The White House announcement was part of a broader campaign against image-based sexual abuse of children as well as the creation of intimate AI deepfake images of adults without their consent.
Such images have “skyrocketed, disproportionately targeting women, children, and LGBTQI+ people, and emerging as one of the fastest growing harmful uses of AI to date,” said a statement from the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Joining the tech companies for part of the pledge was Common Crawl, a repository of data constantly trawled from the open internet that's a key source used to train AI chatbots and image-generators. It committed more broadly to responsibly sourcing its datasets and safeguarding them from image-based sexual abuse.
In a separate pledge Thursday, another group of companies — among them Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok — announced a set of voluntary principles to prevent image-based sexual abuse. The announcements were tied to the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act.