have been created with the technology since it first began spreading across the internet several years ago. That technology is easier to use now than ever before.
The bill would allow prosecutors to charge people with up to five years in prison and $10,000 in fines for disseminating deepfakes. To become law, the bill must still go through a conference committee and get signed by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz.“The concern I have is just the civil penalty. I want to see it higher,” Republican Sen. Nathan Wesenberg, of Little Falls, said on the Senate floor before voting against the bill.
A small handful of other states have passed similar legislation to combat deepfakes, said Democratic Sen. Erin Maye Quade, the Apple Valley lawmaker who championed the bill. Those states include Texas, California and Virginia. “I think we’re really behind at the federal level and the state level” on data privacy and technology regulation, Maye Quade said. “Just watching the advancement of AI technology, even in the last year, had me really concerned that we didn’t have anything in place.”President Joe Biden talked about tanks. But a doctored version of the video amassed hundreds of thousands of views that week on social media, making it appear like he gave a speech that attacked transgender people.
Digital forensics experts said the video was created using a new generation of artificial intelligence tools, which allow anyone to quickly generate audio simulating a person’s voice with a few clicks of a button. And while the Biden clip on social media may have failed to fool most users, the clip showed how easy it now is for people to generate hateful and disinformation-filled deepfake videos that could do real-world harm.