The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has warned that a proposed deepfake bill could hurt the games industry by failing to distinguish between AI-generated content and digital replicas.
ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis has asked the US Senate Judiciary Committee to amend the No Fakes Act, scheduled for markup on June 11, to address this concern.
“The No Fakes Act, as currently drafted, creates a level of uncertainty that poses a real threat to existing games and to the future of video game development in the United States,” Pierre-Louis wrote in a letter addressed to senators Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin.
In the bill, a digital replica is defined as being “a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual that is embodied in a sound recording, image, and audiovisual work […] in which the actual individual did not actually perform or appear.”
Pierre-Louis argued that this definition “threatens to engender frivolous lawsuits by those who may, even by coincidence, resemble a game character, especially one of the thousands of background characters present in video games.”
“While the industry would likely prevail against such claims in court in the end, the time and expense of litigating such suits would be economically devastating.”
Pierre-Louis also highlighted how the bill “creates liability for certain tools and services that are used to create digital replicas.”
“We are concerned that the bill, as drafted, fails to adequately differentiate between tools and services built specifically to enable the creation of harmful digital replicas, and the potential for third-party abuse of innovative, multi-purpose, and otherwise legitimate tools capable of creating digital replicas.”
Pierre-Louis urged lawmakers to revise the legislation, stating, “unlike other stakeholder products, video games are entirely digital creations. While you may have heard there is no serious opposition to the bill, I am writing to register our industry’s concerns with the bill as currently written.”
