AI Chiefs Say Deepfakes a Threat to World, Call For Regulation

Artificial intelligence industry chiefs have issued an urgent call for tough regulations on the creation of deepfakes, saying they pose a serious and destabilising risk to societies across the globe.

Experts and industry executives, including one of the technology’s trailblazers Yoshua Bengio, have signed an open letter recommending fully criminalising deepfake child pornography, and the creation or spreading of harmful deepfakes.

“Today, deepfakes often involve sexual imagery, fraud, or political disinformation. Since AI is progressing rapidly and making deepfakes much easier to create, safeguards are needed,” the group said in the letter, which was put together by Andrew Critch, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley.

Deepfakes are realistic yet fabricated images, audios and videos created by AI algorithms, and recent advances in the technology have made them more and more indistinguishable from human-created content.

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The letter, titled ‘Disrupting the Deepfake Supply Chain,’ had been signed by over 400 individuals from various industries including academia, entertainment and politics.

Signatories included Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, two former Estonian presidents, researchers at Google DeepMind and a researcher from OpenAI.

Ensuring AI systems do not harm society has been a priority for regulators since Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT in late 2022, which wowed users by engaging them in human-like conversation and performing other tasks.

There have been multiple warnings from prominent individuals about AI risks, notably a letter signed by Elon Musk last year that called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model.

• Reuters with additional editing by Sean O’Meara

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Sean O’Meara

Sean O’Meara is an Editor at Asia Financial. He has been a newspaper man for more than 30 years, working at local, regional and national titles in the UK as a writer, sub-editor, page designer and print editor. A football, cricket and rugby fan, he has a particular interest in sports finance.