Former News Channel 5 Meteorologist Bree Smith backs Tennessee bill to criminalize deepfakes

Former NewsChannel 5 meteorologist Bree Smith said she was “devastated” when imposter social media accounts claiming to be her began to solicit personal information and money from fans last fall. 

“These accounts used fake pictures that showed my face on someone else’s semi-nude body. They also made fake videos that used my face and my name to try to convince people it was the real me,” Smith testified in the Tennessee House Criminal Justice Subcommittee Wednesday. 

Smith is now pushing lawmakers to outlaw non-consensual “deepfakes” — videos, photographs and audio files created by artificial intelligence that depict things that did not occur without consent from the people depicted.

In the last several months, Smith said dozens — if not hundreds — of imposter accounts have posed as her, posting about fake contests and direct-messaging fans and friends asking for help, promising sexual acts and soliciting money for hotel stays.

“I felt humiliated and scared,” Smith said. “I didn’t know what to do or how to fight it, and I didn’t know how to protect the viewers and the people that trusted me online from being subject to this kind of extortion.”

A bill brought by Nashville Democratic Rep. Jason Powell would make it a felony to publish, or threaten to publish, fake AI-images with the intent to damage a person’s reputation or cause them harm. If the images are deemed likely to facilitate violence or interfere with governmental conduct, the creator would face additional jail time. 

The bill would also allow victims to file civil suits against the deepfake creator and seek a restraining order or injunction to prevent the continued display of the images or videos.

Smith left her job of nine years at NewsChannel 5 in January. The station told The Tennessean in January that it tried to negotiate to renew Smith’s contract, but those negotiations were not successful.

The 43-year-old mother of two said she has tried without much success to report the accounts to various social media platforms, but “it’s like whack-a-mole.”

“As a public servant, this has devastated my life’s work,” Smith said. “I have been a meteorologist in Middle Tennessee for nine years, and it is not a glamorous job. I did what I did because I believed that I could help people. I believed that when severe weather was happening, I could save people’s lives, and so then to have my face, my reputation, the trust that this community put in me now being weaponized to hurt the very people that I spent my entire career trying to protect — I mean, it essentially stole what I’ve worked so hard to create.”

The committee voted 7-0 on Wednesday to move the bill to the House Judiciary Committee for consideration.