Denmark Proposes Protection for All Citizens Against AI "Deepfakes"

Denmark has floated a bill that would allow any person – not just celebrities – to demand the takedown of AI-generated forgeries featuring their likeness.  Most countries allow the famous to police use of their image because it features into their livelihood and brand; “regular” people who do not make money off their image frequently have no ready recourse against use of their image.  The proposed law would permit any citizen to have forged images of themselves removed from the internet.  The law would do this by amending Danish copyright law to allow such self-enforcement.

WHY IT MATTERS

Anyone who has ever tried to get hurtful or harmful content taken down from Facebook or other social media platforms knows that the process is tedious at best, and often not very successful.  Unless the content presents a clear violation of the platform's self-declared “standards of use,” most users have no immediate or reliable recourse against even defamatory or misleading information.  Think about disgruntled customers or former employees who leave fake reviews about a business; or exes who post "revenge porn."  Although the “revenge porn” type posts usually do violate a site's standards, fake reviews generally do not.  Even when a platform agrees to remove a post, however, users generally have to report every instance of the offending content and keep having it taken down: they are required to engage in a game of whac-a-mole to keep offensive content from being re-posted.  An approach such as Denmark is proposing, in which platforms are responsible for responding to take-down requests from ordinary users, could flip this routine on its head.  Of course, it would still not be useful against material such as fake reviews, unless they contained deepfake imagery.  But it would be the start of an interesting conversation – about whether each of us has the right to control our identity, in an age when defamation laws, privacy laws, and copyright laws arguably do not keep up with mischief-makers online.