News Signal regulation
The law bans what was made yesterday and today's model couldn't care less
Lobbying costs hundreds of millions a year. What exactly does that buy?
Five countries are writing deepfake laws simultaneously, which is the most efficient way to document that youβre five years too late. The laws ban what happened yesterday, the industry works on tomorrow, and the gap between those two timelines is called profit.
The product is called untraceability
South Korea bans deepfake campaign content ninety days before a vote. Meta reaches more people in ninety seconds than the Korean parliament has in ten years, but those ninety days probably feel very principled. The UK criminalizes the creation of non-consensual intimate imagery, and the models generating that imagery run on servers in jurisdictions where British law carries the weight of a polite suggestion. βRemoval within 48 hoursβ is written into the law. Sam Altman has a lobbyist, that lobbyist has an agenda, that agenda has priorities, and non-consensual intimate images of nameless people arenβt on it. By the time anyone picks up the phone, the model is three generations ahead, producing things current law canβt even name, because naming takes time and deployment doesnβt.
Maintaining the untraceability of this infrastructure costs hundreds of millions a year in legal and lobbying fees, which means it isnβt a side effect, itβs a core product. Actively maintained by companies that spend more on lobbying than Big Oil and Big Tobacco combined, and that write the exemptions into the laws meant to constrain them, because no one else has the technical knowledge to draft those exemptions precisely enough.
Adaptation is the end product
The woman whose face appears on synthetic pornography without her consent, who is being blackmailed, whose career is being destroyed, needs to become media-resilient. Serious analyses say so. Microsoft isnβt stopping. Google isnβt taking responsibility. OpenAI isnβt restricting its distribution. But the media-resilient citizen is a policy option with broad support.
Hate speech, child sexual abuse material, election manipulation, ten years, the same pattern, ten years, the same answer, and the system producing that answer is busy registering its next jurisdiction as a fiscal domicile.