Rep. Laurel Lee, R-Fla., who was a member of the House Task Force on AI in the last Congress, said today she expects to reintroduce the bipartisan Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE Act) with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Rep. Lee co-sponsored the DEFIANCE Act last year, which Rep. Ocasio-Cortez introduced to allow victims of non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfakes to sue people who knowingly create and possess them.
“We worked together on the DEFIANCE Act, and I anticipate we’ll be reintroducing it this Congress,” Rep. Lee said Tuesday morning during a conversation with Punchbowl News. “It is an important step toward giving people who are victims of this kind of behavior a cause of action and something that they can do to help stop the proliferation.”
Rep. Lee said that she’s “optimistic” the bill will become law this Congress, noting that it was a subject that quickly received “consensus support” within the House Task Force on AI.
“It is something that is easy to understand, easy to empathize with, and generally, there’s just a recognition that it’s inappropriate and we need to do what we can to mitigate it,” she said.
Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., who co-chaired the prior Congress’s House AI Task Force, also said earlier this year that he sees restricting the use of AI tools to generate non-consensual intimate imagery as “low-hanging fruit” for Congress this year.
As for AI regulations as a whole, Rep. Lee said Congress has a goal of fostering innovation – not overregulating, but also creating guardrails.
“In Congress, what I think that we are most likely to do is try to work on things like … best practices, standards,” she said. “Where can we integrate, for example, [the National Institute of Standards and Technology] (NIST)? Could NIST be working on things like standards for model cards that will provide some transparency about, you know, when is AI being used for what purpose?”
“How can we get involved in some baseline standard?” Rep. Lee added. “We don’t need to be looking at somebody’s algorithms, like that’s not going to be a productive use of Congress, but we can, I think, work on things like transparency.”