The government in Denmark wants to protect citizens from deepfake images by giving them more control over their own likenesses, expanding copyright law in a pioneering measure that would allow people to demand that social media platforms take down digital forgeries.
Deepfake technology, which uses A.I. tools to create ultrarealistic images, videos or audio that appear to be actual people, is rapidly improving, leaving the images much harder to spot than ever.
Authorities in the United States and around the world are quickly imposing new rules in a struggle to catch up with the technology, which has legitimate uses but has also been widely adopted to make nonconsensual pornography, to run scams and to spread disinformation.
Existing laws are largely intended to crack down on the harms caused by the technology, typically by using the criminal code. The Danish bill would take a new tack, experts said, by amending copyright law to make it illegal to share most deepfake images of another person without their consent.
Jakob Engel-Schmidt, the Danish culture minister, said, “Technology has outpaced our current legislation.” The bill, he added, is an effort to “secure fundamental rights” as the digital age tests the boundaries of personal privacy.
There is also hope among the bill’s backers that it could be a test case for the rest of the European Union, the presidency of which Denmark has just assumed.
The bill went into a public comment period this week. It has the support of most political parties in Denmark and is widely expected to become law after the Danish Parliament considers it around the turn of the year.
Mr. Engel-Schmidt said that the proposed law would give people “the right to your own voice, your own facial features, and no one can copy that without your consent.”
The Danish government argues that the prevailing legal approach to deepfake technology — which focuses on trying to regulate specific nefarious uses, such as pornography or misinformation — forces governments into a reactive, defensive crouch. As the technology improves, new harms could easily appear.
Denmark is trying to be proactive. The new law would define the very existence of many deepfakes as a violation of a person’s right to protect their own likeness from manipulation of any kind. To protect free speech, there are exceptions in the bill for satire and social criticism.
Henry Ajder, an expert on A.I. and deepfakes, said the legislation was “sort of harm-agnostic” because the use the forgeries might be put to is irrelevant.
“It’s not saying, ‘We’re targeting this specific harm,’” he noted. “It’s saying, ‘This is how we think about identity in the synthetic age.’”
Mr. Ajder was one of several experts who called the bill a different approach — even as they raised questions about how Denmark could enforce it.
Francesco Cavalli, chief operating officer of Sensity AI, a company that offers deepfake detection tools, said in an email, “This is definitely a new approach that no one else has experimented with yet.”
But, Mr. Cavalli added, there are potential limitations. He compared the legislation to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, a digital privacy law enacted in 2018 that was seen as a landmark expansion of protections in the internet age but soon struggled to live up to its lofty aims.
“Denmark may be granting a new right, but if the mechanisms to enforce it are slow, burdensome or inconsistent, the real-world impact could be minimal,” Mr. Cavalli noted. “Regulation without enforcement is a signal, not a shield,” he said.
The bill would make social media companies responsible for removing offending deepfakes, but it does not penalize the users who post them. If the platforms do not remove a deepfake, they could be fined, the Danish Culture Ministry said in an email.
TikTok and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment on the legislation.
Some experts said that the Danish bill was vague, especially since there is no official consensus on what counts as a deepfake. And although there would be protections for satire, there is no objective test for what constitutes humor, so users may need to turn to the courts to decide such disputes, the Culture Ministry acknowledged.
Finally, the law would only apply to Danish territory, which means it would have limited reach. As Mr. Cavalli noted, “Malicious actors operate globally, making it extremely difficult to investigate and prosecute them at the local level.”
Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
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