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‘One of America’s best allies’: Denmark receives high praise from US

US President Joe Biden expressed great praise for Denmark when he met with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in the White House.

Published: 6 June 2023 12:25 CEST
Joe Biden - Mette Frederiksen - Oval Office
US President Joe Biden (right) holds a bilateral meeting with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 5th, 2023. Photo by: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP

“I would like to share with everyone back home in Denmark how much praise there is for our country in the United States,” Frederiksen said after the meeting with President Biden, the Ritzau agency reported.

“We have capable defence forces, we are a reliable cooperation partner for the US, and our intelligence service was praised at a meeting I had earlier today with the head of the CIA,” she said.

Frederiksen emphasizes that a good reputation is not something that comes by itself.

“It is something that has been built up in Denmark over many years. This is thanks to our soldiers, intelligence service, cooperation between authorities, and political cooperation…

“We are a small country, but we can do so much, and that is also what the Americans praised us for today,” the prime minister said.

Biden: Denmark is one of America’s best allies

During their meeting at the White House on Monday, President Biden expressed great praise for Denmark, hailing it as one of America’s best allies.

“Denmark is one of our best allies and most faithful friends,” President Biden told Prime Minister Frederiksen at the beginning of their meeting.

Highlighting the alignment of values, President Biden specifically mentioned Denmark’s resolute stance against Russian aggression, particularly in their support for Ukraine and its people.

“We share many of the same values…One of these values ​​includes standing up against Russian aggression,” Biden said.

Among other things, he expressed gratitude to Prime Minister Frederiksen for the defence cooperation between Denmark and the US.

Furthermore, President Biden thanked Denmark for its commendable efforts in the realm of green transition.

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POLITICS

EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Denmark's culture minister said on Monday he hoped to use copyright law to bring an end to the controversial new trend of using deep fake videos in politics. Here's the background.

Published: 13 May 2024 15:13 CEST
EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, who represents the Moderate Party, warned that the technique, used in recent videos by the far-right Danish People’s Party and libertarian Liberal Alliance were the “top level of  a slippery slope that could end up undermining our trust in one another and making every political message, newspaper article and artistic publication a potential battleground for whether it is true or false”. 

Which parties have used deepfake video in campaigning? 

The Danish People’s Party at the end of last month issued an AI-generated deepfake video showing a spoof speech in which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to announce that Ascension Day, Easter and Christmas would no longer be public holidays, and that they would all be replaced by the Muslim festival of Eid as the country’s only holiday. 

This was a satirical reference to the government’s unpopular decision to abolish Store bededag, or “Great Prayer Day” as a public holiday. 

The video was clearly labelled as AI-generated, and ends with the Danish People’s Party’s leader, Morten Messeschmidt, awakening from a nightmare. 

The Liberal Alliance also released a video for Great Prayer Day, in which it used AI to turn Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S), Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) into eccentric-looking characters similar to those in the film’s of the US director Wes Anderson.

What kind of a stir have the videos caused in Denmark? 

Denmark’s Minister for Digitization, Marie Bjerre, who represents the centre-right Liberal Party, was sharply critical of the Danish People’s Party’s move. 

“I think it is way over the line for the Danish People’s Party to make a deepfake of a political opponent. I don’t think it’s proper either, and they shouldn’t do it,” she said. “It is also a problem for our democracy and society. Because with deepfakes, you can create material that looks extremely credible, which means that you can really spread misinformation. That is why it is also very serious that the Danish People’s Party is using deepfake for this kind of thing.” 

She said that such videos should only be allowed if the organisation making or distributing them have received consent from the person depicted. 

“If you want to make deepfakes of people, you must ask for permission. That will be the proper way to do it,” she said. 

Messerschmidt defended the video as light-hearted satire that at the same time educated Danish people about the new technology. 

“What we can do is show Danes how to use the new technologies and how to use them in a good way, like here in an entertaining and satirical way,” he said. 

Although Engel-Schmidt said he was concerned about the use of deepfake videos in politics, he acknowledged that the light-hearted videos released by the two parties were in themselves unlikely to deceive anyone.  

How does Engel-Schmidt hope to regulate such deepfake videos? 

He said he aimed to see whether copyright law could be used to regulate such videos.

Presumably this would mean seeing whether, under law, people have a right to the use of the own image, personality or voice, and can therefore forbid them from being used without permission. 

What do the experts say? 

Christiane Vejlø, one of Denmark’s leading experts on the relationship between people and technology, welcomed the government’s moves towards regulating deepfake videos, pointing to the impact they were already having on politics in other countries such as India and the US.

“There is no doubt that we will have to deal with this phenomenon. It has an impact on something that is most important to us in a democracy – namely trust and faith in other people,” she told Denmark’s public broadcaster DR.

In the current Indian election campaign, she said that deepfakes of popular Bollywood actors had been used to criticise the current government and encourage voters to vote for the opposition.

“In India and the USA we see politicians saying things they could never think of saying. We are getting an erosion of the truth,” she said. 

She said that even if the videos were clearly labelled as AI-generated, it did not necessarily make them unproblematic. 

“Even if you can see that it is a deepfake, it can still influence voters to think that there is something wrong with them [the politician] or that they look stupid,” she said. “We have a situation where another person is used as a digital hand puppet.” 

 
 

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