WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Angus King spoke with an AI scientist about the need for regulation and liability of computer-generated or -altered content. In an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, King asked Dr. Yann LeCun – a New York University Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University – about what is technologically feasible in terms of implementing watermarks (a small icon or caption) for users to discern between real and artificially created content.

King began his questioning by asked how about the feasibility of labeling AI-generate content.

“Now, Dr. LeCun, a very practical question. How feasible is watermarking of AI-generated images?” King asked. “This is of concern to us, frankly, because we are very likely to be subject to AI-generated false disinformation, very skillful. Our face, our voice, our gestures, but completely false. How feasible is it to require that AI-generated images on Facebook or on TikTok or Instagram all be watermarked or labeled in such a way so that the consumer will know that they're looking at something that isn't real …Is that something we should be thinking about here as we're thinking about regulation?”

“Senator, this is a very timely question. Of course, it is technically feasible. The main issue is for a common standard to be adopted industry wide. So there needs to be a common way of watermarking, invisible or invisible way, using steganography,” LeCun responded. “The fact that the process by which a piece of information has been produced. This can be done with images and video and audio, such that a computer can detect whether the system has been generated by a generative AI system. But the user will have to not counteract. It will have to use the products to produce it that obey that standard. And so that needs to be adopted industry-wide. The problem is much more complicated for text. There is no easy way to hide a watermark inside of a text. People have tried to do this by kind of manipulating the frequency of different words, but it's very far from perfect. But for text, text is produced by humans. It's not like a photograph which you can take anywhere. Text, in the end, the person posting the text has to be responsible for that content.”

Senator King has been a leading voice in fighting threats from technology, having served as the Co-Chair of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission – which has had dozens of recommendations become law since its launch in 2019. As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, Senator King has been a strong supporter of increased watermarking regulations. The FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act legislation includes a Senator King-led provision to evaluate technology, including applications, tools, and models, to detect and watermark generative artificial intelligence. Additionally, he recently had an exchange during a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, where he raised the question of what Congress and the private sector can do to combat fake and misinformation online.

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