The new Minnesota law that would ban apps and websites that can generate nonconsensual intimate imagery can take effect today, after xAI's last-minute effort to stop it from being enforced failed to convince a federal judge. According to NBC News, US District Judge Donovan Frank has refused to grant xAI's request to stop the new law from being enforced on August 1 in a complaint arguing that it violates the First Amendment.
Based on the judge's order, he wasn't persuaded by xAI's actions that the law's enforcement would cause immediate harm. He noted that xAI filed the lawsuit on July 29, 2026, almost three months after the law was signed and merely three days before it was set to take effect. "Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate," the judge wrote.
While Judge Frank didn't side with xAI this time around, the lawsuit will still push through. The court will hold a hearing for the case on August 19 to decide whether to grant xAI's request to put a preliminary injunction on the Minnesota law, which is the first of its kind in the country.
In addition to banning apps and websites that can generate adult AI deepfakes in the state, the law would also fine developers $500,000 every time a user generates a nonconsensual intimate image using their products. Under the law, a "nudified" image or video is something that has been "altered or generated to depict an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual." It will apply to instances wherein an altered image or video is "so realistic that a reasonable person would believe that the intimate part belongs to the identifiable individual."
However, xAI argued in its lawsuit that the law was an "overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit 'nudification.'" The company denied that it was contesting Minnesota's efforts to prevent the spread of artificially generated nude images of real people. However, it said the law "extends far beyond that goal, exposing a wide array of protected speech to civil liability and government sanction."
Grok gained infamy earlier this year for complying with people's requests to transform photos of real women and children into sexualized images. It implemented policy changes to address the situation by mid-January, but NBC News says Grok has still been undressing real people as recently as April.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05, @04:45AM
"I didn't say that, like that!!!"
... by politicians.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05, @10:49AM (1 child)
Is he one of these [theguardian.com]?
That would explain a lot.
And yet we revere the rich. They must be better than us, right? Money doesn't grow on trees. They must be very intelligent and work very hard.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 05, @02:15PM
It is one of those things, though. There is an idea there, held on to past all reasonable bounds.
If you simplify the world to a frictionless sphere in a vacuum, money can be spent in two ways: satisfying your own needs and desires, or buying equipment to improve productivity. We want a system that rewards the latter with more money to invest and further increase production. With the intent that there's just more to go around afterwards.
But we don't live in that frictionless world. We live in a world where Elon got rich by way of government contracts for his space company, government subsidies and outright banning of comparable cars that cost a third as much at his car company. A world in which rigging financial metrics enable outright fraud. A world where abusing the network effect allows de facto monopoly power in communication with your friends. A world in which it is far more profitable to invest in manipulation and gambling than increased productivity in manufacturing.
The things you optimize for to get rich are totally at odds with the nominal reason why being rich should have positive value.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday August 05, @01:54PM (13 children)
OTOH, I think the real problem is the nudity taboo. It's just plain silly. It's because people living in cold climates became unused to seeing naked people, even though they wanted to. With heated buildings it should have been discarded.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05, @02:14PM (3 children)
Have you tried visiting a nudist camp?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 05, @09:59PM (2 children)
I was at one a couple of weekends ago. Not fully nudist, just clothing-optional. You'd be surprised how quickly nobody cares. Naked people basically look like themselves, but without clothes on.
The main beneficiaries of the nudity taboo are the pr0n and stripping industries. If nudity were normal, they couldn't sell it to you.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday August 05, @11:47PM
They'd just sell you something else. Whatever you normalize, there will always be some aspirational or unattainable experience you'll want.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday August 07, @12:04PM
Harold said it best [youtube.com].
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Username on Wednesday August 05, @02:20PM (2 children)
I don't want to see some 50 year old dude's nutsack. I don't think anyone does unless they are paid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05, @03:16PM
I know. We don't even want to have to see our own. It's traumatic.
(Score: 3, Funny) by HiThere on Thursday August 06, @12:29AM
So don't look.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday August 05, @11:35PM (4 children)
I disagree. This isn't really about nudity at all; that's just the manifestation.
its about power and consent. They are creating them as a power play over the subjects in the image. They get to make the subjects do things or present themselves in ways they did not consent to. In the privacy of one's own home, at least in theory, one might argue that the creation of this is within the bounds of free speech etc (but given these are commercial online services, publishing them to you as a service, they can hardly claim to be equivalent to a pencil and notepad in your private home), and if/when the images are made public, the intention is generally a demonstration of that power over the victims and humiliate them.
Normalizing nudity wouldn't really change anything.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 06, @02:44PM (3 children)
It's the fanfic problem. You can write Star Trek fanfic using licensed IP at home all you want using a word processor; its a problem if you publish a book on Amazon without the IP owner's permission.
Another problem is we're not far from crashing the pr0n industry completely. No one needs the middlemen if you can just ask AI. The middlemen in the pr0n industry are the same people running the banks and hollywood, etc. Speaking of hollywood, once its normalized that all pr0n vids are AI generated, its the same ethnic group running hollywood (for the same reasons LOL) and replacing all of that with AI will have some impact.
Another problem is "head in the sand" about the death of visual evidence as proof of anything. We just got culturally used to everyone having infinite cameras everywhere with infinite storage and its all true. Now its all false anyone with AI access can fake anything, doesn't even take powerpoint skills anymore. We're back to pre-phone era of nobody has trustworthy visual footage anymore. Lots of people make a lot of money off surveillance capitalism and they will churn the waters any way they can to keep that income stream running another year or two. So "we need to ban AI photo generation of any sort to save the children" LOL thats the least of their concerns, they just want that paycheck to last a little longer.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday August 06, @08:27PM (2 children)
This is a slightly novel wrinkle though - Is it a problem if a commerical online LLM writes fanfic for you as service? It's not being published on amazon without the IP owner's permission, but it is being published to at least that one single user at home from that commercial LLM provider. So maybe that still needs IP rights?
