New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, a Democrat now running for Congress in Manhattan\u2019s 12th District, argues that one of the most alarming uses of artificial intelligence\u2014highly realistic deepfakes\u2014is less an unsolvable crisis than a failure to deploy an existing fix.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan we nerd out about deep fakes? Because this is a solvable problem and one that that I think most people are missing the boat on,\u201d Bores said on a recent episode of Bloomberg\u2019s Odd Lots podcast<\/a>, hosted by Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway.\u200b<\/p>\n Rather than training people to spot visual glitches in fake images or audio, Bores said policymakers and the tech industry should lean on a well-established cryptographic approach similar to what made online banking possible in the 1990s. Back then, skeptics doubted consumers would ever trust financial transactions over the internet. The widespread adoption of HTTPS\u2014using digital certificates to verify that a website is authentic\u2014changed that.\u200b<\/p>\n \u201cThat was a solvable problem,\u201d Bores said. \u201cThat basically same technique works for images, video, and for audio.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n Bores pointed to a \u201cfree open-source metadata standard\u201d known as C2PA<\/a>, short for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, which allows creators and platforms to attach tamper-evident credentials to files. The standard can cryptographically record whether a piece of content was captured on a real device, generated by AI, and how it has been edited over time.\u200b<\/p>\n \u201cThe challenge is the creator has to attach it and so you need to get to a place where that is the default option,\u201d Bores said.<\/p>\n In his view, the goal is a world where most legitimate media carries this kind of provenance data, and should \u201cyou see an image and it doesn\u2019t have that cryptographic proof, you should be skeptical.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n Bores said thanks to the shift from HTTP to HTTPS, consumers now instinctively know to distrust a banking site that lacks a secure connection. \u201cIt\u2019d be like going to your banking website and only loading HTTP, right? You would instantly be suspect, but you can still produce the images.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n AI has become a central political and economic issue, with deepfakes emerging as a particular concern<\/a> for elections, financial fraud, and online harassment. Bores said some of the most damaging cases involve non-consensual sexual images, including those targeting school-age girls, where even a clearly labeled fake can have real-world consequences. He argued that state-level laws banning deepfake pornography, including in New York<\/a>, now risk being constrained by a new federal push<\/a> to preempt state AI rules.\u200b<\/p>\n Bores\u2019s broader AI agenda has already drawn industry fire. He authored the Raise Act<\/a>\u2014a bill that aims to impose safety and reporting requirements on a small group of so-called \u201cfrontier\u201d AI labs, including Meta<\/a>, Google<\/a>, OpenAI, Anthropic and XAI\u2014which was just signed into law last Friday. The Raise Act requires those companies to publish safety plans, disclose \u201ccritical safety incidents,\u201d and refrain from releasing models that fail their own internal tests.\u200b<\/p>\n The measure passed the New York State Assembly with bipartisan support, but has also triggered a backlash from a pro-AI super PAC<\/a>, reportedly backed by prominent tech investors and executives, which has pledged millions of dollars to defeat Bores in the 2026 primary.\u200b<\/p>\n