There’s absolutely no way Florida Congressman Michael Waltz—a former Army Green Beret—would ever root for the archrival Navy football team to beat his beloved Black Knights.
But that apparently happens, thanks to a just-released deepfake video created to raise awareness about how easily the disinformation can be created and disseminated.
Waltz, a Republican, teamed up with Virginia Congressman Don Beyer, a Democrat, to create a bipartisan deepfake video for the House Science subcommittee. Researchers from SUNY-Albany and the University of Chicago created the deepfake by using a video statement from Beyer and swapping it with Waltz’s image, according to the Washington Post.
The goal: To demonstrate how deepfakes—artificial intelligence (A.I.) That can literally put words in the mouths of people in video or audio clips—could be abused, and the need for lawmakers to combat it.
“Deepfake technology undermines public trust in any digital communications,” Waltz appears to say in the video (although it was actually Beyer’s voice).
The bipartisan video is the latest effort to regulate deepfakes. In June, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing about the national security challenges of deepfakes, A.I., and types of manipulated media.
That was followed by Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from New York, introducing the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act, an initial attempt by Congress to criminalize synthetic media used to deceive the public.
Jack Clark, a policy director at A.I. Think tank OpenAI, who testified on Capitol Hill in June about the deepfakes problem, told Coins2Day in July that it’s overdue for the tech industry, academics, and government to work together to find solutions.
Politicians in Clark’s home state, as well as in Texas and Virginia, have also introduced or enacted their own legislation aimed at regulating deepfakes.
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