Subcommittee advances bill creating criminal penalties for nonconsensual intimate images (H3058)

The artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and special law subcommittee voted 3-0 to give House Bill H3058 a favorable report as amended. The bill would create new criminal penalties for knowingly sharing an intimate image or a digitally forged intimate image of an identifiable person without that person’s effective consent.

The bill’s sponsors and subcommittee members said the measure is intended to address nonconsensual distribution of intimate images—commonly described as “revenge pornography”—and to close a gap that does not currently cover images altered or generated with machine-learning tools. Representative Travis Moore, chair of the subcommittee, described the bill as an effort to “address the problem of the dissemination of what’s commonly referred to as revenge pornography” and noted that the bill’s definition is drafted to include images “substantially modified using machine learning techniques.”

Under the bill as amended, an intimate image is a still or video image of an identifiable person that depicts exposed intimate body parts, bodily fluids, or sexual conduct. A digitally forged intimate image is an altered or fabricated image that falsely…