Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) addressed the deepfake video that went viral last month of the senator’s likeness offering a “vulgar and absurd critique” of actress Sydney Sweeney’s “great jeans” ad campaign.
In a New York Times op-ed, the moderate Democrat called on Congress to pass legislation to protect Americans from the harms of deepfakes, saying the issue requires urgent action amid the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
“I learned that lesson in a visceral way over the last month when a fake video of me — opining on, of all things, the actress Sydney Sweeney’s jeans — went viral,” she wrote in the op-ed.
Klobuchar said after she co-led a hearing on data privacy last month, she noticed “a clip of me from that hearing circulating widely on X, to the tune of more than a million views,” which the senator then clicked on to watch.
“That’s when I heard my voice — but certainly not me — spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney,” she said, referring to the controversial American Eagle advertisement that touted the actress’s “great jeans.”
Klobuchar explained the AI deepfake featured her using derogatory phrases and “lamenting that Democrats were ‘too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside.'”
“Though I could immediately tell that someone used footage from the hearing to make a deepfake, there was no getting around the fact that it looked and sounded very real,” she said.
Klobuchar said when the clip spread to other platforms, TikTok took it down, and Meta labeled the video as artificial intelligence. But she said the social platform X “refused to take it down or label it.”
“X’s response was that I should try to get a ‘Community Note’ to say it was a fake, something the company would not help add,” she added.
The Hill has reached out to X for comment.
Klobuchar noted that her experience “does not in any way represent the gravest threat posed by deepfakes” and pointed to other recent examples, including when someone used AI to pretend to be Secretary of State Marco Rubio and contacted various high-level government officials.
President Trump in May signed into law a bill that Klobuchar pushed for, cracking down on so-called deepfake revenge porn — or sexually explicit AI images and videos that are posted without the victim’s consent.
Klobuchar is calling now for Congress to pass her bipartisan No Fakes Act, which “would give people the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness, while making exceptions for speech protected by the First Amendment,” she said.
“In the United States, and within the bounds of our Constitution, we must put in place common-sense safeguards for artificial intelligence. They must at least include labeling requirements for content that is substantially generated by A.I.,” she wrote in the op-ed.
She warned that the country is “at just the tip of the iceberg,” noting, “The internet has an endless appetite for flashy, controversial content that stokes anger. The people who create these videos aren’t going to stop at Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.”
“We can love the technology and we can use the technology, but we can’t cede all the power over our own images and our privacy,” she wrote. “It is time for members of Congress to stand up for their constituents, stop currying favor with the tech companies and set the record straight. In a democracy, we do that by enacting laws. And it is long past time to pass one.”
