AOC Describes the ‘Trauma’ of Seeing Deepfake Porn of Herself

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the experience of stumbling upon AI-generated porn of herself while scrolling through X. ‘There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” she said.

In a new interview, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she recently stumbled upon AI-generated porn of herself. She told Rolling Stone she had been scrolling through X and speaking with her aides in a car when she saw the digitally-created image. “I need to get this off my screen,” she recalled thinking before closing the page.

“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” she said. “As a survivor of physical sexual assault, it adds a level of dysregulation,” she said. “It resurfaces trauma, while I’m trying to — in the middle of a fucking meeting.” In 2021, AOC revealed that she was a survivor of sexual assault. The next year, she shared more information, telling people at an abortion-rights rally that when she was in her early 20s, she was raped by a man she was dating.

Ocasio-Cortez said seeing the image helped her understand that deepfaking is “not as imaginary as people want to make it seem.” Such images “don’t leave a person” she said, adding that “once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it.”

A 2019 study by Sensity AI found that 96 percent of deepfakes are pornographic and nearly all of them target women, affecting celebrities and nonfamous people. Deepfakes, Ocasio-Cortez said, “parallel the same exact intention of physical rape and sexual assault, [which] is about power, domination, and humiliation. Deepfakes are absolutely a way of digitizing violent humiliation against other people.”

Weeks after the incident, AOC announced that she would be leading a bipartisan effort to pass the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act of 2024 (DEFIANCE Act) — a piece of legislation aimed at ending nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes. “Victims of nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes have waited too long for federal legislation to hold perpetrators accountable,” AOC said. “Congress needs to act to show victims that they won’t be left behind.”