Spurred by the rising menace of deepfakes, the FTC is searching for to modify an current rule that bans the impersonation of companies or authorities companies to cowl all shoppers.
The revised rule — relying on the ultimate language, and the general public feedback that the FTC receives — may also make it illegal for a GenAI platform to offer items or providers that they know or have purpose to know is getting used to hurt shoppers by impersonation.
“Fraudsters are using AI tools to impersonate individuals with eerie precision and at a much wider scale,” FTC chair Lina Khan mentioned in a press launch. “With voice cloning and other AI-driven scams on the rise, protecting Americans from impersonator fraud is more critical than ever. Our proposed expansions to the final impersonation rule would do just that, strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to address AI-enabled scams impersonating individuals.”
It’s not simply people like Taylor Swift who’ve to fret about deepfakes. On-line romance scams involving deepfakes are on the rise. And scammers are impersonating employees to extract money from companies.
In a current poll from YouGov, 85% of People mentioned that they have been very involved or considerably involved in regards to the unfold of deceptive video and audio deepfakes. A separate survey from The Related Press-NORC Heart for Public Affairs Analysis discovered that just about 60% of adults assume AI instruments will enhance the unfold of false and deceptive data in the course of the 2024 U.S. election cycle.
Final week, my colleague Devin Coldewey covered the FCC’s transfer to make AI-voiced robocalls unlawful by reinterpreting an current rule that prohibits synthetic and pre-recorded message spam. Well timed in mild of a cellphone marketing campaign that employed a deepfaked President Biden to discourage New Hampshire residents from voting, the rule change — and the FTC’s step at this time — are the present extent of the federal authorities’s struggle towards deepfakes and deepfaking expertise.
No federal legislation squarely bans deepfakes. Excessive-profile victims like celebrities can theoretically flip to extra conventional current authorized cures to struggle again, together with copyright legislation, likeness rights and torts (e.g. invasion of privateness, intentional infliction of emotional misery). However these patchwork legal guidelines will be time-consuming — and laborious — to litigate.
Within the absence of Congressional motion, ten states across the nation have enacted statutes criminalizing deepfakes — albeit largely non-consensual porn. Little question, we’ll see these legal guidelines amended to embody a wider array of deepfakes — and extra state-level legal guidelines handed — as deepfake-generating instruments develop more and more refined. (Working example, Minnesota’s legislation already targets deepfakes utilized in political campaigning.)
