For millennia, the adage “seeing is believing” has held true. If you only heard about something, it might or might not have happened. But if you saw it with your own eyes, you knew it was true.
That seeing is no longer believing represents a sad revolution in human consciousness, the effects of which we cannot begin to predict. I saw this purported video of Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar talking about Sydney Sweeney, jeans, and ugly Democrats:
🚨BREAKING!!!: Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota weights in on Sydney Sweeney’s new American Eagle ad. pic.twitter.com/DusZYlisFR
— andy (@reapingandy) July 31, 2025
It was obviously a fake. But Klobuchar was appropriately outraged:
I never thought I’d opine about Sydney Sweeney’s jeans. And that’s because I didn’t. It was AI.
Deepfakes are getting impossible to detect, especially when companies—and Congress—refuse to act. We need to give Americans control over their own images.https://t.co/QrhAbdoWZX
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) August 20, 2025
Klobuchar is promoting a bill she calls the “No Fakes Act,” which:
…would seek to make videos like these illegal.
She claimed the federal censorship of such videos 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.”
Parody and satire are of course time-honored forms of political expression, but why would any deepfake video be entitled to First Amendment protection? It seems to me that every person has some kind of ownership interest in his own likeness and voice, and no one should be able to misappropriate those qualities to create a video that misrepresents that person’s views, puts him in a bad light, or mocks him.
Of course comedians have long done impressions of politicians, some of them spot-on. But the comedian didn’t impersonate the politician. Everyone knew they were seeing the comedian, not the politician. AI raises new issues. So let’s have the debate: maybe I am missing something, but I think all deepfake videos (definition necessary, of course) of any identifiable person should be banned. Change my mind!
