Moran’s bipartisan bill would protect Americans against deepfakes

U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) on Nov. 20 offered a bipartisan bill that would federally fund research for detecting generative adversarial networks, also known as deepfakes, which are manipulated online videos that mimic a person’s identity.

“The Identifying Outputs of Generative Adversarial Networks Act will assist the federal government to effectively coordinate its efforts to address this threat by accelerating research and development of deepfake technology detection,” Sen. Moran said on Wednesday.

The senator cosponsored S. 2904 with bill sponsor U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) to direct the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to support research on the outputs generated by deepfakes and other comparable techniques that may be developed in the future, according to the text of the bill.

“As technology continues to evolve, so do the complexity and frequency of digital threats to Americans,” said Sen. Moran. “Deepfakes can be means for a variety of ill-intentioned uses, but the technology poses a specific threat to U.S. voters and consumers by way of misinformation that is increasingly difficult to identify.”

If enacted, S. 2904 also would direct the NIST to set measurements and standards related to this technology and to develop a report on the feasibility of public-private partnerships that would work to detect deepfakes.

“Recently, deepfake technologies have been used to spoof the voices of leaders in other countries, to spread misinformation during democratic elections, and to confuse and defraud consumers,” said Sen. Cortez Masto, who added that S. 2904 will help the government “devise comprehensive strategies to stop it and to ensure we’re educating … all Americans on ways they can protect themselves.”

S. 2904 is companion legislation to the same-named H.R. 4355, which was introduced in September by U.S. Reps. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) and Haley Stevens (D-MI) in their chamber. H.R. 4355 sailed through a House committee markup and earlier this month was placed on the Union Calendar for action.