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Law / United States / Mississippi

HB 1308 (2025), Morphed-Image Child Exploitation Amendments

Miss. Code Ann. §§ 97-5-31, 97-5-33, 97-5-35, 97-5-37 (as amended by HB 1308, 2025 Regular Session)

In force since .

An AI prohibited practices rule binding public and private bodies.

How the hook was established
express
What makes it apply
Content origin, Place of effect
Obligation class
Prohibition
Audit expectation
none
Setting the rule reaches
General

What it requires

  • Do not use any means, including a computer, to cause, depict, record, transport, sell, or knowingly possess a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct; this reaches a computer-generated or morphed image, and since 2025 no longer requires the depicted minor to be an identifiable real child.
  • Whether this statute reaches a depiction generated entirely by artificial intelligence with no real child's likeness at all is not resolved by its text; the offenses for transporting, selling, and possessing such a depiction are worded in terms of an actual child.

These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.

In the frameworks

NIST AI RMF
  • MAP 3.3Targeted application scope is specified and documented based on the system’s capability, established context, and AI system categorization.
NIST AI 600-1
MIT mitigations Draft
  • 1.5Safety Decision Frameworks
  • 3.3Access Management
FINOS AIGF
ETSI EN 304 223
  • 5.1.2-1Business need and security risks written down and assessed before deciding to build an AI system.
  • 5.1.4-5End-users told which uses of the system are prohibited.

Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law

Identifiers refer to ETSI EN 304 223 V2.1.1 (2025-12), © ETSI 2025, all rights reserved. ETSI owns the standard; no ETSI text (titles or sentences) is reproduced here. The standard is free to download from ETSI.

If you get it wrong

Criminal exposureYes

Criminal exposure note

A first conviction under Section 97-5-33 is a felony punishable by a fine of $50,000 to $500,000 and imprisonment of 5 to 40 years; a second or subsequent conviction is punishable by a fine of $100,000 to $1,000,000 and imprisonment of 20 years to life.

Penalty structure

First-offense range under Section 97-5-35: a fine of $50,000 to $500,000. A second or subsequent conviction escalates to a fine of $100,000 to $1,000,000, which this field does not carry separately.

Rule
Fixed only
As of
Minimum
50,000
Currency
USD
Fixed cap
500,000

Who enforces it

Settledness

As of
Open questions
Does the phrase 'an actual child' in Section 97-5-33(3) through (5) reach a visual depiction generated entirely by artificial intelligence with no identifiable or real child's likeness involved, given that Section 97-5-31(f)'s 2025-amended morphed image definition no longer requires the depicted minor to be identifiable?

What it makes you log

Logging duty

These sections criminalize producing, transporting, selling, and knowingly possessing a computer-generated or morphed depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; none of them imposes a duty to keep logs or records of such a depiction or of an investigation into one.

Kind
None
As of

What this law does

Drafted with AI

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page. How this site is made

Research summary

Legal information, not legal advice. This is LexLint's own research summary of a public legal source, and it creates no attorney-client relationship. For decisions that matter, consult qualified counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. About LexLint

Mississippi's child-exploitation statute already defined a morphed image to include a computer or computer-generated image or picture of sexually explicit conduct created, adapted, or modified to appear to depict a minor engaging in the conduct.

House Bill 1308 (2025), enacted primarily to create a new child-grooming offense, also amended Section 97-5-31 to remove the definition of identifiable child and to remove identifiable child in the definition of child and morphed images, so prosecuting a morphed-image offense no longer requires proof of the specific real-world identity of the depicted minor.

The underlying offenses that reach transporting, selling, and knowingly possessing such a depiction (Section 97-5-33(3) to (5)) are still worded in terms of an actual child, so whether a depiction generated entirely by artificial intelligence, with no real child's likeness involved at all, falls within them is not settled by the statute's text.

A first conviction under Section 97-5-33 is a felony punishable by a fine of $50,000 to $500,000 and imprisonment of 5 to 40 years; a second or subsequent conviction is punishable by a fine of $100,000 to $1,000,000 and imprisonment of 20 years to life. Signed by the Governor , effective .

When LexLint raises it

When your app profile says your app generates images with AI, generates video with AI or publishes adult content.

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