Spurred by the rising risk of deepfakes, the FTC is looking for to modify an current rule that bans the impersonation of companies or authorities businesses 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 supply items or companies that they know or have cause to know are getting used to hurt shoppers by way of impersonation.
“Fraudsters are utilizing AI instruments to impersonate people with eerie precision and at a a lot wider scale,” FTC chair Lina Khan mentioned in a press launch. “With voice cloning and different AI-driven scams on the rise, defending Individuals from impersonator fraud is extra essential than ever. Our proposed expansions to the ultimate impersonation rule would do exactly that, strengthening the FTC’s toolkit to handle AI-enabled scams impersonating people.”
It’s not simply of us like Taylor Swift who’ve to fret about deepfakes. On-line romance scams involving deepfakes are on the rise. And scammers are impersonating staff to extract money from companies.
In a current ballot from YouGov, 85% of Individuals mentioned they had been very involved or considerably involved concerning 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 info throughout the 2024 U.S. election cycle.
Final week, my colleague Devin Coldewey coated 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 right now — are the present extent of the federal authorities’s combat towards deepfakes and deepfaking know-how.
No federal legislation squarely bans deepfakes. Excessive-profile victims like celebrities can theoretically flip to extra conventional current authorized treatments to combat again, together with copyright legislation, likeness rights and torts (e.g. invasion of privateness, intentional infliction of emotional misery). However these patchwork legal guidelines may be time-consuming — and laborious — to litigate.
Within the absence of congressional motion, 10 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.)
