Copyright Laws Can Stop Deepfakes

The U.S. should give its residents rights to their own face and voice

- 

GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL intelligence can now counterfeit reality at an industrial scale. Deepfakes—photographs, videos and audio tracks that use AI to create convincing but entirely fabricated representations of people or events—aren’t just an Internet content problem; they are a social-order problem. The power of AI to create words and images that seem real but aren't threatens society, critical thinking and civilizational stability. A society that doesn’t know what is real cannot self-govern.

We need laws that prioritize human dignity and protect democracy. Denmark is setting the example. In June the Danish government proposed an amendment to its copyright law that would give people rights to their own face and voice. It would prohibit the creation of deepfakes of a person without their consent, and it would impose consequences on those who violate this rule. It would legally enshrine the principle that you own you.

What makes Denmark’s approach powerful is the corporate fear of copyright-infringement legalities. In a study uploaded to preprint server arXiv.org in 2024, researchers posted 50 nude deepfakes on X and reported them to the platform in two ways: 25 as copyright complaints and 25 as nonconsensual nudity under X’s policies. X quickly removed the copyright claims but took down none of the intimate-privacy violations. Legal rights got action; privacy didn't.