The San Francisco City Attorney's Office is targeting websites accused of creating and spreading deepfake nudes, taking the sites offline and sending a clear message.
Chief Deputy City Attorney Yvonne Meré told NBC Bay Area the one-of-a-kind case challenging artificial intelligence that she, City Attorney David Chiu and their office filed more than six months ago has pulled the plug on almost a dozen websites that create and proliferate deepfake nudes.
"The actors that we targeted have now gone out of that business, and that seems like a bit of a win," Meré said. "Eleven of the websites that we targeted have shut down, so they’re no longer in existence."
Meré spoke with NBC News last August, when the City Atorney's Office first filed the case challenging how these pictures are created and spread. In many cases, the images contain a real face but use AI to create a fake body.
At the time the case was first filed, there were hundreds of millions of hits to those websites in a one year period, Meré said.
While the case is still active, it’s already proving to be a legal victory. It’s a personal and significant one for Meré, the first Latina chief deputy city attorney in San Francisco and only the second woman to hold the position.
"We work many many hours," she said, "and at the end of the day, you want that legacy to be for something, so you can say to your child: 'Look, Mommy worked on this while you were little.'"
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It was Meré’s then 15-year-old daughter who came to mind when she read an article a year ago about a mother and daughter fighting against websites which proliferate deepfake nudes and even exploit minors in child pornography.
"They knew a nude image of their 15-year-old was out in the world, they couldn’t claw it back, they didn’t even know who created it," Meré said. "No individual, no website, no marking on that photo."
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That's when the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office decided to get involved as one of fewer than 10 local governments that have the ability to go after businesses under the Unfair Competition Law in California.
"To me, it’s really important that government be responsive to its citizens, and these kinds of cases are a way to say we know that something is wrong and we know it's harming you," Meré said.
