SB 926 and SB 981, which were both authored by Senator Aisha Wahab, will stop online predators and expand the revenge porn law to include identity theft.
"Identity theft is often associated to fraud," explained Wahab. "There are some laws in place for credit card theft and financial violations of innocent people, but we need to move forward with 21st century crimes."
What is SB 926?
According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, SB 926 criminalizes the distribution of AI-generated sexually explicit images with the intent to cause serious emotional distress to the person depicted in the image.
Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Cybertipline received more than 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation online.
The Organization for Social Media Safety, a nonprofit, has been a champion for legislation like this for years.
"We have seen pornographic deepfakes target particularly women business owners, women in child custody battles, and now young women in high school and middle schools," said Organization for Social Media Safety CEO Marc Berkman. "It has a real psychological impact on the target of these videos, which is incredibly concerning. There is potential reputational damage."
What is SB 981?
SB 981 requires social media platforms to provide a reporting mechanism for people who are depicted in those sexually explicit images and videos without their consent. It also requires them to immediately remove the content from their platforms.
L.A. County DA George Gascón held a news conference Tuesday, supporting the new legislation, calling them "cutting-edge laws."
"90 to 95% of the victims here happen to be women and girls, so we want to ensure that AI-generated images are also part of the crime and actually strengthening the law to make sure that very clearly it says, 'This is a crime,'" he said.
What is SB 942?
According to Newsom's office, SB 942 focuses on helping the public "more reliably identify AI-generated content."
"It requires widely-used generative AI systems to include provenance disclosures in the content they generate," read a press release on the governor's website. "These disclosures, while invisible to humans, should be detectable by free tools offered together with these systems. Users can use these tools to identify AI-generated content."
The laws go into effect next year.