HARRISBURG, Pa. — On Monday State Sen. Tracy Pennycuick (R, Berks and Montgomery Counties) announced a recently enacted law to combat the use of AI in creating deepfake child pornographic content.
The legislation follows an incident in Lancaster County that resulted in 60 teen girls' photographs being used in explicit AI-generated content.
Deepfakes are images, videos and audio that are digitally altered, depicting both real and fake people or events.
The new legislation, listed as Act 125 of 2024, amends previous legislation to include the use of AI to create child pornographic content. According to Pennycuick, the old law had a loophole.
“You could be convicted of creating child pornography but because AI was not specifically listed it was a grey area,” Pennycuick stated.
In the case of the two teen boys at Lancaster Country Day School who used AI to generate sexually explicit content of their classmates, they were charged with multiple counts of possession and dissemination of child pornographic material but not for the creation of the content.
Pennycuick added that the legislation gives local law enforcement and the state the power to prosecute individuals, no matter the situation, as the use of AI platforms to create sexually explicit material is increasing.
“Even if you’re a kid and you’re messing around with your classmates' photos [we’re] still going to prosecute, it’s still child pornography,” Pennycuick stated.
Chad Hogg, assistant professor of computer science at Millersville University, shared some of the additional dangers of AI-generated images, stating that most people can’t distinguish between a real image and something that has been generated artificially.
“Often if you see something with your eyes it can seem much more real than what somebody may be telling you…because it’s so believable to people and it doesn’t seem like something that could be faked,” Hogg said.
As AI programs become more sophisticated and harder to detect, Pennycuick says the new legislation is the first step in protecting the children of Pennsylvania from future incidents.
“We recognize this is a problem and we want to protect your children. We are going to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Pennycuick asserted.