A Northern Kentucky lawmaker’s bill to outlaw computer-generated child pornography and child sex dolls in the commonwealth passed the Kentucky House on a bipartisan vote Monday.
Rep. Stephanie Dietz (R-Edgewood) is the lead sponsor of House Bill 207, passed on a 93-0 vote Monday. The bill would add creating or promoting a “digitization,” or computer-generated sexual images of children (including those generated by AI or artificial intelligence), to the definition of a felony sex crime in Kentucky law. Possessing, selling, transporting or allowing the use of child sex dolls would also be a felony sex crime, should the bill become law.
Adults convicted of a sex crime in Kentucky have their name added to a public sex offender registry. The registry is searchable by employers, family, friends, neighbors and anyone else. State law also limits where a sex offender can live (for example, sex offenders in Kentucky cannot live near schools, child daycare centers or playgrounds ).
HB 207 now goes to the Senate for its consideration.
Child sex doll legislation was first introduced by Dietz in 2023 (HB 182) shortly after she was elected to her first term in office, although that bill was never heard in committee. In a House Judiciary Committee hearing on HB 207 Friday, Dietz said she initially filed sex doll legislation at the request of Kenton Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders. The intent, Dietz said, is to give law enforcement probable cause for sex offender searches.
“In short, possession of an anatomically correct child sex doll is not illegal in Kentucky and therefore cannot be used as probable cause (to search someone’s property) for further child pornography,” Dietz said Friday.
Attorney General Russell Coleman’s office worked with Dietz on the child sex doll provisions in HB 207 this year. In committee testimony alongside Dietz Friday, the Attorney General’s Deputy Commissioner for Counter Exploitation Jeremy Murrell said, “there is no question, no gray area, or what this type of doll is made for and used for ” when found by law enforcement.
“We believe the legislation closes a current loophole dealing with child sex dolls, and also gives prosecutors and law enforcement officers new tools to deal with a new trend in child sex abuse material,” Murrell told lawmakers.
The AI component was added to the bill this year. AI software allows the creation of “deep fake” sexual imagery through tools like face swapping and computer-generated likeness in photos and videos, Kentucky State Police Lieutenant and E-crimes branch commander Mike Bowling told the House Judiciary Committee in his testimony Friday.
Nude images can also be created from scratch by using text prompts to generate hairstyles, body type, “whatever you want,” Bowling said.
Deep fake images are especially harmful to the mental health of school children and other young people who are common targets, Bowling said.
“With the deep fakes, you have the psychological impact of our school kids,” Bowling told the committee. “Child sex abuse victims, known victims, are now being revictimized” by these images, he said.
House approval of HB 207 Monday comes just days after a federal charge of distributing child sexual abuse material was filed against a Louisville school teacher by the U.S. Attorney of the Western District of Kentucky last Friday. Jordan A. Fautz, 39, is accused of distributing child sexual abuse material to an undercover officer while he was employed as a 7th and 8th-grade religion teacher at St. Stephen Martyr Catholic School in Louisville in December 2023 and January 2024.
“Certain (of these) materials had been manipulated by morphing or photoshopping original child sexual abuse materials with other, non-explicit images of minors,” according to a Friday news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “For example, in one such instance, the nude image of a minor victim depicted her face transposed by means of photoshop or morphing technology onto a different nude female’s body, effectively generating child sexual abuse material.”
The FBI Louisville Field Office is currently trying to identify potential victims of Fautz, according to Friday’s announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Attorney General Coleman thanked the House for approving HB 207 in a Monday press release, calling the vote a “unanimous step toward protecting our children from exploitation.”
“We must stop this evil here,” Coleman said. “Law enforcement and prosecutors must have innovative tools to take on criminals who prey on our kids with AI-generated child sex abuse material and sickening child sex dolls. If we don’t, these predators are likely to escalate to the hands-on sexual abuse of children.”