On Sunday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two proposals that aim to close a loophole when it comes to AI-generated nude images of children.
Penned by Assemblymember Marc Berman, AB 1831 clarified that child pornography is illegal, even if it is AI-generated. A previous law did not allow legal action against those in possession of AI-generated, deepfake nude images of children if it could not be proven that those images were depicting a real child.
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In a Facebook post, Berman said the proposal was one of his “top priority bills.”
“AI that is used to create these awful images is trained from thousands of images of real children being abused, revictimizing those children all over again,” he wrote.
The prevalence of AI-generated child pornography has been studied in the U.K. and Australia. In the former, an Internet Watch Foundation investigation found that, in one month, a dark web forum hosted more than 20,000 AI-generated images. Over 10 percent of those images satisfied the legal requirements for child sexual exploitation material.
Meanwhile, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received nearly 50,000 reports of child sexual exploitation material between 2023 and 2024, which was up more than 9,000 reports from the prior year.
Newsom’s latest signing comes amid the governor’s crackdown on AI. Earlier this month, Newsom signed bills making it easier to identify deepfake content, illegal to create and distribute sexually explicit images of a real person that appear authentic, and possible for users to report sexually explicit deepfakes of themselves.
“Nobody should be threatened by someone on the internet who could deepfake them, especially in sexually explicit ways,” Newsom said. “We’re in an era where digital tools like AI have immense capabilities, but they can also be abused against other people. We’re stepping up to protect Californians.”
