Jessica Tezoquipa, news editor

On Aug. 1, a first-in-the-nation law passed prohibiting the use, advertisement and dissemination of “nudification technology” in Minnesota. Banning the act of using a known person’s image to generate pornography is facing resistance from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI. According to MPR, each unlawful use could face a penalty of $500,000 for the companies that violate this law.

xAI sued the state of Minnesota, claiming this law violates the First Amendment. Federal Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI from blocking the law after it filed a lawsuit for a temporary restraining order against HF 1606. “We took great care to make sure that this law doesn’t touch the First Amendment and respects art and only targets the specific image that we wanted to target, which is nudified images that they are not legal,” Quade said, according to CBS News. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison says that this law does not prohibit free speech, but it “merely puts guardrails in place on a tool that has the potential to hurt individual Minnesotans.”

Musk claims this law is “clumsy” and that xAI already polices users to pinpoint bad actors. In the lawsuit, xAI claims it “strictly prohibits its users from generating nude or sexualized images of people without their consent,” and xAI in the past “filed suit against users who evade its extensive technological blockers to generate such images.” Judge Donovan Frank allowed the law to go into effect, stating Musk waited too long to file his motion. 

Augsburg student Graciela Ryan believes that “AI is unethical [because] to generate those images it takes photos of real people who did not consent to being portrayed in such a manner. I would consider it a form of assault.” Ryan states further that “it is very disturbing, the fact that people are fighting so hard to make sure that AI pornography is legal and, specifically, child pornography is legal. Obviously generating such images is wrong, [because] those images take the photos of real children and run them through these generators to create these images. It’s not somehow different from real pornography that depicts children; it uses their photos to create AI child pornography.”

Another Augsburg student Leo Dennis spoke on what the opposition to these policies felt like to him. “Protecting people who use AI to make porn of children is protecting pedophiles.” He also shared his thoughts on people who wanted the ban lifted. “The want to have it is still rooted in wanting to have sex with children, so it’s wrong.” Lastly, Dennis shared an impact of AI porn that he felt has not been brought up in conversations such as this one but that he finds important, “I think AI porn should be banned out right because its taking away jobs from people who already are doing sex work which they might be forced into because of how horrible the economy is right now.” 

Support for this bill at Augsburg is clear from the people interviewed. It seems that sentiment is shared outside of Minnesota as well, as other states have reached out to Sen. Erin Maye Quade, who authored the bill to pass similar statutes. While still in effect, this will be an ongoing legal battle.