The growing menace of deepfakes & how govt seeks to counter it with AI content labelling, Pg17.

Key Highlights:

• The Centre has proposed draft rules mandating the labelling of AI-generated content on social media platforms to counter the misuse of deepfakes.
• Social media platforms will need to obtain a declaration from users regarding whether uploaded content is synthetically generated information.
• Platforms allowing AI content creation must label or embed such content with a permanent unique metadata or identifier.
• Visual content labels should cover at least 10% of the surface area, and audio content labels should cover the initial 10% of the duration.

Detailed Insights:

• The draft amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, aim to address the growing threat of deepfakes and synthetically generated information.
• Failure to comply with the new rules may result in platforms losing legal immunity from third-party content, extending their responsibility to verify user declarations and prevent the publication of unlabeled AI-generated content.
• The proposed amendments define synthetically generated information as content artificially created or altered using computer resources in a manner that appears reasonably authentic or true.
• Companies like Meta and Google already have some form of AI labelling on their platforms, but enforcement remains inconsistent and largely reactive.
• India's proposed amendments aim to proactively verify AI content by deploying suitable technological measures, rather than relying on user declarations or external intimation.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Deepfake: A video or audio recording that has been digitally altered to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something they did not.
• Synthetically Generated Information: Content artificially created or altered using computer resources to appear authentic.
• Metadata: Data that provides information about other data, such as the author, date, and time of creation.