Danish citizens to ‘own their own faces' to prevent deepfakes

Times

28-06-2025

Denmark plans to become the first country in the world to give its citizens copyright over their faces and voices in an effort to clamp down on 'deepfakes' — videos, audio clips and images that are digitally doctored to spread false information.
In recent years the tools for making deepfakes, including artificial intelligence-assisted editing software, have become so sophisticated and ubiquitous that it takes not much more than a few clicks of a mouse to create them.
They are already endemic in the political sphere and were deployed during recent election campaigns in Slovakia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Argentina. The former US president Joe Biden was subjected to an audio deepfake during the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire last year.
In November an MP from the German Social Democratic party was reprimanded for posting a deepfake video of Friedrich Merz, the conservative leader and future chancellor, saying that his party 'despised' the electorate.
The Danish culture ministry said it would soon no longer be possible to distinguish between real and deepfake material. That in turn would undermine trust in authentic pictures and videos, it warned. 'Since images and videos swiftly become embedded in people's subconscious, digitally manipulated versions of an image or video can establish fundamental doubts and perhaps even a completely wrong perception of genuine depictions of reality.'
There is now broad cross-party support in Denmark's parliament for a reform to the copyright law that would make it illegal to share deepfakes.
The bill includes a special protection for musicians and performing artists against digital imitations.
'We are now sending an unequivocal signal to all citizens that you have the right to your own body, your own voice and your own facial features,' said Jakob Engel-Schmidt, the culture minister.
Lars Christian Lilleholt, the parliamentary leader of the Danish Liberal party, which is part of the ruling coalition, said AI tools had made it alarmingly easy to impersonate politicians and celebrities and to exploit their aura of credibility to propagate false claims.
'It is not just harmful to the individual who has their identity stolen,' he said. 'It is harmful to democracy as a whole when we cannot trust what we see.'
The reform will include an exemption for parody and satire. This is a thorny area: several studies suggest a large proportion of political deepfakes are humorous or harmless rather than malicious. There are some experts who warn that concern about the phenomenon risks tipping over into a moral panic.
In April last year Mette Frederiksen, Denmark's Social Democratic prime minister, was targeted with an AI-generated deepfake that fell into this grey area.
After her government announced that it was abolishing a Christian public holiday, the right-wing populist Danish People's Party released a video of a fake press conference where Frederiksen appeared to say she would scrap all the other religious holidays, including Easter and Christmas.
The clip, which was presented as a dream sequence and clearly labelled as AI-manipulated content, prompted debate about the acceptable boundaries of the technology.