A deep fake is a picture or video of someone doing or saying something they didn’t. In the old days pictures and video were considered “proof”, it was easy to tell if they had been altered, as with the laughable removal of out-of-favour leaders from Soviet pictures.

With the advent of useful “AI’ making deepfakes has become easy, and it is destroying one of the ways we know the truth. In addition it is putting people into positions they never took, having them say things they did not say and so forth. The common general use is for pornography, but putting words into someone’s mouth is potentially just as bad.

The law will need to be changed to deal with this.

  1. Making a deep fake of someone without their legal authorization must be both a criminal and civil offense, with jail time, not just fines, since in fines don’t work if someone expects to make more money than the cost of the fine.
  2. Consent must be active. No contracts of adhesion, never in a EULA, always requiring an individual specific contract which is compensated.
  3. No long term contracts. Five years at most; nothing which is open-ended or forever.
  4. If required for employment, this cannot last longer than the employment without a separate contract signed after the person is no longer employed. Some exceptions may be put in place for actors and whatnot.
  5. All deep fakes must prominently say, in a way that cannot be missed (no fine print or credits) that they are deep fakes, probably a banner at the top or bottom of every part of the video where they appear, except in movies and tv shows, but even then they must start with a prominent announcement and end with one.
  6. Ideally, though unlikely in the current environment, a person should receive a payment every time the deep fake is shown, there should not just be a one time fee. This should be done similarly to the residuals or radio play laws of the late 20th century. There are some technological hurdles to this, but they are not insurmountable.
  7. This must apply to dead people as well. Either the estate’s approval must be given and a contract signed, or people must have been dead a long time, perhaps fifty years and the requirement for a prominent disclosure that what is being seen is a deep fake.
  8. Anyone who uses a deep fake must keep the disclosure that it is a fake.

We have been very bad about law keeping up with technology, and when we have not (as with the DMCA) we have mostly created very bad law. It would be nice, for once, to get on something in a timely and fair manner.

If you think there are any other ways the law should be formatted, or if you disagree, says so in comments, with your reasoning.

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