MN lawmakers confident nudification ban will survive challenge from Elon Musk's AI company
MN lawmakers defend nudification ban after Musk lawsuit
Minnesota lawmakers and victim-survivor advocates defended a first-in-the-nation law set to take effect Aug. 1 banning nudification technology used to create nonconsensual sexual images. The news conference came one day after Elon Musk’s AI company xAI filed a lawsuit seeking a temporary restraining order to block the law.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - Minnesota lawmakers say they are confident that a ban on nudification technology – AI tech that allows users to make nude photos – will survive a challenge being brought by Elon Musk's company.
xAI sues over nudification ban
The backstory:
On Tuesday, xAI, the start-up AI company founded by Elon Musk best known for the chatbot "Grok" that is available through social media platform X, filed a lawsuit in federal court over Minnesota's new nudification ban.
The lawsuit argues that the ban is an infringement of First Amendment rights, while arguing that the law goes too far by banning consensual images along with nonconsensual nude images.
Dig deeper:
Speaking on Wednesday, Sen. Erin Maye Quade, who authored the bill in the Senate, said there were protections built into the law to protect art.
"I don't see this as a free speech issue," said Sen. Maye Quade. "This does not regulate content. It does not regulate art. It regulates conduct. Prompts are not art, and we protect art specifically in this law. Again, it's pretty audacious to sue to prevent a law that protects children from being turned into child sexual abuse material. But again, this is already happening. They're already doing it with that tool and I think that's why."
Lawmakers confident law will go into effect
What they're saying:
Sen. Maye Quade is confident the law will be allowed to go into effect during the challenge from xAI.
Another Minnesota law due to go into effect this weekend banning prediction markets was recently blocked from taking effect after a judge granted an injunction.
"I feel confident the judge will look at the law and see how well it was written and see what it is meant to protect and allow it to go into effect while the court case works its way through the courts," she said. And I expect that the courts will see that this law has been very, very well crafted to protect First Amendment rights while also protecting Minnesotans from image-based sexual abuse and being turned into child sexual abuse material. The law was written specifically to do that, and I hope that it will withstand judicial scrutiny and go into effect on Saturday."
Sen. Maye Quade also pointed out she worked with tech companies, like Adobe, while developing the law.
"We worked hand in hand with companies who do good work and provide good tools to make sure that their work is not implicated here," she said. "In addition, this was a very bipartisan bill that took two years to pass. It went through multiple committees in the Senate. It is bipartisan coauthors over here. We worked on it between every single committee lawyers, advocates, and then in the House, the same process. And so we really came out at the end with the best bill we could possibly have. And part of the reason you don't see a multitude of tech companies suing the state of Minnesota over this law is because it really doesn't implicate them at all."