Giorgia Meloni seeks to trademark her voice to counter AI deepfakes

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has applied to the EU’s intellectual property office to trademark her voice, as she seeks to battle AI-generated deepfakes ahead of the country’s general elections next year.

A trademark application, with four-second voice samples of the prime minister declaring “Io sono Giorgia Meloni” — “I am Giorgia Meloni” — twice was filed on Monday and is currently under review.

The application puts Meloni at the forefront of legal battles by public figures around the globe over how to protect the timbre and intonation of their voices from being cloned and misused by AI-generated deepfakes.

While many entertainers, such as Taylor Swift and the Italian singer Giusy Ferreri, have applied to trademark their voices, Meloni is the first major politician known to have sought to do so.

Her move comes as Italy gears up for what is expected to be a bitterly fought election battle next year, in which Meloni will seek a second term while facing challenges from both the centre-left opposition and from a new far-right party led by former military general Roberto Vannacci.

“Italy is entering an election campaign that is going to be very bloody in many ways. It’s going to be nasty — it’s very clear,” said Giovanni Orsina, head of political science at Rome’s Luiss University.

“She is going to be the arch-enemy . . . from the right and from the left,” he said. “My simple take is that she decided that she is going to be targeted a lot, and she is doing what she can to defend herself.”

Italian social media has recently been awash with deepfake videos that falsely show the prime minister promoting investment schemes.

But concern has been mounting about the potential impact of deepfakes and disinformation in influencing the election contest, the first in Italy since rapid advances in generative AI have changed the information landscape.

While anti-disinformation activists have appealed to Italy’s political parties to eschew AI-generated disinformation in the campaign, not all have agreed. Clones of the prime minister’s voice have already been circulated in political advertisements which suggest voters should vote her out of office.

Guido Scorza, a lawyer and expert on new technologies, said trademarking her voice would give Meloni stronger tools to battle deepfakes circulating on social media as platforms are more responsive to complaints of trademark violations than other types of grievances.

“It is certainly easier to get content removed from a platform by claiming that the content contains your trademark, rather than by claiming that the content contains your personal data, represented by your voice,” Scorza said.

However, Gianni Riotta, director of the Italian Digital Media Observatory, said even trademark protection was unlikely to do much to stem the deepfake disinformation tide, even if the prime minister’s legal move would raise awareness of the issue.

“She has done a good thing to build a wall around her image and around her voice . . . but AI will go around it,” Riotta said.

“The scale is humongous — they [platforms] can take it down and it will pop up the next day,” he said. “It’s a game of whack-a-mole. The real merit of her action is to raise awareness. But it will not really be effective.”