A Fresh Outcry Against Deepfakes

February 29, 2024

This essay is the work of a dumb humanoid. No smart software required.

There is no surer way in 2024 to incur public wrath than to wrong Taylor Swift. The Daily Mail reports, “’Deepfakes Are a Huge Threat to Society’: More than 400 Experts and Celebrities Sign Open Letter Demanding Tougher Laws Against AI-Generated Videos—Weeks After Taylor Swift Became a Victim.” Will the super duper mega star’s clout spur overdue action? Deepfake porn has been an under-acknowledged problem for years. Naturally, the generative AI boom has made it much worse: Between 2022 and 2023, we learn, such content has increased by more than 400 percent. Of course, the vast majority of victims are women and girls. Celebrities are especially popular targets. Reporter Nikki Main writes:

“‘Deepfakes are a huge threat to human society and are already causing growing harm to individuals, communities, and the functioning of democracy,’ said Andrew Critch, AI Researcher at UC Berkeley in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and lead author on the letter. … The letter, titled ‘Disrupting the Deepfake Supply Chain,’ calls for a blanket ban on deepfake technology, and demands that lawmakers fully criminalize deepfake child pornography and establish criminal penalties for anyone who knowingly creates or shares such content. Signees also demanded that software developers and distributors be held accountable for anyone using their audio and visual products to create deepfakes.”

Penalties alone will not curb the problem. Critch and company make this suggestion:

“The letter encouraged media companies, software developers, and device manufacturers to work together to create authentication methods like adding tamper-proof digital seals and cryptographic signature techniques to verify the content is real.”

Sadly, media and tech companies are unlikely to invest in such measures unless adequate penalties are put in place. Will legislators finally act? Answer: They are having meetings. That’s an act.

Cynthia Murrell, March 29, 2024

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Government, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.