Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called on Congress to pass new, more protective legislations around the use of artificial intelligence after a vulgar deepfake video of her commenting on Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad went viral.
“Today, a realistic deepfake — an AI-generated video that shows someone doing or saying something they never did — can circle the globe and land in the phones of millions while the truth is still stuck on a landline,” Klobuchar wrote in a guest essay for the New York Times published Wednesday. The article was titled “Amy Klobuchar: What I Didn’t Say About Sydney Sweeney.”
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“That’s why it’s urgent for Congress to immediately pass new laws to protect Americans by preventing their likeness from being used to do harm,” the senator continued. “I learned that lesson in a visceral way over the last month when a fake video of me — opining on, of all things, the actress Sydney Sweeney’s jeans — went viral.”
In the video, AI reworked Klobuchar’s voice to ask Republicans to include Democrats.
“All we’re saying is that we want representation,” the deepfake begins. “If Republicans are going to have beautiful girls with perfect titties in their ads, we want ads for Democrats too. We want ugly, fat b—ches wearing pink wigs and long ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House ’cause they didn’t get extra ketchup.”
She went on to explain that the actual footage used came from a July 30 meeting during which Klobuchar led a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on data privacy. The only discussion that took place, Klobuchar detailed, was about the “need for a strong federal data privacy law.” But a week later, Klobuchar said she was stunned when she saw an edited version of the meeting that featured her saying words she never used.
“That’s when I heard my voice — but certainly not me — spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney,” Klobuchar said. “The AI deepfake featured me using the phrase ‘perfect titties’ and lamenting that Democrats were ‘too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside.’ Though I could immediately tell that someone used footage from the hearing to make a deepfake, there was no getting around the fact that it looked and sounded very real.”
The politician said she tried her best to get the video removed online or labeled with a note that read “digitally altered content,” but her efforts were unsuccessful when X “refused to take it down.”
“It was using my likeness to stoke controversy where it did not exist,” Klobuchar said. “It had me saying vile things. And while I would like to think that most people would be able to recognize it as fake, some clearly thought it was real. […] X refused to take it down or label it, even though its own policy says users are prohibited from sharing ‘inauthentic content on X that may deceive people,’ including ‘manipulated, or out-of-context media that may result in widespread confusion on public issues.'”
The video eventually reached other social media platforms. TikTok removed the video and Meta labeled it as being AI. As far as X: “X’s response was that I should try to get a ‘Community Note’ to say it was a fake, something the company would not help add.”
By the end of her essay, she shared studies about deepfakes impact others’ view of a person despite it being fake, mentioned that artificial intelligence could be used to harm social media users and called out tech companies.
“Why should tech companies’ profits rule over our rights to our own images and voices?” Klobuchar questioned. “Why do their shareholders and CEO’s get to make more money with the spread of viral content at the expense of our privacy and reputations? And why are there no consequences for the people who actually make the unauthorized deepfakes and spread the lies?”
She concluded by reiterating her plea for Congress to get involved.
“We can love the technology and we can use the technology, but we can’t cede all the power over our own images and our privacy,” she wrote. “It is time for members of Congress to stand up for their constituents, stop currying favor with the tech companies and set the record straight. In a democracy, we do that by enacting laws. And it is long past time to pass one.”
The post Amy Klobuchar Calls for New AI Laws After Sydney Sweeney Deepfake Video Goes Viral: ‘It Had Me Saying Vile Things’ appeared first on TheWrap.
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