Advocate urges Alabama to make AI-generated sexual-image bills a legislative priority

Dr. Randy Brinson, president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, told the commission AI tools can generate sexual images of children in seconds and that the resulting synthetic images cause the same harms as real imagery. "The injury is not lessened because the image is synthetic," he said.

Brinson pointed to the federal Take It Down Act, signed in May 2025, as creating a minimum removal requirement for platforms and noted the law's removal obligations and recent enforcement letters from the Federal Trade Commission. He said the federal law does not reach developer liability for tools that generate such images and urged Alabama to act to close that gap.

He asked the commission to recommend that the legislature make HB314 (or its successor) a legislative priority and clarified that Representative Harris's HB347 — which passed one chamber in a prior session but ran out of calendar time — aimed to create a civil and criminal cause of action for developers who direct users to create exploitative material. Brinson also urged the commission to require robust statutory definitions that describe harmful conduct, to avoid obsolescence as tools change, and to build a reporting infrastructure (AG's office, ICAC task force) so officials can track incidents and produce annual statistics.

Brinson described a recent mobilization campaign with 260,000 unique website visitors and 10 million ad views to demonstrate constituent support and said a state cause of action would encourage platforms and developers to remove or disable harmful tools.

In follow-up discussion, commissioners asked whether prevention (design standards, age gating) or civil remedies would be more effective. Brinson said both approaches are complementary but that civil causes of action have repeatedly driven platform and developer behavior when properly enforced.