by 2020, a volume business on mainstream porn sites, with some fake videos of actresses drawing millions of views (rampant deepfake pornography). The legal response has lagged at every step.
What changed by late 2023 is that the victims got younger and the prosecutions got messier: US lawmakers scrambling to respond to AI-generated nudes of teen girls followed the Levittown case, where victims helped convict a former classmate only through an ordeal 'complicated by the lack of clear US laws.' Virginia and California's statutes show enforcement is possible; the patchwork is the problem.
First-order effects
- Victims outside Virginia and California currently have no equivalent statutory recourse when their likeness is shared — prosecutors like those in the Levittown case must improvise around an absence of federal law rather than invoke it.
- Nina Jankowicz's disclosure that she is herself a target puts a named public figure behind the push, giving lawmakers' existing scramble for punitive measures a high-profile case study.
Second-order effects
- Porn platforms hosting this material face mounting pressure to police uploads proactively, since a federal statute would convert hosting nonconsensual deepfakes from a moderation problem into a prosecutable offense.
- The machine-learning dataset problem cuts the other way: as prior reporting showed, non-consensual images persist in training corpora indefinitely, so even a federal takedown-and-punish regime would leave the underlying generation pipeline untouched unless regulators also target data practices.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US policy moves from state-by-state patches toward a single federal statute defining image-based sexual abuse by synthetic media — establishing a template other countries' responses to AI-generated nudes would likely converge on.
- A durable federal framework would also force the synthetic-media ecosystem to separate detection, provenance, and removal responsibilities explicitly, because no single actor can currently be held accountable end-to-end.
The trend: Deepfake sexual abuse is outrunning a fragmented legal map, pulling US policy from scattered state statutes toward federal criminal legislation on synthetic nonconsensual imagery.