As national legislation on deepfake pornography crawls its way through Congress, states across the country are trying to take matters into their own hands. Thirty-nine states have introduced a hodgepodge of laws designed to deter the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes and punish those who make and share them. Earlier this year, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a victim of nonconsensual deepfakes, introduced the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or Defiance Act. If passed, the bill would allow victims of deepfake pornography to sue as long as they could prove the deepfakes had been made without their consent. In June, Republican senator Ted Cruz introduced the Take It Down Act, which would require platforms to remove both revenge porn and nonconsensual deepfake porn.

Major technology companies, including Google, Apple, and Discord, have been enabling people to quickly sign up to harmful "undress" websites, which use AI to remove clothes from real photos to make victims appear to be "nude" without their consent. More than a dozen of these deepfake websites have been using login buttons from the tech companies for months. A WIRED analysis found 16 of the biggest so-called undress and "nudify" websites using the sign-in infrastructure from Google, Apple, Discord, Twitter, Patreon, and Line. This approach allows people to easily create accounts on the deepfake websites--offering them a veneer of credibility--before they pay for credits and generate images. While bots and websites that create nonconsensual intimate images of women and girls have existed for years, the number has increased with the introduction of generative AI.

San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu announced he intended to shut down 16 of the most popular AI "undressing" sites at a press conference on Thursday. The Verge reported that the City Attorney is accusing these sites of violating federal laws regarding revenge pornography, deepfake pornography and child pornography. Chiu's office also accused the sites of violating the state of California's unfair competition law because "the harm they cause to consumers greatly outweighs any benefits associated with those practices," according to the complaint for injunctive relief filed in a California superior court. The complaint focuses on a total of 50 defendants Chiu intends to prosecute for operating undressing websites. Some of the defendants' and websites' names were redacted but it also publicly identifies a few companies that operate "some of the world's most popular websites that offer to nudify images of women and girls" such as Sol Ecom located in Florida, Briver in New Mexico and the UK-based Itai Tech Ltd.

David Chiu announced Thursday that his office is suing the operators of 16 A.I.-powered "undressing" websites that help users create and distribute deepfake nude photos of women and girls. The lawsuit, which city officials said was the first of its kind, accuses the websites' operators of violating state and federal laws that ban deepfake pornography, revenge pornography and child pornography, as well as California's unfair competition law. The names of the sites were redacted in the copy of the suit made public Thursday. Chiu's office has yet to identify the owners of many of the websites, but officials say they hope to find their names and hold them accountable. Chiu said the lawsuit has two goals: shutting down these websites and sounding the alarm about this form of "sexual abuse."

Li Deng has been working with artificial intelligence and machine learning for nearly three decades. He spent 17 years at Microsoft and founded the tech company's Deep Learning Center in Redmond, Washington. But for the past five years, Deng has worked in finance, and now he's on a mission to persuade other technologists to get into the field as well. "In finance, the data is huge. In many cases, it's much bigger than the data you're dealing with in technology," Deng tells us.

Pearl Chiu has jet black hair and a bearing of quiet confidence. She pauses to think before she speaks, and radiates a teacher's joy in discussing her work. She's the only clinically trained psychologist in the lab who has direct experience with patients in a clinical setting, and she arrived at machine learning from a distinctly human place. "As I was seeing, working with, patients, I was just frustrated with how little we knew about what is happening," Chiu says. She believes bringing in machines to detect patterns may be a solution.

R is a data analysis software as well as a programming language. Data scientists, statisticians and analysts use R for statistical analysis, data visualization and predictive modeling. R is open source and allows integration with other applications and systems. Compared to other data analysis platforms, R has an extensive set of data products. Problems faced with data are cleared with R's excellent data visualization feature.

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Since books are expensive, I tend to research extensively before deciding on which ones to purchase. For professional reasons, I wanted to branch into machine learning using the R programming language. Based on customer reviews, the Amazon "Look Inside" feature, and online suggestions, I invested in several books: "An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R" (James, Whitten, Hastie and Tibshirani), "Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach, Third Edition" (Russell and Norvig), "Machine Learning with R" (Lantz), and "Machine Learning with R Cookbook" (Chiu). With these resources, and with a great YouTube course from the University of British Columbia (Google UBC CPSC 340 Nando YouTube), I set out to learn. Still learning (no overnight success stories here), but the progress is encouraging.

After Celebgate and the Fappening, a new iOS app called Nude is trying to protect iOS users' racy photos from another iCloud leak. The app scans a user's camera roll and pinpoints which photos, videos or documents include explicit content. After the AI scan, the images are locked into the app and erased to avoid hackers from getting their hands on the images. Jessica Chiu, Y.C. Chen and Edgar Khanzandian created the Nude app, which was released Oct. 4. "The app itself is very simple and intuitive to use," Chiu told International Business Times. "Once our proprietary AI technology scans through your camera roll and detects sensitive material, they are then imported into the app, deleted from your camera roll, and erased from iCloud."