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AOC and Paris Hilton team up on a bill targeting AI deepfake porn

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Paris Hilton and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are taking on AI-generated deepfake porn.

The hotel heiress and businesswoman traveled to the Capitol on Thursday for a press conference with the New York Democrat and Republican Rep. Laurel Lee of Florida to promote the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or DEFIANCE Act.

The bill would create a civil right of action allowing victims of AI-generated deepfake porn to sue the creators and distributors of those images.

“While these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this, teenagers switch schools, and children lose their lives.”

Hilton spoke emotionally about having an intimate video of her shared widely online when she was 19.

“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse. There were no laws at the time to protect me,” Hilton said. “There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it.”

“What happened to me then is happening now to millions of women and girls in a new and more terrifying way,” Hilton added.

Though Elon Musk’s X and the AI chatbot Grok were not mentioned by name at the press conference, the push to pass the bill comes after the AI agent began generating sexualized images of people, including minors, in response to prompts from users on X. The AI images spurring widespread concerns and even bans on Grok in some countries.

X has since stopped the Grok account from generating sexualized images of real people when tagged on the social network — though you can still do so using the app. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has said that anyone “using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

“There is an explosion of AI generating explicit images of children,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote earlier this month in response to news coverage of the Grok-generated images. “And it’s not just actresses. Across the country, more and more teenage girls are becoming victims of deepfake harassment. Congress must step in and pass my DEFIANCE Act to ensure victims can seek justice.”

Social media companies have largely been shielded from being held legally liable for illegal content shared on their platforms thanks to Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act of 1996, though the provision has come under fire from both Republicans and Democrats in the last decade.

The DEFIANCE Act passed the Senate last week by a voice vote, meaning no senator objected. It remains unclear when the bill will come up for a vote in the Senate, though Speaker Mike Johnson told The Independent recently that he’s “certainly in favor of it.”

In May, President Donald Trump signed the “TAKE IT DOWN Act” into law, which includes a provision requiring platforms to take down AI-generated revenge porn. That provision doesn’t fully take effect until May 2026.

This isn’t the first time Hilton has come to Capitol Hill to advocate for a piece of legislation.

In both 2021 and 2023, she came to Washington to push for the passage of a bill aimed at combating abuse in residential treatment facilities for troubled teens.




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The ‘Godfather of SaaS’ says he replaced most of his sales team with AI agents: ‘We’re done with hiring humans’

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Jason Lemkin, known to some as the Godfather of SaaS, says the time has come to push the limits of AI in the workplace.

In practice, Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world’s largest community of business-to-business founders, said on Lenny’s Podcast recently that this means he will stop hiring humans in his sales department.

Instead, SaaStr is going all in on agents, which are commonly defined as virtual assistants that can complete tasks autonomously. They break down problems, outline plans, and take action without being prompted by a user.

He said the company now has 20 AI agents automating tasks once handled by a team of 10 sales development representatives and account executives.

That move from an entirely human workforce to an agent-based workforce was rapid.

In May, SaaStr had just one AI agent in production that it used for various digital tasks, Lemkin said. That month, though, during the SaaStr Annual — its yearly gathering of over 10,000 founders, executives, and VCs — two of its high-paid sales representatives abruptly quit.

Lemkin said he turned to his chief AI officer and said, “We’re done with hiring humans in sales. We’re going to push the limits with agents.”

Lemkin’s calculus was that it just wasn’t worth the cost of hiring another junior sales representative for a $150,000 a year position who would eventually quit, when he could use a loyal AI agent instead.

Amelia Lerutte, SaaStr’s chief AI officer, told Business Insider by email that by June, the company began ramping up the number of agents it had in production.

“We had only 1 non-core agent at the time with Delphi, but didn’t go deep on 2 to 20+ until the beginning of June,” she said. “It was a conscious choice after their departure to reallocate some (but not all) head count spend to agents.”

At the SaaStr office, the 10 desks that once belonged to humans on the go-to-market team are now labeled with the names of agents, like “Quali for qualified,” “Arty for artisan,” and “Repli for Replit,” Lemkin said.

Lemkin said SaaStr is training its agents on its best humans.

“Train an agent with your best person, and best script, then that agent can start to become a version of your best salesperson,” he said.

SaaStr’s process is similar to how Vercel, the cloud-based platform for developers, trained a sales agent off its top performer for six weeks by documenting every step of their work, and then building an agent to mimic their process.

Many companies are experimenting with AI agents, but risks remain. One of the big ones is the threat of data leaks and cybercrime.

“AI agents, in order to have their full functionality, in order to be able to access applications, often need to access the operating system or the OS level of the device on which you’re running them,” Harry Farmer, a senior researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, recently told Wired.

All of that access creates more potential attack points for cybercriminals.

Security threats aside, Lemkin said that the net productivity of agents is about the same as humans. However, he said, agents are more efficient and can scale — just like software.




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