In most of the world, authorities can’t do much about it. Even as the software grows more sophisticated and accessible, few laws exist to manage its spread.
“The AI scene is an interesting place for global politics, because countries are competing with one another on who’s going to set the tone,” said Ravit Dotan, a postdoctoral researcher who runs the Collaborative AI Responsibility Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. “We know that laws are coming, but we don’t know what they are yet, so there’s a lot of unpredictability.”
The increasing volume of deepfakes could lead to a situation where “citizens no longer have a shared reality, or could create societal confusion about which information sources are reliable; a situation sometimes referred to as ‘information apocalypse’ or ‘reality apathy'” the European law enforcement agency Europol wrote in a report last year.
“Many of the sophisticated civil societies recognise how this can be weaponised and destructive,” she said, adding that the United States should be bolder in setting its own standards rather than trailing another front-runner. Only a handful of other states, including New York, restrict deepfake pornography. While running for reelection in 2019, Houston’s mayor said a critical ad from a fellow candidate broke a Texas law that bans certain misleading political deepfakes.