Sen. Amy Klobuchar said she was surprised when she heard her voice in a clip on X criticizing Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad campaign, which aims to sell the company's jeans with the likeness of the actress' "great genes."
The tone and pitch sounded like her, but they weren't her words, Klobuchar wrote in an Aug. 20 New York Times opinion piece. That's when the Minnesota Democratic senator realized it was a deepfake, a digitally altered video or audio recording that uses a person's voice or image, created by artificial intelligence.
"A realistic deepfake — an A.I.-generated video that shows someone doing or saying something they never did — can circle the globe and land in the phones of millions while the truth is still stuck on a landline," Klobuchar wrote in the piece, titled "What I Didn't Say About Sydney Sweeney." She called the so-called video of her "a vulgar and absurd critique."
Klobuchar has pushed for AI regulation on the national level – an effort that's not just supported by Democrats. In 2024, she and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced a Senate bill to ban actual and artificial intelligence- generated posts of intimate imagery and deepfakes. The bill also required online platforms to "promptly remove such depictions upon receiving notice."
