Inside the First Major U.S. Bill Tackling AI Harms--and Deepfake Abuse

Here's what the bill aims to achieve, and how it crossed many hurdles en route to becoming law. The Take It Down Act was borne out of the suffering--and then activism--of a handful of teenagers. In October 2023, 14-year-old Elliston Berry of Texas and 15-year-old Francesca Mani of New Jersey each learned that classmates had used AI software to fabricate nude images of them and female classmates. The tools that had been used to humiliate them were relatively new: products of the generative AI boom in which virtually any image could be created with the click of a button. Pornographic and sometimes violent deepfake images of Taylor Swift and others soon spread across the internet.