Stuart M. Gerson, Member of the Firm in the Litigation and Health Care & Life Sciences practices, in the firm’s Washington, DC, and New York offices, was quoted in Bloomberg Law Business & Practice, in “Deepfake Political Ads Are ‘Wild West’ for Campaign Lawyers,” by Tatyana Monnay.
Following is an excerpt:
Political lawyers are gearing up for a contentious election cycle featuring a new generation of attack ads—AI-assisted and largely unregulated deepfake clips of their clients.
Lack of federal regulation, limited litigation strategies, and potential action from the Federal Election Commission are creating a volatile legal landscape for political lawyers, who are anticipating an onslaught of sophisticated AI-generated video or audio clips of a client doing or saying something that never happened. …
The bipartisan board of the American Association of Political Consultants in May unanimously agreed to condemn the use of generative deepfake content in campaigns. The organization also encouraged media to refuse to carry or deliver ads using deepfake generative AI content.
“The tools that AI is providing recently has upped the ante because they’ve made the product much better looking, much more believable, and much more targeted,” said Stuart Gerson, former US acting attorney general, who is now a member of Epstein Becker & Green’s litigation practice and a board member of the Campaign Legal Center. …
High Stakes …
The AI-backed attacks aren’t limited to domestic political actors, Gerson at Epstein Becker said.
“We are in the moral equivalent of a cyber war with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea,” Gerson said.
