The NO FAKES Act is a no-brainer: Your identity belongs to you | The Hill

With each passing day, scams are getting scarier. Now assisted by artificial intelligence, scammers are posing a greater risk to Americans than ever before in history.

People lose billions of dollars per year to impostor scams — up nearly threefold since 2020. Even before AI use became ubiquitous, impersonation fraud was all too rampant. Today, it translates to millions of individual reports of scamming and stealing every single year, and AI is making cloning tools even more powerful.

Case in point: Arizona mother Jennifer DeStefano. In 2023, DeStefano answered a phone call and heard her 15-year-old daughter crying and begging for help. Suddenly, a man took over the call, claiming that he had kidnapped DeStefano’s daughter and demanding a $1 million ransom for her safe return before lowering the demand to $50,000.

Before paying the ransom, DeStefano discovered her daughter was safe. When she later testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, she described recognizing her daughter’s cries and the way she spoke. The committee identified her as the victim of an AI deepfake kidnapping and extortion scam.

This was back in 2023. With rapidly advancing AI, this problem is getting worse. AI makes it easier to imitate the people we trust and harder to know whether the person on the other end of a phone call — or appearing in a video on our screen — is real. Now, voice and image duplication are even more advanced. All that a scammer needs to duplicate a voice is three seconds of audio.

And scams are only the tip of the iceberg. AI-powered digital duplicates called deepfakes are concerning because they don’t require explicit human permission, wading into individual privacy, personal security, corporate reputation and other realms. Shouldn’t people have rights against digital duplicates?

In 2024, following an AI study that received more than 10,000 public comments, the U.S. Copyright Office concluded that existing AI-related protections contain massive gaps, recommending that Congress enact a federal law protecting all individuals against the knowing distribution of unauthorized digital replicas. The Copyright Office specifically stated the AI threat transcends entertainment and politics to private citizens — virtually every part of society.

Creatives know the problem firsthand, and they are demanding a solution. From musicians to voice actors, professionals have grown increasingly concerned about generative AI stealing from them — stealing them — when they are simply trying to make a living. Whether it’s James Bond or a Disney movie, AI developers are openly stealing copyrighted art, and it is wrong.

Intellectual property protections are just common sense. It is an 80-20 issue, if not even more popular. That’s why The Alliance for Secure AI, which I advise, recently launched “Creatives for Secure AI,” rallying creative professionals to confront the AI question and protect their likenesses. People should have meaningful control over convincing copies of themselves.

Congress is starting to see it that way, too. The bipartisan NO FAKES Act would establish protections for everyday Americans regarding digital duplicates. It would essentially create a federal intellectual property right to defend individuals from unauthorized digital replicas of their voice and visual likeness, protecting their privacy and livelihood.

The underlying principle is simple: Your identity belongs to you. No one should have to worry that their face or voice can be copied, manipulated or used to deceive others. At a time when AI development is moving too fast for public policy to catch up, Americans deserve protections that match the technology of our time and the speed of its deployment.

There are multiple layers to the AI threat. How many stories like DeStefano’s remain unsurfaced? How many artists and entertainers and performers will see their hard-earned identities co-opted by AI replicas without permission? How many countless victims of AI-powered overreach never get the justice they deserve?

These are difficult questions to answer, but our leaders can start by legislating with common sense. The NO FAKES Act is one place to start, so we can see progress on an issue that affects Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.

The NO FAKES Act unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and is currently awaiting a vote on the Senate floor, but congressional leadership has yet to put it up to a vote. Our leaders must allow Congress to do its job and bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

The Hill:

The NO FAKES Act is a no-brainer: Your identity belongs to you | The Hill

Media Contact

The Hill:

The NO FAKES Act is a no-brainer: Your identity belongs to you | The Hill

Media Contact

Sign Up for Our Newsletter