In July, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfake Media Act (COPIED Act) to promote transparency in artificial intelligence-generated content and protect creators from having their digital representations used or altered by artificial intelligence (AI). In a new insight, Technology and Innovation Policy Analyst Angela Luna walks through the bill and considers its potential harms.

Key points:

• As AI takes on a larger role in content creation, the challenge of distinguishing between human-created works and AI-generated content grows more difficult, raising concerns within the creative industries about originality and copyright.
• The COPIED Act would mainly direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop standards that facilitate the detection of synthetic content and prohibit the use of protected material to train AI models or generate AI content, giving creators more control over their images, likenesses, and copyrighted material.
• As Congress debates the bill, it should not overlook the unresolved questions about copyright protections regarding AI training data – or the impacts the bill would have on free speech and AI innovation – to ensure that NIST does not struggle to establish effective guidelines without this necessary information.

Read the analysis