Act 827, passed by the Arkansas Legislature last year, makes it a crime to knowingly create or distribute AI-generated or digitally distributed altered sexual images of a person without their consent. While making such acts criminal, the act alone doesn’t stop the crimes. This month, a community gathering in Fayetteville placed the focus on AI-generated abuse and pathways to justice for survivors. The meeting was organized by Leah Juliett, survivor, writer and advocate. Juliett says that session this month brought together survivors, policy experts and community members.
Juliett: Because AI-facilitated sexual abuse is happening here in Arkansas, and it has serious consequences for the privacy, the safety and the well-being of everyone, including and especially survivors who deserve meaningful support, including legislation. And we have legislation here in Arkansas with Act 827 that criminalizes the production of deepfake abuse and gives survivors a civil path to justice. But we believe that it should be accompanied by meaningful enforcement of that legislation and accessible public education and prevention efforts. So that’s what we were trying to do at the event.
But I really believe that no survivor should have to make their trauma public to be believed or supported. So this was an event for everyone where folks could take the mic if they wanted to and share their experiences, but they could also walk away feeling supported, more educated and more able to directly act if they have been affected or impacted by AI-related abuse here in Arkansas.
Kellams: What did you hear that night?
Juliett: We heard stories that really displayed the breadth and depth of how AI can impact everyone, from young people who were victims of chatbot abuse and died by suicide, to how AI was used to manipulate photos of children that never existed in the first place, or how AI was used to create a sexual image of an adult woman and then ruin her career and her reputation.
But we also heard from survivors about how they took their power back after exploitation. We heard from survivors Danielle Green, who lives here in Arkansas, as well as Susanna Gibson and Samantha McCoy, who are all friends of mine and instrumental in the fight against deepfake abuse at the national level.
And I think that that visibility is important because when I survived this experience, I didn’t know that there was anyone else in the world who was also living through what I lived through. So to see powerful women, to see powerful community members and young people take to the stage, take to the mic and share their experiences really shows that none of us are alone in this, that we’re all experiencing some form of harm at the hands of unregulated technology, social media and AI, and that we can all come together to show that Northwest Arkansas community members and survivors are stronger than powerful tech companies.
Kellams: You mentioned that there is legislation. There is a law in Arkansas to help victim survivors, but you would like to see enforcement go along with that. What do you mean?
Juliett: I mean, legislation matters, but it can’t be the end of the conversation. We need prevention to make sure that the harm doesn’t happen in the first place. We need accountability for the tech companies and the perpetrators who use AI, who use the internet to facilitate harm. We need accessible support for survivors and victims and families, and we need to continue to work alongside survivors like me, like my friends, like fellow survivors in this community to make real change.
Not just as folks on the mic to speak after harm has happened or after a crisis, but as essential stakeholders and policymakers and players in this movement to create safer digital communities for everyone.
Kellams: Obviously, I think everyone would agree, action taken against perpetrators. What about the tech companies that supply these platforms? Are they cooperative?
Juliett: They’re not cooperative. And that’s why we’ve seen lately in the news so many tech companies being brought into the court or brought into the public to be held accountable, to be questioned for what safeguards they put in place or what safeguards they didn’t put in place. And that’s why I believe that safety by design should become the standard for all tech products that are being developed or pushed to the public, and not the exception. It shouldn’t be a PR response to develop safeguards against abuse that’s already happening.
Companies should be required to assess how their products can facilitate child sexual exploitation or child sexual abuse material before they launch them, before they become publicly available, and implement safeguards to address those known risks. There’s also practical protections that can be done on social media companies like Meta Platforms, including restrictions on contact between minors and adult strangers, stronger reporting mechanisms for when harm happens and systems internally at these companies that respond quickly when abuse is reported.
All of these things can be baked into the design of a product, and reporting tools after the fact, after harm has happened, have to be easy to find and then connected to direct action. Because as so many of us who are on these social media platforms, who exist as everyday users on Instagram, we know that when we see a harmful comment or an abusive image, we make a report about it on the platform. But a report that disappears into the queue is not a safeguard.
The goal should be to prevent foreseeable harm before it happens by having all of these measures in place, not to make survivors and community members and product users the sole people responsible for cleaning up the consequences of tech’s mistakes.
Kellams: It seems like there’s an unfortunate challenge here, that so many in the community don’t know of these threats or don’t understand AI or deepfakes. And it seems as though perhaps the people who would perpetrate these crimes are ahead of the game, I guess, of maybe even some law enforcement officials, legislators and general public.
