The COPIED Act aims to curb AI deepfakes, protect content creators, and enforce legal measures against unauthorized AI content use.

The speed at which artificial intelligence is developing has never been seen before in history, across all industries, but such progress also gives rise to major concerns about the misuse of AI-generated deepfakes or unauthorized use of original material. Just recently, due to such challenges, the United States enacted the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act. The bipartisan bill will help the growing menace of AI deepfakes and make sure that the rights of content creators are protected.

Understand the COPIED Act

The COPIED Act is a holistic legislative attempt at curbing the misuse of AI technology in creating deepfakes and ensuring that the original content does not get exploited without due credit or recompense. In this line of thought, the bill would require the creation of a digital document that could be termed as “content provenance information.” It is mostly a logbook for every type of content, whether news articles, artifacts, images, or videos, guaranteeing authenticity and detection of AI-generated content.

An important component of this bill criminalizes content provenance information tampering. This clause is an important safeguard for the protection of journalists, artists, and other creators from unauthorized AI use of their work. It will empower state officials to enforce such regulations, thus providing a pathway to enable creators to sue AI companies that either remove watermarks or use content without permission and proper compensation.

Addressing Deepfakes

First and foremost, it is targeting the proliferation of deepfakes created by AI. The implications of manipulated images and videos could be as serious as personal harm or public misinformation. Another act recently introduced, called the Take It Down Act, specifically deals with the removal of non-consensual intimate images created by AI deepfakes. It was also induced by some highly publicized incidents, such as AI-generated nude images of Taylor Swift that went viral, fomenting a national debate on the ethical use of AI technology.

The COPIED Act builds on these efforts to provide a broader framework for all forms of deepfakes. It allows traceability of content and illegalizes tampering with the providence information to slow down the viral spread of harmful AI-generated media and protect people’s privacy and reputation.

Content Creator Protection

Besides deepfakes, the COPIED Act also hopes to ensure that AI isn’t making money off of original content without due compensation. A spate of recent controversies has shined a light on just this issue. For instance, Forbes accused AI search engine Perplexity AI of content theft. Wired reported that Perplexity was summarizing articles, with explicit restrictions in place.

The COPIED Act ensures that strict measures are put in place for content provenance, with legal ramifications for any violations of these rules. This is a massive success story for journalists, musicians, artists, and all others who have been at the pinch of AI systems milking their works without permission.

Global Views on AI Regulation

While the COPIED Act marks a milestone for the US, other regions have been proactive in regulating AI. The Artificial Intelligence Act is one of the most well-rounded frameworks globally that the European Union has enacted. It classifies AI systems into four risk categories: Unacceptable Risk, High-Risk AI, Limited-Risk AI, and Minimal-Risk AI. Those systems found to be an unacceptable risk—for example, China’s social scoring AI—are forbidden under the act.

AI regulation in India is absolutely in its infancy. There is no law particularly for the regulation of AI; however, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a directive in March that required “under-tested” or “unreliable” AI systems to get government approval before being deployed. Later on, this mandate was overturned to prevent stalling innovation.

Conclusion

The COPIED Act is a major step in regulating AI technology in the United States. Because it dwells on these two major aspects of AI deepfakes and unauthorized use of the original content, the bill needs to protect an individual’s privacy and the rights of content creators. More such efforts through legislation will be required as AI technology evolves further if innovation has to be appropriately weighed between ethical considerations and the protection of the rights of all stakeholders.