Jim VandeHei: Writing with AI

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Paris Hilton is sounding the alarm about explicit AI-generated images that she says could “ruin someone’s life,” shining a star-powered light on one of the darkest corners of the internet.

“Searching for Mr. Deepfakes,” Hilton’s new true crime docuseries, just debuted  exclusively on her TikTok channel . The series, shared in rapid-fire videos built for a younger-skewing social media audience who “wouldn’t have watched a long-form documentary,” details a years-long investigation launched by tech journalist Laurie Segall to track down the anonymous owner of an AI-generated pornography site called Mr. Deepfakes.

Hilton told ITK in an exclusive interview that, using AI technology, “people can just take a photo — a family photo, a Christmas photo, anything — and literally turn it into an explicit image or video.”

“It could happen to literally anyone who puts their image online,” she warned.

Segall said after getting a tip about the site and taking a look, “There were thousands of videos of women — AI-generated but who didn’t consent — doing sexual, graphic things they had never done.”

Hilton’s image was among the multitude of women featured on the site — but they weren’t all famous faces.

“They said it was ‘public women,’ but ‘public’ was a very loose definition. I just remember looking at this and saying, ‘How on earth does this exist?’” exclaimed Segall.

“There was nothing these women could do, because they would try to contact the owner of the site, and it was anonymous,” added Segall, the CEO of Mostly Human Media.

“Some of these look very realistic,” Hilton said, “so it’s just completely frightening.”

It’s an issue, Hilton said, that’s “deeply personal” for her.

The TV personality has been open about what happened to her in 2003, when an intimate video of her was shared on the internet without her consent. It was an experience that she said has significantly impacted her work today.

“It took me 20 years to be able to speak about it out loud, because when you go through something, it’s so traumatizing that you just don’t even want to think it’s real. You just don’t even want to remember it, speak about it, and there’s also a huge shame behind it,” she said.

“As a 19-year-old teenager when this happened, there was no technology to even describe it. There were no laws to protect me,” Hilton said.

Now, the business and media maven and former reality TV star is aiming to change that. She’s  made multiple high-profile  trips to  Capitol Hill in recent years, uniting typically bitterly divided lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

In January , the 45-year-old mother of two touted the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act. The bipartisan legislation would allow victims of nonconsensual deepfake pornography to sue individuals who produce and distribute the AI-generated content. She also pointed to  the passage  of the Take It Down Act, signed into law last year by President Trump. The bipartisan legislation, championed by first lady Melania Trump, enacts stricter penalties for the distribution of nonconsensual intimate images and AI-generated deepfakes.

“I’ve helped pass three federal bills and 16 state laws to protect children, and I really feel that this is my true purpose in life and my legacy,” Hilton said.

“That’s why I keep coming back to D.C. all the time, because I know when I come there, I really can make a huge difference in people’s lives.”

Proponents urging lawmakers to “catch up” to the explicit deepfake issue with legislation originally faced an uphill battle, Segall said, because there was neither public pressure nor “an acceptance that this was real abuse.”

“People would say, ‘Oh, but the images aren’t real. It doesn’t matter,'” she recalled.

Meantime, many victims Segall spoke with were left devastated.

“I had one woman tell me it ruined her life. She literally walked up to her rooftop and considered ending her life. Another woman said it impacted the way she walked in the world — she didn’t trust anybody anymore,” the investigative reporter said.

“This digital abuse was real abuse, and so I thought, from a cultural standpoint, we need to get folks talking about this, and from a legal standpoint, we need to push the laws to catch up with the technology and the impact,” Segall said.

Hilton has said before that she’s often told when she touches down in Washington that she gets more done than the government. Asked what the secret is to lobbying lawmakers to take action, she replied, “When I go in there, I’m going as myself with someone with lived experience, and I also bring other survivors.”

“I make sure that I let everyone know and I let the whole entire world know, so it’s something that they cannot ignore.”

“That’s why I think that I’ve been able to pass so many bills and so many laws so quickly. When I’ve heard of others trying, and they say, ‘I’ve been going back [to Washington] for 10, 15 years, and I still have not passed this…