Other than vague slippery slope fearmongering I don’t see how banning the creation and distribution of deepfake porn is going to make AI monopolized corporations. If have your own personally trained and run AI model, you have complete control of what sort of content it’s generating. Why would you have issues with deepfake porn laws if you are not generating and hosting that content?

It just doesn’t add up, there’s some logical leap here that seems almost on the level of conspiracy theories. As much as governments do tend to favor corporations over regular people there is nothing so far even vaguely suggesting that AI would be so profoundly restricted that only corporations could use it. In fact, what has been described of what is proposed so far does not target the technology at all, only the users who engage in this kind of bad conduct.

But I profoundly disagree with this “nothing to be done about it”. How would fighting it be worse than letting people suffer for it? It’s not like drugs where the main person who might have issues is the user themselves, this affects unrelated vulnerable people.

If it is identified who is making deepfake porn and where it’s being hosted, it can be taken down. You could argue that not every single responsible person will be identified, but it might still be enough to diminish the prevalence and number of victims. And to the point that the remaining ones will have to be sneaky about it, that still might lead to less harassment to the victims.

You compare it to the war on drugs. Meanwhile I think of the rise of the automobile, with people crying that seat belts and traffic lights were ruining their freedom and “there’s nothing to be done” about people dying in car crashes.