Senate Democrat Addresses Deepfake Video of Her Talking About ‘Ugly’ Democrats and Sydney Sweeney’s ‘Perfect T*tties’
(Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) took to the pages of The New York Times to warn about the dangers of AI content after a deepfake video of her arguing that actress Sydney Sweeney has “perfect titties” and Democrats are “fat” and “ugly” went viral.
In an op-ed titled “What I Didn’t Say About Sydney Sweeney,” Klobuchar recalled coming across the AI-generated video of herself as she noticed it being widely shared.
“That’s when I heard my voice — but certainly not me — spewing a vulgar and absurd critique of an ad campaign for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney. The A.I. deepfake featured me using the phrase ‘perfect titties’ and lamenting that Democrats were ‘too fat to wear jeans or too ugly to go outside,'” she 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.”
The fake video featured Klobuchar complaining about a jeans ad campaign featuring Sweeney, which sparked controversy.
“If Republicans are gonna have beautiful girls with perfect titties in their ads, we want ads for Democrats too, you know?” the fake senator said in the video. “We want ugly, fat b****es wearing pink wigs, and long-a** 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?”
Klobuchar said she faced roadblocks when trying to have the video removed or clearly labeled as digitally-manipulated content.
“X refused to take it down or label it, even though its policy says users are prohibited from sharing ‘inauthentic content on X that may deceive people,’ including ‘manipulated or out-of-context media that may result in widespread confusion on public issues,'” she wrote. “As the video spread to other platforms, TikTok took it down, and Meta labeled it as A.I. However, X’s response was that I should try to get a ‘community note’ to say it was a fake — something the company would not help add.”
Klobuchar is calling for support for the No Fakes Act, bipartisan proposal that 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.”
“We are clearly at just the tip of the iceberg. Deepfakes like the one made of me in that hearing are going to become more common, not less — and harder for anyone to identify as A.I.,” the senator wrote. “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.”
