Over 700 people, including AI experts and executives, sign an open letter calling for more regulation of deepfakes, such as by criminalizing deepfake child porn
especially as we head into a major election. ‘AI godfather’, others urge more deepfake regulation in open letter https://www.reuters.com/... Ari H. Mendelson / @kingmakerseries : Regulating this kind of stuff is exactly like trying to regulate drugs in sports. I have a sinking feeling that the technology is going to develop far faster than the ability of legislators, regulators and courts to regulate it adequately. https://www.nasdaq.com/... @fli_org : Deepfakes are causing incredible harm: Supercharging sexual harassment and abuse, enabling widespread fraud (up 3,000% last year), derailing lives, and even disrupting elections with dangerous disinformation. Sign the open letter to #BanDeepfakes: https://openletter.net/... Max Tegmark / @tegmark : More than 90% of deepfakes are nonconsensual sexual material, fraud or attempts to mess with elections. There's a surge in momentum across the ideological spectrum to disrupt the deepfake supply chain. Please consider joining me as a signatory of this open letter: #BanDeepfakes... Meeri Haataja / @meerihaataja : I signed this open letter as I'm worried about the future where we can't separate truth from fiction on a large scale. #deepfake #openletter #regulation https://openletter.net/... Sissy Willis / @sissywillis : “The quandary is that the people who would do the regulating have blown any trust they might have once had that they would regulate fairly.” HMM: ‘AI godfather’, others urge more deepfake regulation in open letter. https://instapundit.com/633254/ Liv Boeree / @liv_boeree : I signed this letter because we need some sane regulation against the growing problem of Deepfake videos. It's not just the non-consensual porn issue; they're destroying our ability to discern truth from fiction itself. A small upside, huge downside technology. [image] @nujindiaorg : We are concerned, keenly observing the developments in this arena. @thehill : Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and one of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence (AI), Yoshua Bengio, were among hundreds who signed an open letter calling for deepfake regulation. https://thehill.com/... [image]
Context & Ripple Effects
The letter follows a voluntary election-deepfake accord by major technology companies, shifting the debate from platform commitments toward enforceable obligations. It also builds on an uneven legal baseline: some states already prohibit nonconsensual synthetic sexual imagery, while broader rules have been constrained by speech concerns.
The focus on child sexual abuse material and deceptive media makes this a concrete escalation in a debate that has long included calls for stronger action against nonconsensual deepfake pornography and recognition that governments have adopted relatively few deepfake-specific rules despite the technology's harms.
First-order effects
- The signatories add coordinated pressure on legislators and regulators to treat specified deepfake harms—particularly synthetic child sexual abuse material—as criminal-law and enforcement priorities.
- AI companies and platforms face a more explicit expectation that voluntary safeguards, including the recent industry accord on election deception, may need to be supplemented by measures that prevent or remove abusive synthetic media.
Second-order effects
- Platforms, model providers, and hosting services may have to clarify who bears responsibility across creation, distribution, and removal when policymakers translate broad anti-deepfake demands into rules.
- The emphasis on sexual abuse and election deception could steer policy toward harm-specific obligations rather than a single blanket restriction on synthetic media, preserving the central free-speech trade-off.
Third-order effects
- If these campaigns yield enforceable rules, provenance, detection, reporting, and takedown capabilities could become baseline compliance infrastructure across the generative-media supply chain.
- The durable policy challenge is likely to be allocating liability among creators, toolmakers, platforms, and hosts without turning legitimate synthetic expression into prohibited content; the corpus does not establish where that line will settle.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from voluntary AI-safety pledges toward targeted, harm-based governance of synthetic media.