FTC Finalizing Consumer Protection Rules to Deter AI-Generated Impersonation

The Federal Trade Commission is soliciting public comments on its new proposed rules to protect consumers from malicious artificial intelligence-generated government and business impersonation tactics. 

The new proposals would add protections to the consumer safeguards that the FTC earlier lined up in its notice of proposed rulemaking issued in October 2022. The proposed rules for comment include declaring it unlawful for firms to sell goods or services known to use videos, images or text for impersonation to defraud consumers, the FTC said Thursday.

The agency noted that scammers are devising new ways, such as voice cloning, to deceive consumers and its proposed rules will help it combat fraudsters and recompense their consumer victims. In November 2023, the FTC launched a Voice Cloning Challenge competition to help it generate ideas on consumer protection against AI-enabled voice cloning, also known as audio deepfakes.

FTC Chair Lina Khan observed that scammers’ use of AI in impersonation has advanced “with eerie precision and at a much wider scale,” making it more critical to protect consumers. She added that the supplemental rules would strengthen the agency’s toolkit against AI-enabled impersonations.

Besides the supplemental rules, the FTC said it has finalized a new rule on government and business impersonation empowering the agency to directly file federal court cases against scammers impersonating government agencies or businesses and compel them to refund their scam victims.