Paris Hilton and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are taking on AI-generated deepfake porn.
The hotel heiress and businesswoman traveled to the Capitol on Thursday for a press conference with the New York Democrat and Republican Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida to promote the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or DEFIANCE Act.
The bill would create a civil right of action allowing victims of AI-generated deepfake porn to sue the creators and distributors of those images.
“While these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this, teenagers switch schools, and children lose their lives.”
Hilton spoke emotionally about having an intimate video of her shared widely online when she was 19.
“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse. There were no laws at the time to protect me,” Hilton said. “There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it.”
“What happened to me then is happening now to millions of women and girls in a new and more terrifying way,” Hilton added.
Though Elon Musk’s X and the AI chatbot Grok were not mentioned by name at the press conference, the push to pass the bill comes after the AI agent began generating sexualized images of people, including minors, in response to prompts from users on X. The AI images spurring widespread concerns and even bans on Grok in some countries.
X has since stopped the Grok account from generating sexualized images of real people when tagged on the social network — though you can still do so using the app. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has said that anyone “using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”
“There is an explosion of AI generating explicit images of children,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote earlier this month in response to news coverage of the Grok-generated images. “And it’s not just actresses. Across the country, more and more teenage girls are becoming victims of deepfake harassment. Congress must step in and pass my DEFIANCE Act to ensure victims can seek justice.”
Social media companies have largely been shielded from being held legally liable for illegal content shared on their platforms thanks to Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act of 1996, though the provision has come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats in the last decade.
The DEFIANCE Act passed the Senate last week by a voice vote, meaning no senator objected. It remains unclear when the bill will come up for a vote in the Senate, though Speaker Mike Johnson told The Independent recently that he’s “certainly in favor of it.”
In May, President Donald Trump signed the “TAKE IT DOWN Act” into law, which includes a provision requiring platforms to take down AI-generated revenge porn. That provision doesn’t fully take effect until May 2026.
This isn’t the first time Hilton has come to Capitol Hill to advocate for a piece of legislation.
In both 2021 and 2023, she came to Washington to push for the passage of a bill aimed at combating abuse in residential treatment facilities for troubled teens.
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