Generative AI is Neither Too Unprecedented Nor Too New to Regulate

Last month, OpenAI unleashed Sora 2, the latest in a surge of generative-AI technologies empowering users to create perceptually realistic media from a single image or prompt. Sora 2, in particular, enables anyone with the app to hijack another person’s digital identity at the click of a button through its “cameo” feature, generating videos that falsify actions, speech, and entire events—so-called deepfakes. With weak anti-impersonation measures, thousands of deepfakes of real people have been created both consensually and non-consensually, and accompanying distribution safeguards have already fallen short against the breadth of harmful content out there.

The current moment
While the technology itself is undeniably advancing at a remarkable pace, the harms associated with generative AI and deepfakes (AI-generated content) are not new. Over just five years since the first open-source tools began to emerge, these systems have been used to supercharge disinformation, fraud, and a range of societal harms—from the ballot box to the boardroom.

While the realism and accessibility of AI-generated content are undeniably unprecedented, the underlying harms are not. The rapid dissemination of false information to millions of people, the polarization and radicalization of communities, and the entrenched patterns of online harassment, data extraction and labor exploitation have existed since the dawn of the technology industry, if not before. Indeed, they are packaged and deployed through the same software products and systems that have defined the industry since its inception: social-media platforms, algorithmic recommendation systems, and the web and mobile applications that mediate nearly all digital interaction. What is new is not the nature of these harms, but their scale and speed.