Minnesota is on the verge of drawing a legal line around one of AI's darker uses. Lawmakers on Wednesday approved a bill that would outlaw "nudification" tech—software that turns ordinary photos into realistic, sexually explicit deepfakes—sending it to Gov. Tim Walz, who's expected to sign it, per The 19th and Minnesota Public Radio. That would make Minnesota the first state to explicitly ban the creation of AI-generated pornographic images without a person's consent.
The bill gained momentum after Molly Kelley learned in June 2024 that a man she thought was a close family friend had taken her social media pics and used them to create explicit images and videos of her, as well as of dozens of other women. "The uncomfortable reality is just how ubiquitous this software is and how few guardrails there are," she said in an interview, noting that the technology is trained on "the actual abuse of real human beings."
The measure sailed through the Senate 65-0 and the House 132-1. The lone "no" vote from the latter came from Rep. Drew Roach, who argued the bill doesn't address the root causes of the issue. "We're going to attack a software, a manufacturer, and ... [shift] our focus on that instead of the perpetrators of these crimes," he said, per a release. "If we want to prevent this from happening in the future, we should go after those perpetrators with the full force of the law."
Rep. Jessica Hanson, who sponsored the bill, pushes back on Roach's claims, saying that the content creation itself is enough of a root cause, and that law enforcement does go after these types of criminals but "the law is not strong enough to catch a lot of them." Anti-sexual-violence group RAINN backed the bill, calling nudification apps "automated abuse" and saying those who profit from them should be held accountable, per MPR.
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