Juliett: That’s true to a degree. To a degree, we can use our ignorance to the technology as an excuse. But really, I think that we as a culture have never taken child sexual exploitation seriously enough. AI-generated child sexual abuse is really an old cultural failure with new technology behind it. It’s not an unprecedented problem, as much as we would like to say that it is.
Because before the internet, CSAM was distributed in the mail physically, and then the internet came and transformed the scale and the speed of that distribution. But our response never addressed the underlying problem. And then cloud storage exacerbated it, and social media exacerbated it. And now generative AI is creating new ways to produce it. But at every stage along the way, technology has evolved faster than our willingness to prioritize child safety.
We have to prioritize that as strongly as we’re prioritizing innovation. Instead, I think we’ve repeatedly allowed companies to introduce new technology without addressing how those capabilities can be used to exploit children. And then the past continues to come back to haunt us because we never address the underlying problem.
So it really is a cultural issue. It’s also an issue of lack of oversight, lack of public reporting and lack of real accountability. Because if the public isn’t made privy to what the companies view as the risks that their products have, then we don’t know how to best engage with those products. We don’t know if we should use those products. So transparency is really important.
Independent oversight, I think, should really assess whether the safeguards that these companies bake into their products work, whether they’re responding to risks that they know about and whether their products are continuing to contribute to preventable exploitation. And then the public should be made known about the safety testing and the abuse reports, and how long a platform takes to respond to an abuse report, and really the effectiveness of the protective measures.
Because if we’re not measuring how effective the protections are, and then the public isn’t made aware of that, then really we’re flying blind when it comes to using these products and not knowing whether or not they’re safe for us as adults or our children. And that’s just not responsible for any of us.
Kellams: Events like the one that took place in Fayetteville earlier this month can give voice to survivors, allow people to understand what’s going on. What next would you like general community members to do to help curb this problem?
Juliett: I think we have to stop treating online abuse as something that happens exclusively behind a screen. Digital harm is real-world violence. We’ve seen children take their lives at the hands of these products and at the hands of this harm. We’ve seen women be exploited into oblivion. We’ve seen young people like me have their abuse and trauma follow them throughout their adolescence and into adulthood.
AI-facilitated sexual abuse is already happening in Arkansas. We see cases every day on the news with consequences for real children. And so it’s time for the community to hold these companies accountable, to demand regulation, to be a part of accountability as essential stakeholders, as users of social media products, as users of AI products, and really support one another by informing one another about the legislation that we have here in Arkansas, pathways to justice for folks who have been harmed. And we can all work to prevent AI exploitation and online abuse by having these conversations and holding people accountable when we see them harm others.
But really, nothing that we do alone can stop the issue if the tech companies aren’t willing to work to provide meaningful safeguards and meaningful prevention and safe design and regulate the input and the output of what AI is generating. Otherwise, these technologies shouldn’t exist at all if we can’t have them safely.
And no survivor should ever have to make their trauma public to be believed or supported. And no survivor should have to be brought out into the courtroom and exposed as evidence to have the public take them seriously. It’s time for all of us to take this issue seriously, because as the event showed, we’ve all been impacted by this issue across the aisle, bipartisanly, across ages, backgrounds, races, sexualities, gender identities. All of us have been impacted in some way. And this is really an issue that we can all get behind if we remember that we as people are more powerful than tech companies and billionaires.
Kellams: If you or someone you know has been exploited or bullied or been the target of one of these crimes, what can you do?
Juliett: I recommend that if you think that you or someone you know has been exploited by child sexual abuse or is a victim of child sexual abuse, that you contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. You can also reach out to me, and I can get you in touch with a list of resources. That includes legal resources, organizations that can support you, state legislation that you could learn more about, different hotlines, crisis lines, warm lines, survivor resources. I have a booklet of resources that I’d be happy to give to folks. And you can contact me via social media. My social media is @leahjuliett.
But really, what I want folks to remember is that they aren’t alone. When I was first exploited, I thought that ending my life was the only thing that I could do to save my life. And now I realize that I am one of millions who’ve been impacted, and one of millions who’ve really generated millions for many of these tech companies that allow users to continue to exploit people to strengthen their bottom line.
And at the end of the day, we all have each other, and we can all support one another by being kinder, safer online citizens, but also by being folks who refuse to accept the status quo and stand up to disrupt the cycle of history that allows child sexual exploitation to continue with new technology.
Kellams: Leah, where can people find out more about your work?
Juliett: You can visit my website, which is leahjuliett.com, or you can follow me on my social media channels.
Kellams: Leah, thank you so much for your time.
Juliett: Yeah, thank you so much, Kyle.
Leah Juliett spoke with me via Zoom on Tuesday. This is Ozarks at Large.
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