Depending on your perspective, generative AI might be the key to a bold technological future or an unsettling tipping point into the devaluation of art and the violation of countless ethics. And while there have been some high-profile efforts to reduce the potential of abuse in this technology such as the recent SAG strike, there’s still a lot of concern about what AI might do for the lives and livelihoods of countless creative professionals.
It’s in the spirit of addressing these concerns that a trio of U.S. Senators recently introduced a bill that, if signed into law, would take promising steps to regulate what could and could not be done with AI. The bill, known as the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act of 2024’ — COPIED Act for short — is the work of Senators Marsha Blackburn, Maria Cantwell and Martin Heinrich.
The bill seeks to bring clarity and transparency to the inner workings of AI. The bill goes on to cite “the journalists, publishers, broadcasters, and artists whose content is used to train these systems and is manipulated to produce synthetic content and synthetically-modified content that competes unfairly in the digital marketplace with covered content.”
“Artificial intelligence has given bad actors the ability to create deepfakes of every individual, including those in the creative community, to imitate their likeness without their consent and profit off of counterfeit content,” Senator Blackwell said in a statement announcing the bill and explaining her support of it.
Deepfakes Are on Reality TV Now. What Could Go Wrong?
The creators say this could make the internet more “human.” Critics disagree.“The COPIED Act will also put creators, including local journalists, artists and musicians, back in control of their content with a provenance and watermark process that I think is very much needed,” Senator Cantwell said.
As Engadget’s Danny Gallagher pointed out in an article about the bill, the COPIED Act has the support of a number of high-profile industry organizations, including SAG-AFTRA and the National Newspaper Association. Whether that will give it enough momentum to get it signed into law remains to be seen — though the bipartisan nature of the bill seems like a promising start.
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