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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

10/11/23 06:07 AM IST

The government issued a directive on deepfake

In News
  • Recently, the Indian government instructed “social media intermediaries” to remove morphed videos or deepfakes from their platforms within 24 hours of a complaint being filed, in accordance with a requirement outlined in the IT Rules 2021.
Deepfakes
  • Deepfakes have been around since 2017 and refer to videos, audios or images created using a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning.
  • The term became popular when a Reddit contributor used a publicly available AI-driven software to impose the faces of celebrities onto the bodies of people in pornographic videos.
  • Fast forward to 2023, deepfake tech, with the help of AI tools, allows semi- and unskilled individuals to create fake content with morphed audio-visual clips and images.
  • Researchers have observed a 230% increase in deepfake usage by cybercriminals and scammers, and have predicted the technology would replace phishing in a couple of years, Cyfrima.
  • Deepfake tech can be used to fictional material from scratch, unlike the morphing of an existing video seen in the case of Rashmika Mandanna.
Working of Technology
  • The technology involves modifying or creating images and videos using a machine learning technique called generative adversarial network (GAN).
  • The AI-driven software detects and learns the subjects’ movements and facial expressions from the source material and then duplicates these in another video or image.
  • To ensure that the deepfake created is as close to real as possible, creators use a large database of source images.
  • This is why more deepfake videos are created of public figures, celebrities and politicians.
  • The dataset is then used by one software to create a fake video, while a second software is used to detect signs of forgery in it.
  • Through the collaborative work of the two software, the fake video is rendered until the second software package can no longer detect the forgery.
  • This is known as “unsupervised learning”, when machine-language models teach themselves. The method makes it difficult for other software to identify deepfakes.
Laws in India
  • Deepfakes are fast becoming a problem and are used by threat actors to spread misinformation online.
  • However, there are laws which can be invoked to deter threat actors from creating deep fake videos.
  • India’s IT Rules, 2021 require that all content reported to be fake or produced using deep fake be taken down by intermediary platforms within 36 hours.
  • The Indian IT ministry has also issued notices to social media platforms stating that impersonating online was illegal under Section 66D of the Information Technology Act of 2000.
  • The IT Rules, 2021, also prohibit hosting any content that impersonates another person and requires social media firms to take down artificially morphed images when alerted.
Deepfake Voice
  • A voice deepfake is one that closely mimics a real person’s voice.
  • The voice can accurately replicate tonality, accents, cadence, and other unique characteristics of the target person.
  • People use AI and robust computing power to generate such voice clones or synthetic voices.
  • Sometimes it can take weeks to produce such voices, according to Speechify, a text-to-speech conversion app.
Other uses of Deepfake Videos
  • Apart from being used to create morphed images or videos to make fun, deepfakes have also been used to create pornographic content.
  • The technology could potentially be used to incite political violence, sabotage elections, unsettle diplomatic relations, and spread misinformation.
  • This technology can also be used to humiliate and blackmail people or attack organisations by presenting false evidence against leaders and public figures.
  • However, as is the case with all new tech, deepfakes have positive usages as well.
Laws around the world
  • Different countries around the globe have passed legislations to curb the misuse of deepfake tech.
  • The EU has issued guidelines for the creation of an independent network of fact-checkers to help analyse the sources and processes of content creation.
  • The EU’s code also requires tech companies including Google, Meta, and X to take measures in countering deepfakes and fake accounts on their platforms.
  • China has issued guidelines to service providers and users to ensure that any doctored content using deepfake tech is explicitly labelled and can be traced back to its source.
  • The United States of America has also introduced the bipartisan Deepfake Task Force Act to counter deepfake technology.
Source- The Hindu

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