Do you consider your facial features entirely yours? On the internet, they aren’t. Even less so since artificial intelligence (AI) entered the game, bringing us the world of deepfakes – videos, images, or audio created using AI to depict someone doing or saying something they never did.

They can be – and often are – used for malicious purposes. Impersonating people to gain (and later destroy) people's trust or generating fake news, for instance. With the internet being the wild place that it is, taming the production and sharing of deepfakes is a monumental task.

A broad political agreement in the Danish parliament now wants to tackle this issue by giving citizens the right to their own body, voice, and facial features. Only 2 out of 11 parties didn’t join the agreement. They happen to be the only two parties that have produced campaign videos with deepfakes of the current Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. As you can probably imagine, they sparked a lot of controversy.

The agreement should pave the way for a new law to make it ”illegal to share deepfakes and other digital imitations of personal characteristics.” According to the text, its purpose is not to fine and imprison those who share the content, but rather to facilitate the removal of deepfakes from digital platforms and enable compensation for victims.

But there are limitations. One is that the rules only apply in Denmark. So even though a deepfake is removed from a platform in Denmark, it would still be accessible if the site is accessed from a different country. Even though the EU’s Digital Services Act (determining that platforms can be fined for not taking down illegal content) illegal content is often defined by national laws and therefore doesn’t offer a standard Europe-wide solution in many cases.

A potential partial help could be the EU's AI Act from last year, which is currently being implemented. It states that deepfakes must be clearly and visibly labelled, while another article bans ”purposefully manipulative or deceptive techniques” to impair people’s decision making, resulting in causing someone harm.

In the meantime, France and the UK have also taken some action. The former outlawed the sharing of any AI-created visual or audio content without the consent of the person portrayed in it last year. France also banned pornographic deepfakes, as has the UK.