Advances in artificial intelligence technology have paved the way for ever increasingly genuine looking deepfakes. Deepfakes are highly realistic images, audio, or video that have been altered or generated using AI. Recently, ByteDance’s OmniHuman-1 model has gained notoriety for being able to generate incredibly realistic videos of humans talking and moving from just one image. Deepfake content can range from innocuous memes to more insidious things like political propaganda and revenge pornography. While many states have laws against the dissemination of revenge porn, the rapid advances in AI have revealed loopholes in revenge porn statutes that allow deepfaked content to slip through.
To combat the legal gray area surrounding deepfaked revenge pornography, President Trump signed the “Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act”, also referred to as the “Take it Down Act” on May 19, 2025. His endeavor to criminalize deepfaked revenge pornography is backed by First Lady Melania Trump, who claims the law will protect children online. She specifically points out that the new law will benefit teenage girls, who are overwhelmingly victimized by explicit content.
While the intentions of the Take it Down Act seem benign, digital rights activists and free speech advocates are concerned that the law will unfairly censor legal content and could be used as a tool for political speech suppression. They fear that the notice-and-takedown system proposed by the law is not nuanced enough to tackle the revenge pornography issue and will negatively affect legitimate content. The Internet Society, a nonprofit advocate of digital privacy on the internet, says the Take it Down Act poses risks to users’ privacy rights by “undermining encryption.”
