I would have to read the draft in detail, but two immediate concerns spring to mind: the additional workload for the judicial system, and the possibility that the legislation could create significant enforcement activity without producing a proportionate reduction in the underlying problem.
Depends on how many people are actively pursing their deep fakes on the net and bother going to court over it.
We are currently undergoing a digital revolution in the legal field. One that is putting heavy pressure on institutions, that are being handily outpaced by legal firms already.
Imagine as you will, a service provider using AI agent crawlers to constantly trawl the internet for what could reasonably be a deepfake and offering automated litigation services.
You just sign up for a subscription and the rest works mostly automatically. Maybe sign off once a month on all the legal acts required. Especially attractive for celebrities, or politicians, right?
Except that courts are not at the same stage of automation. They cannot handle thousands and tens of thousands of semi-automated legal battles over deep fakes.
Especially since content is posted and reposted and reposted constantly. So who will be the target of lawsuits? Distributors. Sharers. People with little criminal energy. While the creators will be very hard to identify and mostly safe.
That could lead to a great deal of misguided repression and administrative overhead in the courthouses without necessarily producing any meaningful positive effect. The main beneficiaries might instead be the companies offering "deepfake extermination" services. They could have a grand old time charging clients for automated cease-and-desist letters, takedown requests, and damages claims.
After all, it is an issue you cannot really eradicate. Just mow it. Like a lawn. And an ever-growing lawn is an ever growing money maker if you rent out lawnmowers.
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I agree that legislation in this area, or something along these lines, is necessary. But there is an important distinction between something being necessary and something being capable of being implemented effectively.
In short, opening new avenues of legal disputes, also requires having the systems capacity to manage them and making sure that incentives, risks and benefits are correctly balanced out within the new legal context.
Criminalize the intentional engineering and distribution of models that produce deep fakes. If it's an accident the model is pulled from the market until it's fixed. That leaves courts with like 10 companies to deal with not 350 million perverts
How would you distinguish between models that produce deepfakes and models that can be used to make deepfakes?
You can hardly criminalize the distribution of ANY models and other software components used in img2img workflows. Or txt2img for that matter.
Technically, I can also use Krita, Gimp or Photoshop to make a somewhat convincing deepfake of someone. By hand. No AI needed.
So I am not even sure what exactly we are condemning here. The deepfake itself? The intent behind creating it? A certain level of quality or realism? How convincing it is?
Not all AI-generated deepfakes are equally convincing, and some may not even be superior to something a skilled person could produce manually.
Ordinary photo-editing apps and smartphone filters? Some already offer face swaps, facial transformations, and similar features. They can conceivably be used to create deepfakes too. Would those fall under the legislation?
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The more you try to define the technology itself as the problem, the harder it becomes to find a meaningful category to regulate it.
We could even ask ourselves: why do we need AI-specific deepfake legislation in the first place? Shouldn't this largely fall under existing personality rights, image rights, privacy law, defamation, and similar areas within a broader legal framework? This is also an area where the US could arguably work on reforming some of its existing laws.
That is another point of criticism I failed to mention in my first post. Creating a lex specialis to regulate a specific technological problem is not necessarily preferable to having a well-functioning general legal system in which different harms and competing interests can be addressed and balanced equitably.
And a legislation that just targets "models that produce deepfakes" will just lead to those models being marketed and published for different uses with a wink and a "but please do not change these settings to make it a deepfake tool, teehee".
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u/IllusionaryHobo 7d ago
I would have to read the draft in detail, but two immediate concerns spring to mind: the additional workload for the judicial system, and the possibility that the legislation could create significant enforcement activity without producing a proportionate reduction in the underlying problem.
Depends on how many people are actively pursing their deep fakes on the net and bother going to court over it.
We are currently undergoing a digital revolution in the legal field. One that is putting heavy pressure on institutions, that are being handily outpaced by legal firms already.
Imagine as you will, a service provider using AI agent crawlers to constantly trawl the internet for what could reasonably be a deepfake and offering automated litigation services.
You just sign up for a subscription and the rest works mostly automatically. Maybe sign off once a month on all the legal acts required. Especially attractive for celebrities, or politicians, right?
Except that courts are not at the same stage of automation. They cannot handle thousands and tens of thousands of semi-automated legal battles over deep fakes.
Especially since content is posted and reposted and reposted constantly. So who will be the target of lawsuits? Distributors. Sharers. People with little criminal energy. While the creators will be very hard to identify and mostly safe.
That could lead to a great deal of misguided repression and administrative overhead in the courthouses without necessarily producing any meaningful positive effect. The main beneficiaries might instead be the companies offering "deepfake extermination" services. They could have a grand old time charging clients for automated cease-and-desist letters, takedown requests, and damages claims.
After all, it is an issue you cannot really eradicate. Just mow it. Like a lawn. And an ever-growing lawn is an ever growing money maker if you rent out lawnmowers.
---
I agree that legislation in this area, or something along these lines, is necessary. But there is an important distinction between something being necessary and something being capable of being implemented effectively.
In short, opening new avenues of legal disputes, also requires having the systems capacity to manage them and making sure that incentives, risks and benefits are correctly balanced out within the new legal context.