The night before I testified in the US Senate in May, 2023, the late philosopher Daniel Dennett sent me a manuscript that he called “counterfeit people”. It was published a few days later in The Atlantic.

He was right then. Three years later even more so. The need for the kind of law he was calling for – one forbidding “the creation of and ‘passing along’ of counterfeit people” is now urgent.

Two items sent to me this morning make that absolutely clear. The first (original sources apparently in this thread here) shows how far deep fake videos have come:

Tell your representatives today, not tomorrow, that we must pass federal1 laws forbidding machine output from being presented as humans, and that we must develop the means to enforce those laws. No use of the first person by chatbots, and no more deepfakes of living people’s voices and images without their express consent, aside from carveouts for obvious parody and so on. All of this has gone too far, too fast. And we must not let corporate lobbyists thwart efforts to address all this.