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Beyond the well-known impacts generative AI has on the environment and the human psyche, it also comes with a tremendous social burden. Deepfakes — digitally altered content that’s indistinguishable from real life — have proliferated off the back of the AI boom, turning the web into a noxious slurry of half-truths and misinformation.
It’s also enabled a major rise in digital sex crimes through deepfake porn of real people. In one recent survey of 557 teenagers in the US, over 36 percent reported that a non-consensual pornographic image had been created of them by someone using AI (alarmingly, over 55 percent reported using AI to personally create deepfake porn.) There’s no question that the technology’s rapid rise has contributed to a massive rise in sexual blackmail, non-consensual sexualization, and child sexual abuse material.
Unlike in the European Union and China, officials in the US have been slow to respond, though two new federal cases may indicate shifting winds. According to the Associated Press, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged two men with creating deepfake porn under a new bipartisan law.
The men, identified as Cornelius Shannon of New Jersey and Arturo Hernandez of Texas, are alleged to have created and posted thousands of images and videos depicting actresses, singers, political figures, and non-celebrity women in sexual situations. The two were not alleged to have worked together, according to a Department of Justice press release, but rather to have operated separate rings spreading deepfake porn.
Altogether, the DoJ has identified roughly 473 albums containing 140 different victims, all of them women. In particular, the “content published by Hernandez has been viewed nearly a million times,” federal prosecutors allege.
“This case makes clear that posting deepfake pornography is not a victimless crime,” United States Attorney Joseph Nocella said in the presser, “and our office will pursue the criminals who engage in this reprehensible conduct with all the legal resources that the federal government can bring to bear, including new authorities granted by Congress to address these emerging forms of psychological, reputational, and financial abuse.”
While any escalation against the creators of deepfake porn is welcome news, the two are just the second and third alleged perpetrators charged under the bipartisan “Take It Down” act, which President Trump signed into law all the way back in April of 2025. Their maximum sentence? Just two years in prison.
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