Legally speaking, you do have some ownership of your own appearance already (at least you do where I live, but I also think most American states have personality rights), so I’m pretty sure spreading deepfakes of someone is illegal already. If not, it’s time for those rights to be brought to your state, and not just because of deepfakes.

From a legal point of view, I don’t think we need to take any extra steps specifically against pictures generated by AI. Like you said, stealing someone’s identity is illegal, it doesn’t matter that the identity created by the con man isn’t the real you. Fake pictures of anyone should be banned, although I’m not sure how that will work with the freedom of speech absolutism present in some countries.

We do need legal guidance covering the problems with all current AI developments, like answering the “does a generated model contain its source material” question. Deepfakes are covered by the same law banning people from spreading photoshopped pictures of you online.

I agree that porn sites should require verification but that won’t fix the “we’ll send images to all of your friends on social media” problem that’s much more pressing. Furthermore, how do you validate someone when AI can be used to create any picture you can think of? Visit the Pornhub office and have your irises scanned? Drivers’ licenses are not that hard to fake and many countries still lack any decent form of digital identity verification in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-currentyear.

Celebrities can probably take down the published models of their faces on hosting sites, but that won’t stop anyone from recreating those models on their own computers and perhaps spreading them through Discord servers and whatnot. You also run into the legal challenge of “is this meant to generate porn or is it general purpose” and “do I actually own the rights to take down these models”. Photographs taken of you are not your intellectual property, and in many cases you have no say in what others do with them, unless they’re actually doing something illegal with the pictures. If you ask me to take a picture of you, you don’t get copyright or ownership of that picture, not even if you pay me for it unless the transfer of copyright is spelled out in a contract.

Fixing these issues will require altering some core concepts in laws all around the world. None of these problems are novel or impossible to solve, but they require rethinking the concept of personality rights. We’ll have to find new boundaries to stick to (are professional impressionists illegal? what about porn lookalikes? what about sexy cosplay? what about pencil drawings? what about non-celebrity stuff, like photoshopping people into wedding photographs because they couldn’t be there at the time?), regardless of technological advancements.

In my opinion, deepfake technology should be treated like we treat Photoshop. It’s a pretty neat tool that is already revolutionary for everything from Instagram filters to movie productions, with some damn dangerous implications if we don’t learn to live with its existence. I can almost guarantee that within a few years Photoshop will add a deepfake button to its UI to insert yourself or someone else into pictures or fully AI generated scenarios; it’s just the next logical step now that it has an image generation feature.