PHOENIX — A bill advancing rapidly through the Arizona state legislature would impose new requirements for adult content uploaded online, including seemingly contradictory provisions that could effectively make it impossible for adult sites to operate in the state.
Riding the current legislative trend aimed at addressing AI-generated nonconsensual intimate images, Arizona’s HB 2133, titled the “Protect Act,” seeks to ensure that nude or sexual depictions of individuals, including those generated by AI, cannot be posted without each depicted person’s consent. However, the bill also includes new verification and consent requirements for adult websites.
Under those requirements, adult sites would be required to use “reasonable consent verification methods” to ensure that any individual depicted in sexual material has provided consent. Importantly, it would also require sites to maintain records of such verification for at least seven years, for potential inspection by the state attorney general.
The potential “catch-22” for adult businesses is that the bill defines “reasonable consent verification methods” as including “(i) An affidavit that attests to the consent and age of each depicted person. (ii) A verification through an independent third party. (iii) Any other commercially reasonable method that does not retain identifying information after the verification is complete.”
Since affidavits generally require notarization, the first option would likely prove prohibitively burdensome for all parties involved. Meanwhile, the second and third options seem directly to contradict the requirement to maintain verification records.
Free Speech Coalition Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile told XBIZ, “It gives us three options for compliance, none of which make any sense. We either have to get notary documents or work through third parties or other methods that don’t keep information — even though we later have to have that information to prove we verified.”
FSC previously sounded the alarm about the bill, likening it to other “consent minefields” such as North Carolina’s “Prevent Sexual Exploitation of Women and Minors Act,” which effectively invalidates model contracts, and Alabama’s HB 164, which — like the Arizona bill — mandates that model releases must be notarized.
Should the bill become law, sites that fail to obtain “verified” consent would be subject to a civil penalty of $10,000 per day, plus damages and attorney fees.
The bill has now passed the Arizona House of Representatives, and has been transmitted to the state Senate.
