MORGANTOWN — The Senate advanced two bills to the House on Tuesday, both aimed at combating AI-era child pornography.
SB 740 criminalizes altering a photograph, image, video clip, movie, or recording containing sexually explicit conduct by inserting the image of an actual minor so it appears that the minor is engaged in the sexually explicit conduct.
An actual minor, the bill says, is any person, “whether living or deceased, whose image was taken or captured when he or she was under the age of 18 and later inserted into a photograph, image, video clip, movie, or recording containing sexually explicit conduct.”
The crime would carry a fine up to $10,000 and/or one-to-five years’ incarceration.
Judiciary chair Charles Trump, R-Morgan, said, “This bill reflects the technological capabilities of what child predators are apparently moving to now. … It should be a crime and it will be.”
Sen. Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, said she received an email about this from a constituent just two days ago. The woman’s 14-year-old son was a victim of this crime. A predator took a picture of him from his Instagram account and imposed his face onto a nude image. The predator then contacted him, threatening to post the image across social media if he didn’t pay money.
The woman went to the police, Rucker said, but they told her, “We don’t know what we can do about this.”
The vote was 34-0.
SB 741 also passed unanimously.
Where SB 740 involves using real victims in artificially generated porn, this bill concerns entirely digitally or AI-generated porn where the image appears to be a minor.
The bill opens with legislative findings, which explains the reason for the bill.
It says, “The Legislature hereby finds that the use of artificial intelligence products to create lifelike, seemingly real media representations of children engaging in sexually explicit conduct as a means of avoiding existing sanctions for the making of child pornography using actual children is a growing problem in the United States which, if it has not done so already, poses a serious threat to West Virginia children.”
It says that AI-generated child porn promotes illegal sexual conduct against children and criminalizing it is the best way to protect the state’s children.
The bill specifies that the content produced must be obscene, which state code defines as appealing to the prurient interest; depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexually explicit conduct; and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
In Judiciary Committee, it was said that, for instance, naked child-like cherubs in a religious painting wouldn’t qualify as obscene.
It criminalizes creation, production, distribution and possession with intent to distribute. It carries a fine up to $20,000 and/or one-to-10 years’ incarceration.
A state trooper in the Crimes Against Children Unit told Judiciary members that predators can possess terabytes of this stuff, which has the same effect as porn using real children but carries no consequences.
“It’s growing at such a rate, it’s becoming extremely hard to combat, so legislation like this helps us with that fight,” she said.
EMAIL: dbeard@dominionpost.com
