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There’s no doubt that the AI revolution is here, and as the technology becomes more sophisticated and more widely used every day, one thing is becoming crystal clear: We are not remotely ready for the ramifications.

From people going into psychosis because of their AI “therapists” and “spiritual guides” to whole new ways of having their identities stolen, the rapid advancements in AI have made deepfakes, a thing that used to only be a concern for celebrities, a danger to all of us. And the country of Denmark is pushing back.

Denmark plans to allow citizens to copyright their identities to protect against deepfakes.

Only a few years ago, creating convincing AI deepfakes required sophisticated, expensive software that relegated its use to lucrative fakery targeting celebrities or politicians. That was then, this is now. The ability to create a nearly indistinguishable AI deepfake of literally any person on Earth is basically right there in the palm of our hands, or at least on our laptops.

The implications are frankly terrifying. Just recently, a viral trend emerged on TikTok in which even the savviest among us, who have felt like we’re all going crazy watching boomers fall for practically everything that gets put in front of them, had to admit that even we had been fooled by an adorable video of rabbits jumping on a trampoline that turned out to be completely, indistinguishably fake.

With most of us having an online treasure trove of photos and videos of us, what is to stop people from creating similarly convincing videos of US doing things that could ruin our reputations, get us sued or blackmailed, or maybe even accused of a crime? It may sound far-fetched, but some of that is already happening.

In short, we have reached an era where our very likenesses are no longer our own, and virtually nobody is doing anything about it. With the exception of Denmark, that is. The Scandinavian country is changing its copyright laws to include individuals’ likenesses to give them control over their own identities.

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The Danish law would empower citizens to sue for copyright infringement if a deepfake were made of them.

The law, which is expected to go into effect this fall, has widespread support in the country’s Parliament across members of varying political parties. “Everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features,” Denmark’s Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt told The Guardian last month, “which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI.”

The law would give citizens the power to demand that online platforms remove any content featuring their likeness that they did not approve of, much like celebrities have the power to do when AI is used to create fake advertisements with them, for example.

Of course, the general public doesn’t have the legal resources a celebrity has to compel the likes of Meta or TikTok to act. Both platforms have become notorious for simply not responding to regular people’s requests that deepfake content of their likeness be removed.

Soon, in Denmark, that could land the platforms in court, and potentially hold them liable for compensating victims monetarily. The law will have a sort of carve-out for parody or satire, but would make any more nefarious use of a person’s likeness illegal.

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Most countries have done little to protect people from deepfakes, and the US just may be the worst.

“Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes,” Engel-Schmidt said to The Guardian. “And I’m not willing to accept that.”

If only Engle-Schmidt weren’t an outlier. While Denmark is certainly not the only country moving to regulate the use of generative AI and deepfakes, its law does seem to be the strongest, and the only one that understands the truly terrifying capabilities of the technology where ordinary people are concerned.

Polina Tankilevitch | Pexels | Canva Pro

France and the U.K. have deepfake regulations, but they focus mainly on combating fraud and child exploitation. The U.S., meanwhile, lacks any federal-level deepfake legislation that applies to the public; existing laws focus on business uses only. Similar to the EU and France, state-level laws focus primarily on protecting children from explicit content.

If anything, the U.S. seems to be going in the opposite direction. President Trump’s legislative efforts have focused on deregulating and expanding the AI industry, and the federal government’s own approach to deepfakes is frankly bone-chilling. For example, the Pentagon is developing its own bespoke deepfake technology that will create fake social media characters indistinguishable from human beings that can influence discourse, public perception, and elections. “The land of the free” could really use some Danish common sense right about now.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.