NuancedPerson

Mette Frederiksen

Prime Minister of Denmark

Denmark’s prime minister has driven her country to the top of Europe’s AI-adoption tables — championing AI across the public sector — while calling the technology “fascinating and terrifying” and pioneering Europe’s first law giving citizens copyright-style rights over their own face and voice against deepfakes.

Politician

Wikipedia

In her words

Even if it didn’t always hit the nail on the head, both in terms of the details of the government’s work programme and punctuation… it is both fascinating and terrifying what it is capable of.

— SBS News (AFP), 2023

What I have just read is not from me. Or any other human for that matter.

— The Local Denmark, 2023

Biography

Mette Frederiksen (born 1977) has led Denmark’s Social Democrats since 2015 and became the country’s youngest-ever prime minister in 2019. She has turned Denmark into an unlikely laboratory for confronting generative AI — first with theatre, then with law.

The ChatGPT speech

On May 31, 2023, closing the parliamentary session, Frederiksen read lawmakers several paragraphs praising her government’s record — then revealed the passage had been written by ChatGPT. The stunt was designed to make AI’s double edge visceral for legislators: capable enough to imitate a head of government, unreliable enough to fumble details of her own programme. Her verdict — “fascinating and terrifying” — became one of the most-quoted lines by any leader about generative AI.

Copyrighting the human face

The warning became policy after a deepfake of Frederiksen herself went viral in 2024, prompting Danish parties to forswear deepfakes of one another. In June 2025 her government secured a broad cross-party agreement — and in July 2025 tabled the bill — to amend Danish copyright law so that every citizen holds rights over their own face, voice and body: a right to demand removal of AI-generated imitations and to claim damages. Widely described as the first law of its kind in Europe, Denmark has pushed for the model to be adopted EU-wide.