Paris Hilton Warns Capitol Hill AI Deepfakes Put Girls at Risk: ‘This Was Abuse’ — a Wake-Up Call for Parents
Any time Paris Hilton shares a slice of mom life — whether it’s her daughter London proving she can “walk better in heels than mommy” or her son Phoenix melting down on It’s a Small World at Disneyland — it’s proof she’s still “sliving” as a mom. But last week, she took to the public for something much more serious for parents: warning that non-consensual AI deepfake porn puts girls at risk, and pushing Congress to act.
Hilton headed to Capitol Hill on Jan. 22 with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) to push the bipartisan DEFIANCE Act, which cleared the Senate last week. In plain terms, it gives victims of nonconsensual, sexually explicit AI deepfakes a way to sue the creators and distributors.
Hilton grounded the issue in her own history. “When I was 19 years old, a private, intimate video of me was shared with the world without my consent,” she said, recalling a sex tape she said she was “coerced” into doing at age 19. “People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse,” she said, per HuffPost. She also described the early-2000s media pile-on and the lack of legal language at the time, saying there “weren’t even words” for what had happened to her.
Her point on Thursday: the scale has changed. Hilton called AI-generated pornography an “epidemic,” and said there are more than 100,000 sexually explicit deepfakes of her online, none created with her consent. “No amount of money or lawyers” is enough to protect victims anymore, she said.
The timing is not accidental. The Senate’s move came as lawmakers and regulators weigh how quickly explicit deepfakes spread on major platforms, including recent controversies tied to X’s Grok. Ocasio-Cortez framed the issue as a form of digital abuse that hits women and minors hardest. And there’s research behind that: a 2019 analysis from Sensity/DeepTrace found that 96% of deepfake videos online were pornographic, and reporting on that same dataset notes that about 90% of the people targeted were women — and that was before the advent of Sora and ChatGPT.
For parents, the practical takeaway is simple and unglamorous: a public photo can be downloaded and manipulated. The “new birds-and-bees talk” involves treating AI-edited imagery and digital consent as part of baseline safety conversations, alongside privacy settings and family device rules. Child safety watchdogs like National Center for Missing & Exploited Children have also documented a sharp rise in reports tied to generative AI and child sexual exploitation, emphasizing how fast this problem is moving.
Hilton closed her remarks with a statement of purpose: “Telling the truth has helped me heal… I will keep telling the truth to protect every woman, every girl, every survivor.”
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