By Kylah Babin
LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE – The Senate Education Committee unanimously advanced a bill on Wednesday that would strive to protect children from deepfakes and other scenarios where their character could be damaged by improper use of artificial intelligence.
Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, proposed Senate Bill 346, which would prohibit the use of deepfakes against students enrolled in K-12. The deepfakes would include any audio or visual content that would be altered to falsely portray a student.
The bill was inspired by a story last November from Lafourche Parish, where a 13-year-old girl was expelled from school for hitting a classmate who made a deepfake porn image of her.
“I was so heartbroken when I heard her story because in all the ways she cried out for help, she didn’t get help until she responded,” Barrow said, referring to the girl’s attack on her classmate. “Not that we actually condoned that type of behavior, but it should never have ruled to that level in the first place.”
The committee advanced Senate Bill 347, also proposed by Barrow, that would add the crime of “unlawful deepfakes” to the definition of power-based violence under the Campus Accountability and Safety Act and open college students to punishment for this type of harrassment.
“[It] closes a critical gap in campus response to digital forms of abuse,” Barrow said.
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, deepfakes are becoming more accessible to the public. Many sites online provide free or cheap services to take an image of a clothed person and transform it into a picture or video of that person appearing naked or engaged in sexual activity.
Barrow’s K-12 bill received lots of support from committee members, especially Sen. Rick Edmonds, R-Baton Rouge. Edmonds’ bill, Senate Bill 42, also works to protect children from the use of artificial intelligence for child sex abuse materials.
“We’re on the same page,” Edmonds told Barrow.
His bill has passed the Senate and currently sits in the House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice.
The Campus Accountability and Safety Act was passed in 2021 to strengthen safety at public postsecondary education institutions. Power-based violence currently includes dating violence, domestic abuse and family violence and any form of sexual assault, violence and exploitation.
Barrow’s bill on harassment by college students included an amendment that would require secondary institutions to provide educational information on power-based violence campuses.
“We’re trying to make sure we keep the students informed about the process,” Barrow said. “So they know how to be able to interact if they actually encounter any of these mechanisms and where to go.”
Sen. Stewart Cathey, R-Monroe, brought Senate Bill 503 to the Senate Commerce Committee, which would create the Minor Exploitation Prevention Act.
“As technology has evolved and become engrossed in our lives, it has opened our eyes to things that we need to do to make sure that we’re protecting children,” Cathey said.
The bill is designed to create a safer space online for children. It would create a balanced approach to this mission, requiring app stores to provide age signals to developers and ensures that the information is used responsibly to protect children.
“This framework shares responsibility between app stores and app developers who make apps with potentially risky content or features for minors,” Cathey said. “This approach allows for families to main control over their data.”
Some present in the committee were concerned about the effectiveness of the honor code system instead of an age verification system the bill has in place to protect children online.
“This would undo a lot of protections we put in place the last couple of years to protect children from evil on the website,” said Will Hall, the director of the Louisiana Baptist’s Office of Public Policy.
Despite this opposition, the bill was moved favorably from committee, Cathey agreed to have a conversation with Hall to discuss the specific mechanisms needed to protect children.
