Bill to protect students from being exploited by deepfakes advances

Published: April 25, 2026

By: Kylah Babin, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — The Senate Education Committee unanimously advanced a bill on Wednesday that would strive to protect children from deepfakes and other scenarios where their character could be damaged by improper use of artificial intelligence.

Sen. Regina Barrow, D-Baton Rouge, proposed Senate Bill 346, which would prohibit the use of deepfakes against students enrolled in K-12. The deepfakes would include any audio or visual content that would be altered to falsely portray a student.

The bill was inspired by a story last November from Lafourche Parish, where a 13-year-old girl was expelled from school for hitting a classmate who made a deepfake porn image of her.

“I was so heartbroken when I heard her story because in all the ways she cried out for help, she didn’t get help until she responded,” Barrow said, referring to the girl’s attack on her classmate. “Not that we actually condoned that type of behavior, but it should never have ruled to that level in the first place.”