Congress Must Act on Regulating Deepfakes

An A.I. policy expert on the desperate need for a new law that will seek to protect Americans from manipulated video

Mutale Nkonde
OneZero

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Deepfake Mark Zuckerberg. Credit: Bill Posters on Instagram

LLast week a bill l have been working on for the last eight months was introduced to the House of Representatives. The Deepfakes Accountability Act seeks to protect the lives of everyday Americans by giving us control of our online image. But what are deepfakes?

Deepfake video is the latest advancement in visual manipulation technologies, but it is not new as it seems — computer scientists note that the first mass-market visual modification technology was actually Photoshop, which was originally released in 1990. But what makes deepfakes different is that they are produced using open source A.I. software, combining facial mapping and audio augmentation to create a completely new property. The videos produced in this way place people in places they have never been, saying things they have never said.

If someone were to make deepfake pornographic content of me, it would undermine public trust and derail my career.

The emergence of deepfakes was brought to public attention by Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson when an online deepfake…

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Mutale Nkonde
OneZero

Mutale is an AI Governance Expert, Co Author on the Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech report, Berkman Klein Fellow follow me on @mutalenkonde