The Take It Down Act targets the kind of material usually called "revenge porn": nude images of people, typically but not necessarily sexual, posted without their consent. The phrase is a little misleading, because revenge is just one of many motivations driving it. A more legalese term, precise but bloodless, is "nonconsensual intimate imagery," or NCII. Whatever it is called, the stories of its victims are heartbreaking. Jealous exes post nude selfie images sent to them by their ex-partners.

The White House released a statement today outlining commitments that several AI companies are making to curb the creation and distribution of image-based sexual abuse. The participating businesses have laid out the steps they are taking to prevent their platforms from being used to generate non-consensual intimate images (NCII) of adults and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Specifically, Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Common Crawl, Microsoft and OpenAI said they'll be: All of the aforementioned except Common Crawl also agreed they'd be: "incorporating feedback loops and iterative stress-testing strategies in their development processes, to guard against AI models outputting image-based sexual abuse" It's a voluntary commitment, so today's announcement doesn't create any new actionable steps or consequences for failing to follow through on those promises. But it's still worth applauding a good faith effort to tackle this serious problem. The notable absences from today's White House release are Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta. Many big tech and AI companies have been making strides to make it easier for victims of NCII to stop the spread of deepfake images and videos separately from this federal effort.