Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up
By Emily Scherer for The 19th
Last October, a 13-year-old boy in Wisconsin used a picture of his classmate celebrating her bat mitzvah to create a deepfake nude he then shared on Snapchat.
This is not an isolated incident. Over the past few years, there has been case after case of school-age children using deepfakes to prank or bully their classmates. And it keeps getting easier to do.
When they emerged online eight years ago, deepfakes were initially difficult to make. Nowadays, advances in technology, through generative artificial intelligence, have provided tools to the masses. Here, The 19th highlights a troubling consequence: the prevalence of deepfake apps among young users.
“If we would have talked five or six years ago about revenge porn in general, I don’t think that you would have found so many offenders were minors,” said Rebecca Delfino, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who studies deepfakes.
Federal and state legislators have sought to tackle the scourge of nonconsensual intimate image (NCII) abuse, sometimes referred to as “revenge porn,” though advocates prefer the former term. Laws criminalizing the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images — for authentic images, at least — are in effect in every U.S. state and Washington, D.C., and last month, President Donald Trump signed a similar measure into law, known as Take It Down.
