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.

That was the response from AI policy and ethics wonks to news last week that the White House's science and technology advisory agency had unveiled an AI Bill of Rights. The document is Biden's vision of how the US government, technology companies, and citizens should work together to hold the AI sector accountable. The US has so far been one of the only Western nations without clear guidance on how to protect its citizens against AI harms--covering everything from wrongful arrests, suicides, and entire cohorts of schoolchildren being marked unjustly by an algorithm, and that's just for starters. The AI Bill of Rights is missing some pretty important areas of harm, such as law enforcement and worker surveillance. And unlike the actual US Bill of Rights, the AI Bill of Rights is more an enthusiastic recommendation than a binding law, which experts worry won't be fully adequate to hold errant tech companies to account.

The new bill, called the AI Liability Directive, will add teeth to the EU's AI Act, which is set to become EU law around the same time. The AI Act would require extra checks for "high risk" uses of AI that have the most potential to harm people, including systems for policing, recruitment, or health care. The new liability bill would give people and companies the right to sue for damages after being harmed by an AI system. The goal is to hold developers, producers, and users of the technologies accountable, and require them to explain how their AI systems were built and trained. Tech companies that fail to follow the rules risk EU-wide class actions.