United States of America: Introduced Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED ACT) including measures for synthetic content detection

On 11 July 2024, the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED ACT) was introduced in the US Senate. The Act proposes federal transparency guidelines for labelling, authenticating, and detecting Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated content. It aims to establish safeguards for journalists, actors, and artists from the use of their work for artificial intelligence development purposes without consent and establish accountability measures for misconduct. Specifically, the Act would require the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop guidelines and standards for content provenance information, watermarking, and synthetic content detection. These standards aim to promote transparency in identifying whether content has been generated or manipulated by AI, as well as its origins. Furthermore, the Act would mandate that providers of AI tools used for creative or journalistic content generation allow content owners to attach provenance information and prohibit its removal. The Act would also prohibit the unauthorised use of content with provenance information to train AI models or generate AI content.