The White House today announced voluntary commitments from several leading artificial intelligence companies to rein in the creation and distribution of image-based sexual abuse, IBSA, including “deepfake” content generated by AI.

The announcement was made by President Biden and Vice President Harris on the eve of the anniversary of the introduction of the Violence Against Women Act, which was signed into federal law by former President Bill Clinton on Sept. 13, 1994.

“Image-based sexual abuse, both non-consensual intimate images, or NCII, of adults and child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, including AI-generated images, has skyrocketed, disproportionately targeting women, children, and LGBTQI+ people, and emerging as one of the fastest growing harmful uses of AI to date,” said the White House in a press release.

As AI products have seen vast improvements and become more available to the public, there has been a worrying rise in the number of sexualized deepfake videos and images. Such images can easily be created and might be shared on social media millions of times before they are taken down. Governments of the world, as well as private companies, are currently in the process of trying to get a handle on this.

Today, Adobe Inc., Anthropic PBC, Cohere Inc., Common Crawl Foundation, Microsoft Corp., and OpenAI agreed to responsibly source their datasets and safeguard them from image-based sexual abuse. Notably, Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC and Meta Platforms Inc. did not sign the agreement, although a number of firms, including Meta and TikTok, have joined the StopNCII initiative to help victims of IBSA more easily report the image or video and have it removed.

The companies who signed the agreement today, minus Common Crawl, also said they would incorporate “feedback loops and iterative stress-testing strategies in their development processes, to guard against AI models outputting image-based sexual abuse.” Moreover, they agreed to remove naked images from their AI training datasets.

This comes as the nonprofits the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, along with the anti-domestic violence organization, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, have introduced the “Principles for Combating Image-Based Sexual Abuse,” a number of principles designed to curb the creation and promulgation of IBSA.

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