New Legislation Seeks to Creat Task Force to Counter Spread of Deepfakes

Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee have introduced a bill that would form a new federal task force to develop a coordinated plan to explore how a digital content provenance standard could help reduce the spread of deepfakes.

The National Deepfake and Digital Provenance Task Force would draw insights from public, private and academic landscapes, according to the legislation titled the Deepfake Task Force Act.

The strategic group would operate under the Department of Homeland Security, Nextgov reported.

Sens. Rob Portman and Gary Peters defined deepfakes as “hyper-realistic, digital manipulations of real content” that show events that did not actually happen.

The bill’s sponsors said that the task force’s responsibilities include developing technologies that content creators could use to authenticate the information they publish and their origin, as well as increasing civil society and industry leaders’ ability to relay trust and information about deepfake sources to consumers.

The measure is aimed at helping the DHS and other federal agencies execute plans to counter the spread of maliciously made synthetic content across the internet.

The bill states that officials from the DHS and the Office of Science and Technology Policy would co-chair the group.

The task force would consist of 12 experts coming from the government, private and academic sectors, and consult with the heads of agencies including the departments of Defense, Energy and State.

The selected members would have technical expertise in relevant areas such as cryptography, artificial intelligence and media manipulation.

The senators’ proposal received support from technology business leaders, including Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz and Truepic CEO Jeff McGregor.