In too deep

As people who care about truth, we’re as worried as anyone about a world awash in malicious deepfakes — whereby, aided by ever-advancing technology, mischief-makers create videos, indistinguishable from real ones, putting words into people’s mouths and treating their bodies like puppets.

When such deepfakes put women’s faces on naked bodies to make them seem to perform, without consent, in pornography, they morph into outright harassment.

But in the name of fighting the scourge, Albany lawmakers are on the cusp of making sweeping changes to New York’s right-of-publicity statute that would thoroughly confuse long-settled laws, making it all but impossible for publishers and broadcasters to know when they are allowed to use celebrities’ images.

This would chill speech and set back First Amendment rights.

Under Sen. Diane Savino and Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein’s bill, any living person

could recoup damages if their “persona” is used for any commercial purpose. So too would such rules apply — for the first time — to any New Yorker dead for 40 years or less.

Stricter rules would govern the use of any “digital replica.” There are exceptions, and exceptions to the exceptions. This is a messy piece of legislation.

Current law, mind you, already contains strong protections; New York aims to reinvent the wheel. And then put that reinvented wheel on a slippery slope.

We don’t know for sure exactly what forms of expressive conduct would be suddenly sanctioned in the global media capital, but neither do the authors of this legislation. Lawyers wait with bated breath to argue over the bill’s vague language.

If this passes, we’re going to order up a deepfake of state lawmakers doing something they’d never ever do: hold hearings to produce a law that’s smart and focused, not sloppy and overbroad.