On LinkedIn, her mother, Dorota Mani—who has been working with the governor’s office on a commission to protect kids from online harms—thanked lawmakers like Murphy and former New Jersey Assemblyman Herb Conaway, who sponsored the law, for “standing with us.”
“When used maliciously, deepfake technology can dismantle lives, distort reality, and exploit the most vulnerable among us,” Conaway said. “I’m proud to have sponsored this legislation when I was still in the Assembly, as it will help us keep pace with advancing technology. This is about drawing a clear line between innovation and harm. It’s time we take a firm stand to protect individuals from digital deception, ensuring that AI serves to empower our communities.”
Doing nothing is no longer an option for schools, teen says
Around the country, as cases like Mani’s continue to pop up, experts expect that shame prevents most victims from coming forward to flag abuses, suspecting that the problem is much more widespread than media reports suggest.
Encode Justice has a tracker monitoring reported cases involving minors, including allowing victims to anonymously report harms around the US. But the true extent of the harm currently remains unknown, as cops warn of a flood of AI child sex images obscuring investigations into real-world child abuse.
Confronting this shadowy threat to kids everywhere, Mani was named as one of TIME’s most influential people in AI last year due to her advocacy fighting deepfakes. She’s not only pressured lawmakers to take strong action to protect vulnerable people, but she’s also pushed for change at tech companies and in schools nationwide.
“When that happened to me and my classmates, we had zero protection whatsoever,” Mani told TIME, and neither did other girls around the world who had been targeted and reached out to thank her for fighting for them. “There were so many girls from different states, different countries. And we all had three things in common: the lack of AI school policies, the lack of laws, and the disregard of consent.”
