xAI in its lawsuit requesting the judge to enjoin the law from being enforced argues that it is too broad as written and infringes on free speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
What a piece of shit company.
Any way, this isn’t what’s protected by the First Amendment:
Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. As a general rule, lies are protected, with limited exceptions such as defamation, fraud, false advertising, perjury, and lying under oath during an official government proceeding.
In bold are what I consider relevant to this topic.
Creating and distributing AI nudes of people was already illegal in Minnesota. This is a separate law that makes hosting or providing any service or “software” that has the ability to do that illegal. It is broadly worded and makes more than the intended target illegal, which was already illegal to begin with.
Ehh, it seems pretty targeted to me, it’s defined to only apply to automatic apps or services, e.g. it specifically exempts manually created images.
Bans X from allowing grok to make naked pictures of celebrities but doesn’t apply to people using photoshop to do the same.
Subd. 3. Exemption. The prohibitions in subdivision 2 do not apply when the website, application, software, program, or other service requires the technical skill of a user to nudify an image or video.
I get the idea, but this doesn’t comfort me, because what is “technical skill” here? That seems subjective and will ultimately be up to a court to decide. What constitutes a skill? It’s prompting a skill? Is prompting Photoshop’s AI a skill? Their lasso tool is pretty easy to use. The line isn’t clear, and a clever lawyer, or a judge, or a jury could come down differently on what counts and what doesn’t.
I get the goal here. But I think we were already covered by the existing law that made distribution of these artificial nudes illegal.
“Prompting” isn’t a skill, that’s just asking for what you want. Same way as asking a barista for a drink doesn’t require the same level of skill as making it.
But in general yes that’s how arguments and decision-making works, for any law. These things aren’t mathematical proofs interpreted by computers, they’re people you convince of your point.
This article must be incomplete, because I don’t see the word “cisgender” anywhere in that list! /s
How could speech violate IP law?
Not just people, children. He’s arguing to be able to make nudes of children.
Welcome to 2026. Apperently we faught wars for this…
The only way to actually stop it is to excise all data using nude human bodies from the models. I’m not sure it’s possible, but I’m here for it.
The thing that interests me is that a local business person would see this law and say “fine, no porn”. Remember, when Yahoo bought tumblr, they sank it by banning porn!
So to me this suggests they can’t figure out how to make their LLM reliably not produce pornography.
If we got rid of computers, and paint brushes that would be a good start.
