Image: (Emily Scherer for The 19th; Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed a bill that would allow victims to sue the creators of nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes for a minimum of $150,000.

The DEFIANCE Act is now headed to the House, where leadership failed to bring it to the floor last session. But there’s new momentum around the issue, as advocates push for Google and Apple to ban Grok from app stores after the chatbot allowed the creation of nonconsensual intimate imagery.

On December 20, Elon Musk, the CEO of social media platform X, richest person in the world and close associate of the Trump administration, announced that the company’s integrated chatbot Grok would be able to generate images from user prompts.

X users quickly realized that they could create explicit images by prompting Grok to “undress” women and girls. Various workarounds have resulted in nonconsensual intimate imagery of real people all over the platform, including child sexual abuse material and fake images of Muslim women with their hijabs removed.

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