Legislative Update: 7/3/23

The last two weeks have been fairly quiet on the legislative front. A few notable developments:

• The end of Oregon’s legislative session meant the failure of both of its age verification laws: SB 257 and an Age-Appropriate Design Code bill modeled after California’s embattled law.
• The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act included a provision to establish a Children’s Data Protection Working Group. A bill updating the rules for the group and pushing out the deadline for its report was sent to the Governor’s desk on June 27th.
• Louisiana passed a bill that creates the crime of “unlawful deepfakes” that will take effect August 1st. It prohibits anyone who, with knowledge that material is a deepfake depicting another person, knowingly creates or possesses material that depicts a person engaging in sexual conduct. It also criminalizes “unlawful deepfakes involving minors”.

Non-consensual deepfake bans have started to emerge in a number of state legislatures, an unsurprising development given the recent explosion in generative AI technologies. In early June, the FBI released a public service announcement about sexually explicit deepfakes being used for harassment and sextortion. And just last week, a new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Thorn highlighted how the rapid evolution of the technology is assisting the production of increasingly realistic computer-generated child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM).