Companion legislation House Bill 2551 and Senate Bill 1108 augments Section 21.165 of Penal Code to broaden the application of offenses that can be brought when perpetrators produce or distribute sexually explicit deep fake content without the
effective consent of the individual being depicted. Existing statute covers deep fake videos which depict a person with their intimate parts exposed or engaged in sexual conduct; these bills expand to cover all visual material, as defined by Section 43.26 (b) (3) of Penal Code. Specifically, this would extend protections for “any film, photograph, videotape, negative, or slide or any photographic reproduction that contains or incorporates in any manner any film, photograph, videotape, negative, or slide…or any disk, diskette, or other physical medium that allows an image to be displayed on a computer or other video screen and any image transmitted to a computer or other video screen by telephone line, cable, satellite transmission, or other method.”