Key Points:
- AI chatbots are being developed to replicate the personalities of real people, sparking concerns over privacy and consent.
- Some members of Congress are attempting to pass a bill that would require the licensing of AI-generated digital replicas of individuals.
- Existing laws are largely powerless against AI technology due to the global nature of the industry.
- AI replicas have been created without the consent of individuals, raising ethical concerns.
- There is a need for regulations surrounding the use of AI-generated replicas as they enter the mainstream market.
Washington wants to fix it, but it’s not clear how.
Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.
The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.” Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.
The Chinese-built virtual Seligman is part of a broader wave of AI chatbots modeled on real humans, using the powerful new systems known as large language models to simulate their personalities online. Meta is experimenting with licensed AI celebrity avatars; you can already find internet chatbots trained on publicly available material about dead historical figures. But Seligman’s situation is also different, and in a way more unsettling. It has cousins in a small handful of projects that have effectively replicated living people without their consent.
In Southern California, tech entrepreneur Alex Furmansky created a chatbot version of Belgian celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel by scraping her podcasts off the internet. He used the bot to counsel himself through a recent heartbreak, documenting his journey in a blog post that a friend eventually forwarded to Perel herself. Perel addressed AI Perel’s existence at the 2023 SXSW conference. Like Seligman, she was more astonished than angry about the replication of her personality. She called it “artificial intimacy.”
Both Seligman and Perel eventually decided to accept the bots rather than challenge their existence. But if they’d wanted to shut down their digital replicas, it’s not clear they would have had a way to do it. Training AI on copyrighted works isn’t actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it.
AI-generated digital replicas illuminate a new kind of policy gray zone created by powerful new “generative AI” platforms, where existing laws and old norms begin to fail. In Washington, spurred mainly by actors and performers alarmed by AI’s capacity to mimic their image and voice, some members of Congress are already attempting to curb the rise of unauthorized digital replicas. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, a bipartisan group of senators — including the leaders of the intellectual property subcommittee — are circulating a draft bill titled the NO FAKES Act that would force the makers of AI-generated digital replicas to license their use from the original human. If passed, the bill would allow individuals to authorize, and even profit from, the use of their AI-generated likeness — and bring lawsuits against cases of unauthorized use.
“More and more, we’re seeing AI used to replicate someone’s likeness and voice in novel ways without consent or compensation,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wrote to POLITICO, in response to the stories of AI experimentation involving Seligman and Perel. She is one of the co-sponsors of the bill. “Our laws need to keep up with this quickly evolving technology,” she said.
But even if NO FAKES Act did pass Congress, it would be largely powerless against the global tide of AI technology. Neither Perel nor Seligman reside in the country where their respective AI chatbot developers do. Perel is Belgian; her replica is based in the U.S. And AI Seligman is trained in China, where U.S. laws have little traction.
“It really is one of those instances where the tools seem woefully inadequate to address the issue, even though you may have very strong intuitions about it,” said Tim Wu, a legal scholar who architected the Biden administration’s antitrust and competition policies.
Neither AI Seligman nor AI Perel were built — at least originally — with a profit motive in mind, their creators say. Contacted by POLITICO, Zhao said he built the AI Seligman to help fellow Chinese citizens through an epidemic of anxiety and depression. China’s mental health policies have made it very difficult for citizens to get confidential help from a therapist. And the demand for mental health services in China has soared over the past three years due to the stresses imposed by China’s now-abandoned draconian ”zero Covid” policy. As vice director of Tsinghua University’s Positive Psychology Research Center in China, Zhao now researches the same branches of psychology his graduate adviser had pioneered. The AI Seligman his team had built — originally trained on 15 of Seligman’s books — is a way to bring the benefits of positive psychology to millions in China, Zhao told his old teacher.
Similarly, when Perel the human wasn’t available, a public version of the AI software driving ChatGPT and Perel’s podcasts allowed Furmansky to build the next best thing. He saw the same potential in AI that Zhao did: a means to access the knowledge locked away in the brains of a few really brilliant people. Furmansky said he and Perel’s team were on cordial terms regarding AI Perel, and had spoken about pursuing something more collaborative. Contacted by POLITICO, Per