FCC Runs Into Reality of Limited Power to Fight Deepfakes

Yaron Dori’s commentary was included in a Law360 article examining how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is taking action to prevent deceptive election-related robocalls in addition to its current declaration that cloned voices fall under a federal ban on junk calls. Yaron comments how the FCC’s move under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) does not amount to an outright ban on AI-generated voices in robocalls.

"The FCC and the chairwoman's office, in particular, saw this as an opportunity…to make a statement about the permissibility of using AI-generated voices in calls," Yaron said. "This declaratory ruling was simply stating what has been, I think, commonly understood under the TCPA probably going back to its enactment in 1991."

Yaron further clarifies that “it's hard to envision an AI-generated voice as not being deemed an 'artificial' voice. And so I think that the FCC was not breaking new ground here, or laying down a new requirement, but merely memorializing what's long been the requirement, which is that you cannot use AI generated voices for calls in certain contexts without consent. And that's been the law.”