Now what if the user self-hosts the LLM, now can they generate fanfic all they want? (Perhaps that's ok? Or perhaps it's still not... if I built a machine that didn't contain the literal text of Lord of the Rings, but you could take it home and have it tell you the entire story, scene by scene, then I'd argue that this machine contains a sufficiently complete "derivative work" of lord of the rings to still need licensing).
And in that vein, any machine that can write fanfic anyone is likely going to want to read likely contains a sufficiently complete internal representation (even if not the literal text) of the source material to still potentially be a derivative work in its own right.
As for image generation, I tend to support the idea that people should own their likeness and have some rights over what is done with it. (And no, I'm not saying that if you take a picture of the beach out of your hotel window you need permission from every individual on the beach first or you go directly to jail.)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 07, @01:10PM (1 child)
I'm not an IP lawyer but I'd understand that as work for hire until you try and resell it.
If you hire someone to voiceover a training video you don't need a written legal release for the voiceover process or editing process or even if the project is canceled, but DO need the written legal release when selling the video or making it public or otherwise redistributing their work.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday August 07, @09:40PM
That's not quite applicable.
In that scenario, the presumption is that you own the training video and script.Then the default copyright assignment would be that the person you hired to do the voice-over owns 'their performance' of the script you provided (but they can't really do anything with it without a license from because you own the script). Meanwhile, you can't really do anything with it either, because its their performance. That is why you need a release or contract before you publish. The copy of that performance that was made for internal evaluation etc effectively "belongs to both of you", and neither of you can do much of anything with it until you reach an agreement.
Further in terms of copyright law, a voice-over that was made but never ultimately used in a finished product, that has no license, would be difficult to sue over, because the performer would have a tough time establishing that they are owed anything for licenseing.
In the fan-fiction scenario its quite different. First, the guy at home who wants the fan-fic (Party A) doesn't own anything. He's commissioning party B to create fan-fic for him as a service. Party B doesn't own anything except the fan-fic they produce, and presumably they're assigning copyright on that to party-A as a work for hire.) But Party C actually owns the source material/canon/trademarks.
I think they'd have a legitimate copyright case, because here, each time party-B produces a new fan-fiction for a party-A, a finished product was delivered to party-A without any license from party-C.
Imagine a company creating and selling custom bespoke Disney princess posters. Would they be able to beat the case by arguing that each poster was simply a work for hire "sample", and that no license was required. If the buyer wanted to mass produce them, then of course, they would need to arrange licensing from Disney at that time, but since that had never happened, so no license was ever needed. That strikes me as extremely dubious.
I realize, of course, that this exists (and has existed long before generative AI), there are plenty of artists for hire that will send you a picture of yourself as Superman, or whatever. I think this has largely simply fallen somewhere between "beneath the notice of the rights holders" and "below any threshold where prosecution of some indie artist over a one-off fan-superman-selfie-image that has no real commercial value makes any sense" -- there's no financial gain, and only reputational self harm from prosecuting those cases.
So, I guess Nintendo would sue! :)
But Nintendo aside, if Microsoft or Google or some other big rich target was doing that "as a service", I would see it justifiably drawing legal fire from all over the place.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06, @05:00PM
Two things can be true at the same time.
Nudity as a taboo is a fairly localized problem, and hardly absolute. See, for example, British stage and television.
But what's going on here is, for those for whom nudity is a private matter, something worth preserving, the genAIs are absolutely violating privacy and social norms (and, because you're either obtuse or an asshole*, Ima bold here) without consent.
One thing observed about people who violate consent IRL is that they always try to escalate. When this becomes easy, they'll escalate more and more often. So, things can only get worse for victims from here unless we start kicking the shit out of the men doing this, or taking away the toys that make this easy.
And it is, within rounding error, men:
https://aiforensics.org/work/hugging-face-ncii [aiforensics.org]
By investigating the platform's most widely used Hugging Face Spaces and creating our own, we found:
Hugging Face's own policies prohibit non-consensual intimate imagery. Yet we found virtually no safeguards preventing these tools from being used for exactly that purpose.
* not ruling out both here, i'd hate to make unreasonable assumptions about you
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Wednesday August 05, @02:23PM
If it makes me think it could be a real photo, you need the subject's consent. Recently there was a shooting at or around an in and out, and media was publishing AI photos of the suspected shooter. They should be sued by anyone that looks like the AI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06, @12:19PM (1 child)
So where can us peons find these nudify apps? We need more (adult!) porn!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 06, @02:49PM
Check out the chans.
The quality is sometimes good often awful.
It's "funny" when AI generated hands have 7 fingers or whatever the meme was, but the expectations for pr0n are somewhat higher and it can be a bit of a freak show.
Realize that probably 99% of AI generated pr0n isn't the headline grabbing stuff its a replacement for bad photoshops of ... enlargements. And those often look pretty ugly even if technically sound, which they usually are not. There's a reproductive reason most guys like most women with normal butts, and find giant double beach ball sized ones to be horrifically ugly, but its a law of the internet that there's always some weirdo out there...
There may or may not be a side push that if all cell phone cameras are "AI Assisted" even if just brightness and exposure trimming, then making all AI altered pr0n illegal essentially limits production to the pros.