Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made headlines this week for all the wrong reasons — a pornographic video of her circulating the internet.
Ocasio-Cortez opened up about the AI-generated deepfake video depicting her likeness performing explicit sexual acts, and warned that it is “not as imaginary as people want to make it seem.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Ocasio-Cortez recounted the disturbing February incident when she came across the explicit fake footage — and vowed to fight deepfake pornography from progressing into the future.
“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “As a survivor of physical sexual assault, it adds a level of dysregulation. It resurfaces trauma, while I’m trying to … [be] in the middle of a f**king meeting.”
The mental image is inescapable after that day, she said. The New York Post shared the following still from the alleged video —
“There are certain images that don’t leave a person, they can’t leave a person,” she confessed, citing research on how the brain struggles to separate distressing digital fakes from reality.
“It has real, real effects not just on the people that are victimized by it, but on the people who see it and consume it,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.”
The experience has spurred the 34-year-old lawmaker to champion new legislation cracking down on deepfake, A.I.-created pornography.
She is sponsoring the bipartisan DEFIANCE Act which would allow victims to sue publishers, distributors, and consumers of such explicit forgeries.
“The deepfakes may not be real, but they cause very real harms,” Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democratic co-sponsor, said. “It’s time to return power to the victims and give them a tool to demand justice.”
For Ocasio-Cortez, the scourge of A.I.-enabled explicit deepfakes is dangerous for women — especially young women. “It’s a subjugation of entire people…When you are able to actively subjugate all women in society on a scale of millions, at once digitally, it’s a direct connection [with] taking their rights away.”
Ocasio-Cortez said she will remain defiant:
“And guess what, motherf***ers? I’m not going anywhere. Deal with it.”
We may not agree with Ocasio-Cortez on much — we disagree on almost everything, really — but the dangers of deepfake A.I. pornography are real.
Stephen Dietrich is the Publisher of The Horn News