FTC proposes new protections to combat AI impersonation of individuals

Seems like this is broader than just AI impersonation. It also would include a person claiming to be from the government when they’re not.<p>&gt; Falsely imply government or business affiliation by using terms that are known to be affiliated with a government agency or business (e.g., stating “I’m calling from the Clerk’s Office” to falsely imply affiliation with a court of law).<p>My first thought on this was <i>great, I’m glad the FTC is doing something about this and I’m surprised it wasn’t already regulated by the FTC</i>.<p>My second thought was the majority of this type of fraud is probably from foreign impersonation, not Americans. And it’s not like they’d be sending in predator drones for surgical strikes against scam call centers, as satisfying as that might be.<p>My third thought was that having this on the books and keeping a record of these violations will give the FTC leverage to crack down on telecoms that don’t do anything about it.

This is the controversial provision, the &quot;means and instrumentalities&quot; clause. Existing law covers people running impersonation scams. The big question is, what responsibilities, if any, do sellers of tools have? The draft language:<p><i>§ 461.5 Means and Instrumentalities: Provision of Goods or Services for Unlawful Impersonation Prohibited.</i><p><i>It is a violation of this part, and an unfair or deceptive act or practice to provide goods or services with knowledge or reason to know that those goods or services will be used to:</i><p><i>(a) materially and falsely pose as, directly or by implication, a government entity or officer thereof, a business or officer thereof, or an individual, in or affecting commerce as commerce is defined in the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. </i>44); or*<p>(b) materially misrepresent, directly or by implication, affiliation with, including endorsement or sponsorship by, a government entity or officer thereof, a business or officer thereof, or an individual, in or affecting commerce as commerce is defined in the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. 44).*<p>It&#x27;s the &quot;with knowledge or reason to know&quot; clause that&#x27;s key here. Various industry parties have already commented on this, some wanting stronger language there to protect sellers of general purpose tools for creating content.<p>Sellers of automated outbound marketing tools which can be used to deliver impersonation scams might be caught up by this.

I suspect in the near future there will be a number of cases where individuals will intentionally release a bunch of AI &quot;chaff&quot;, in the sense that having a very large number of bad videos&#x2F;texts about them, of which many are clearly false, will disguise the actual bad behavior. I&#x27;m not sure what term&#x2F;phrase will be used for this particular tactic, but I am absolutely certain one will arise.

Too bad scammers couldn’t care less what the FTC decides just based on the crap coming into my physical mailbox, email inbox, and calls and texts.

People don’t want to be impersonated by deepfake.<p>Artists don’t want their art style copied.<p>Writers don’t want to be out of business or have the price of their work degraded by GPT spam.<p>There are a lot of things people don’t want AI to do, but I can’t want for them to use AI to remaster Star Trek Next Gen (and other old sci-fi) into 4K. This kind of application hurts nobody.

Isn&#x27;t fraud already illegal?

So individuals still have fair use for protests and comedy?

Key words - “allow for <i>civil</i> penalties”.<p>Civil is a much lower bar than criminal when it comes to court cases.

Seems to me people are not easily impersonated.<p>However, the false belief that a proxy persona, such as remote telephone, video call, or any other non in-person interaction are what give rise to impersonation.<p>Might as well simply say that all persona non-gratis communications are unenforcable.

Unfortunately the cat is it out of the bag, we can&#x27;t simply legislate this away.

When dealing with Western actors, this is symmetric warfare. If you are a political party and the opposition impersonates you, you could do the same back.<p>What concerns me is the asymmetric threat such as posed by North Korean dollar groups. For the uninitiated, this is a real threat but let&#x27;s for a moment not think about the silliness of present day Communists getting extremely ruthless about stacking cash.<p>The model I&#x27;m concerned about is, say you have a NK hacker group and they make a very, very convincing video of a CEO doing something embarrassing (shout out a former UK PM&#x27;s alleged porcine initiation ritual) with a view to making cash.<p>These people are focussed on the bottom line. They could structure their extortion demand to be F.O. money and get paid with little fuss. And do it over and over.<p>On the one hand the replicability of such attacks concerns me. However I have been considering a future where we are embarrassed or exposed to embarrassing content on an industrial scale.<p>Embarrassment is a social concept that we all deal with, and deal with it we do. It could be that the AI impersonation mess gets so bad we all become inoculated to this type of content because virtually everyone notable has become a victim already. Could it become the cost of doing business?

AI watermarking would be a boom business.

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