AOC opens up about trauma of seeing deepfake AI porn of herself: ‘There’s a shock’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has opened up about her own horrifying experience of becoming the victim of AI-generated deepfake porn — warning that it is “not as imaginary as people want to make it seem.”

The Queens Democrat said she was scrolling through X while talking about legislation with her aides in a car in February when she came face-to-face with the AI-generated image of herself performing a sex act.

“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone. “As a survivor of physical sexual assault, it adds a level of dysregulation. It resurfaces trauma, while I’m trying to... in the middle of a f–king meeting.”

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The mental picture of her deepfake version placing her mouth over another’s genitals stayed with Ocasio-Cortez for the rest of the day.

“There are certain images that don’t leave a person, they can’t leave a person,” she confessed to the magazine, citing scientific research arguing that it is difficult for a human brain to separate distressing images glimpsed on a phone from reality, even if they are known to be fake.

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“It’s not as imaginary as people want to make it seem,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “It has real, real effects not just on the people that are victimized by it, but on the people who see it and consume it. And once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.”

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The harm from “digitizing violent humiliation” is akin to physical rape, according to the congresswoman.

“Kids are going to kill themselves over this,” she warmed. “People are going to kill themselves over this.”

Ocasio-Cortez, 34, is now spearheading a House version of the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act of 2024, which would make it easier for victims of nonconsensual AI porn to sue publishers, distributors and consumers of X-rated digital forgeries.