As AI-generated sexual deepfakes spread at massive scale, Minnesota is attempting an aggressive legal response

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Most people, when they think about AI deepfakes, think about porn. They are not wrong. What they probably do not know is the scale.

In 2023, one survey found that deepfake pornography made up 98% of all deepfake videos online. Ninety-nine percent of those depicted women. The technology that the AI industry spent years worrying might destabilize democracy has been deployed, overwhelmingly, to sexualize real women without their knowledge.

Last week, Minnesota decided to do something about it.

The state Senate voted 65-0 to ban nudification apps, the software that makes nonconsensual explicit imagery possible at scale. Not the images or the sharing of them. The apps themselves.

Congress got here first, technically. The Take It Down Act, signed by President Donald Trump last May, made it a federal crime to distribute nonconsensual intimate imagery and requires platforms to remove it........

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