Adi Robertson

If you're talking about non-synthetic stuff, then there are all kinds of documentaries and news reports and really things that people have a public interest in making where you don't want to give someone the right to say you cannot depict me in a thing. And in that case, it's doing something I actually did. But AI-generated images raise the whole other question, which is, OK, so what –

Where do you draw the line between an AI-generated image and a Photoshop of someone and a drawing of someone? Should you not be able to depict any person in a situation that they don't want to be depicted in, even if that situation is something that would just broadly be protected by the First Amendment? Yeah.

Like, where do we think that the societal benefit of preventing a particular usage that hurts someone should be able to override the interest we have in just being able to write about or create images of someone?

The two bills are a little bit the thing I talked about where one of them, the Defiance Act, is really specifically about we want to look at non-consensual pornographic images. We define what that means. And we think that this particular thing we can carve out. There are lots of questions about, in general, how far you want to go in banning synthetic images. But it's really targeting porn.

sexually explicit pictures of real people. And I think things like the No Fakes Act, I believe there's also something called the No AI Fraud Act. These are much broader. We just think that you shouldn't be able to fake images of people. And we're going to make some carve-outs there, but the fundamental idea is that we want to create a giant federal likeness law.

And I think that's much riskier because that is much more a, we start from a point of saying that you shouldn't be able to fake an image of someone without their permission. And then we're going to create some opt-ins with some options where you're allowed to do it.

And I think that raises so many more of these questions that do we really want to create a federal ban on being able to create a fictionalized image of somebody?

Defamation law has already come up with text-based generative AI, where if something like ChatGPT tells a lie about you, are you allowed to say they're making things up about me? I can sue. And I think the benefit of defamation law is that there is a really huge framework for hammering out when exactly something is an acceptable lie and when it's not.

That, all right, well, would a reasonable person believe that this thing is actually true, or is this really obviously political commentary and hyperbole? I think that we're on at least more solid ground there than we are with just saying, all right, fine, you know what, just ban deepfakes. I do think that still defamation law is complicated.

And every time you open up defamation law, as Donald Trump has once suggested, you end up getting a situation where in a lot of cases it's very powerful people. throwing the law against people who don't necessarily have the money to defend themselves. And in general, I'm cagey about trying to open up defamation law.

But it is a place where at least you have a framework that people have spent a very long time talking about.

When a new technology comes along, there are a large number of people who don't necessarily think about it in terms of the First Amendment or of speech protections where you're able to say, oh, well, this thing is just categorically different. We've never had technology like this before. The First Amendment shouldn't apply. And.

I always hope we don't go there with the technology because I think that the problems that come from just blanket outlawing it tend to be really huge. I don't know. I think that we're still waiting to see how disruptive AI tech actually is. We're still waiting to see whether it is meaningfully different from something like Photoshop, even though it seems intuitively like it absolutely should be.

but we're still waiting to see that play out.

If we're talking about non-internet systems like robocalls, then we actually have laws that aren't really even related to most of the things we've talked about. There's a rule called the TCPA that's an anti-robocall law, basically, that says you cannot just bombard people with synthetic phone calls. And it was recently decided that, all right, should artificial voices there include voice cloning?

Yes, obviously. Right. So at this point, things like robocall laws apply to AI. And so if you're going to try to get Joe Biden calling a bunch of people and telling them not to vote, that's something that just can be regulated under a very longstanding law.

That raises really all the same questions that image based questions. AI raises. In some ways, it's probably going to be harder to detect and regulate against at a non-legal platform level because so much stuff is optimized for detecting images. And so in some ways, it's maybe even a thornier problem.

And also, on the other hand, voice impersonation was a thing before this, that there were really good impersonators of celebrity voices. And so I think that that might be a technically harder problem to fix, but I think that the legal questions it raises are very similar.

There are a bunch of really hard technical issues. And a lot of those issues are going to be irrelevant to people because so many people do not check even very obviously fake information because of a variety of reasons that do not have anything to do with it being undetectable as a fake. I think that trying to actually make yourself care about whether something is true is...

is in a lot of ways a bigger, more important step than making sure that nothing false is capable of being produced. I think that's the place where huge numbers of people have fallen down and where huge numbers of people have fallen for things. And I think that while all of these other issues we've been talking about are incredibly important,