With Jennifer Ward-Lealand taking on the global role as a Vice President of the International Federation of Actors, an umbrella body for Actors Equity, hopefully her organisation can start to put pressure on the New Zealand government to pay some attention to the urgent need for reform in the IP and AI space.

As Ward-Lealand pointed out, “Let’s just remember there is no such thing as an AI actor,” “An actor is a human. The AI is just machine-learning. That is a real threat to our work.”

Another pressing problem is deepfakes. The Equal Justice Project argues that urgent action is required, saying: “Deepfake technology is rapidly progressing. New Zealand must try regulating it before it completely spirals out of our control. Creating and sharing deepfake pornography should be a crime. Social media should have authentication requirements for deepfake photos and audio.”

It is on this final point, having some level of authentication, that Alex Bores, an Ex-Palantir executive, turned politician recently pointed out that the whole AI deepfakes problem is easily solvable, by bringing back a  simple, free, decades-old technique. Bores’ solution is straightforward and achievable – using the existing cryptographic approach used in online banking –  HTTPS’ use of digital certificates to verify that a website is authentic. This technique could be repurposed and used to identify who actually originated a particular post  or work so they can at least be identified and hopefully held accountable.

ACT MP Laura McClure’s private members bill is currently before Parliament but even if passed into law it is limited to the sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes. While that will be a good start the problem is far wider than that and it needs to be tackled across the board and in my view urgently.