Sen. Amy Klobuchar is calling for new legislation to address “deepfakes” after a highly realistic AI-generated video that appeared to show her making outrageous statements about Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle jeans ad went viral.
The Minnesota Democrat took to the opinion page of the New York Times Wednesday to clear the air after the video made the rounds online, appearing to show her speaking at a recent Senate Judiciary subcommittee meeting on data privacy.
In her op-ed, Klobuchar decried the bogus footage, which she noted was viewed online more than a million times.
“The A.I. deepfake featured me using the phrase ‘perfect t-tties’ and lamenting that Democrats were “too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside,” the real Sen. Klobuchar wrote.
“Though I could immediately tell that someone used footage from the hearing to make a deepfake, there was no getting around the fact that it looked and sounded very real.”
“If Republicans are gonna have beautiful girls with perfect t-tties in their ads, we want ads for Democrats too, you know?” the deepfake version of Klobuchar said, eerily mirroring the senator’s voice and vocal style.
“We want ugly, fat bitches wearing pink wigs and long-ass fake nails being loud and twerking on top of a cop car at a Waffle House because they didn’t get extra ketchup, you know?” the video continued.
“Just because we’re the party of ugly people doesn’t mean we can’t be featured in ads, OK? And I know most of us are too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside, but we want representation.”
The fake-out video’s bizarro version of Klobuchar was referencing the controversial American Eagle ad campaign featuring it-girl Sydney Sweeney, in which the blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty referred to her “good jeans” in a play on words.
The ad caused an epic meltdown on the left, with TikTokkers decrying the punny commercial as “Nazi propaganda.”
Klobuchar said she reached out to various social media platforms where the video was circulating but had mixed results in getting it taken down. TikTok took it down and Meta labeled it as AI, but the senator said X offered no help beyond suggesting she should try to get a Community Note identifying it as fake.
The whole episode, Klobuchar said, was motivation for a newly proposed piece of legislation dubbed the No Fakes Act, with Senate sponsorship on both sides of the aisle.
The act would “give people the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness, while making exceptions for speech protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote.
Klobuchar said the bill will build on the success of another piece of recently passed legislation governing AI deepfakes, the Take it Down Act. Signed into law by President Trump in May, the Act criminalized the “nonconsensual publication of intimate images, including AI-generated content” and established a process for having offending images removed.
Co-sponsors for the new bill include Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Klobuchar said.
“The internet has an endless appetite for flashy, controversial content that stokes anger. The people who create these videos aren’t going to stop at Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.”
