When Francesca Mani was 14 years old, boys at her New Jersey high school used nudify apps to target her and other girls. At the time, adults did not seem to take the harassment seriously, telling her to move on after she demanded more severe consequences than just a single boy’s one or two-day suspension.
Mani refused to take adults’ advice, going over their heads to lawmakers who were more sensitive to her demands. And now, she’s won her fight to criminalize deepfakes. On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that he said would help victims “take a stand against deceptive and dangerous deepfakes” by making it a crime to create or share fake AI nudes of minors or non-consenting adults—as well as deepfakes seeking to meddle with elections or damage any individuals’ or corporations’ reputations.
Everything before this doesn’t matter. This is the onlyreason for that law - they want to criminalize any sort of satire. Who exactly will be determining the line between a deepfake and a caricature?
I’m not a lawyer so this is just my layperson’s read, but looking at the actual law it seems like in order for it to actually count as “deceptive” it needs to be presented as real. If there’s a disclaimer saying it’s fake, it wouldn’t be illegal under this law, so it seems like satire isn’t the main target.
It could mean that effectively caricature artists become one of the first professions protected by law from AI slop, kind of accidentally, and I don’t have that much problem with that.