Minnesota AI nudification ban holds, but the images stay up

A federal judge in the District of Minnesota has denied a US AI company's request for a preliminary injunction against a state law banning AI nudification tools, according to a report. It is the second refusal in the case, following a denied temporary restraining order in late July. The law remains in effect while the challenge proceeds.

The statute, effective from August, prohibits creating fake nude images of identifiable people using AI, bars website operators and software developers from enabling that use, and forbids advertising such tools. The company filed suit in July arguing the law is overbroad and content based, and that it restricts constitutionally protected speech, while stating that it already prohibits non consensual nude generation internally.

What was and was not decided

This matters, because these rulings are routinely reported as more final than they are.

A denied preliminary injunction means the law is not blocked while the case continues. It is not a ruling that the statute is constitutional, and the challenge has not concluded. It also applies in one state.

For anyone whose likeness has been misused, that last point is the practical one. The internet does not organise itself by state line, and a person's audience is almost never confined to one jurisdiction.

Why legislation keeps arriving late

Laws in this area are being written after the harm has become common, which is normal and largely unavoidable. Legislatures move at the speed of legislatures. Tools move at the speed of software releases.

There is also a structural mismatch that no drafting can fix. A statute is designed to attach consequences to conduct. It operates on people, through courts, over long periods. The harm here is a file existing on servers, being copied, indexed and redistributed by parties who may be in other countries and who may never be identified.

Those are different objects. One is a person's behaviour. The other is a piece of data. A law can be extremely well written and still leave the data exactly where it is.

The distance nobody talks about

For a person who finds synthetic intimate imagery of themselves online, the sequence usually goes something like this. Shock. Then research. Then the discovery that there may be a law that covers it, which briefly feels like relief. Then the slower realisation that the law does not do anything on its own, and that having a right is not the same as having a remedy.

That distance, between the wrong being recognised and the material actually coming down, is where the damage continues to accumulate. It is also the part that gets the least attention, because it is procedural and unglamorous and does not make headlines.

What actually helps

Removal is a separate activity from legal vindication, and it has its own requirements.

It has to reach the host. Getting a page delisted from search results hides it from people searching for it and leaves it fully accessible to anyone with the link.

It has to be persistent. This category of material is copied and reposted, and a single successful removal is not an end state.

It has to be sustainable for the person involved. Doing this yourself means repeatedly encountering the material, which is a real cost that is rarely acknowledged.

How Ceartas handles it

Ceartas does the removal work so the person affected does not have to. We locate where the material is being hosted, we pursue removal with the parties actually holding it on a legal or policy basis, and we continue monitoring so that reappearances are caught and pursued again.

We do not promise that it disappears overnight, because how quickly something comes down depends on third parties processing a valid request. What we commit to is immediate initiation and persistent follow up until it is gone and stays gone.

Minnesota's law survived a serious, well funded challenge, and that is genuinely worth something. It establishes that this conduct is wrong. Establishing that it is wrong and getting it offline remain two separate pieces of work.

If fakes of you are already online, see how our deepfake removal service finds them and requests removal at the host.

This story is part of our deepfake laws and cases tracker, which follows every new law, ruling and platform move on the topic.