European Union allowing the use of deepfakes

While I'm not sure where I stand on this ruling, there's a flaw in this form of reasoning. Namely, I don't think this is merely (or at least usefully) reducible to 'efficiently editing a series of frames'. The ability to do so has emergent effects, and that should be taken seriously!

Quantity has quality of its own. Scale and efficiency matters.

Mass surveillance with million cameras and face recognition is the same as operative with a camera, films that get developed and then processed by an overworked analyst using drawers with physical files. Just a lot faster.

When has that not been the case? There is no obligation to label your centurion helmet or novelty photoshop of the presidentbwalking down the white house lawn without pants as fake.

The actual misdeeds themselves are the crimes like false accusations.

Those get-outs are pretty standard boilerplate. They're there even when it comes to human rights - as otherwise certain actions by the state would not be permitted (for example jail).

> There's huge room for bending these rules to disseminate fake news to attack opponents, falsely accuse innocent people of crimes or save others from crimes they have committed

I'm not sure how well that would work in court. Which is where you'd go if you think the government in your country has broken the law, isn't that the process?

"Does the above mean that the powers can create deepfakes, but given certain conditions, they're not obligated to reveal their nature?"

There's a similar, obvious loophole, in the statement from the released EU doc:

"users of AI systems who use the same to generate or manipulate image, ..."

Basically limiting the regulatory concern to the 'use of AI' in the process.

So what if 'AI' is not used?

If you create 'fakes' manually - by some non-AI process, by dubbing over a voice - that's cool then?

Because if that statement were used in a legal context, then the notion of 'users of AI' seems fairly explicit.

I've been downvoted into oblivion for the the very clear observation: it's nary impossible to legislate using specific technologies, especially as they are ill-defined.

The issue here is not 'AI' - it's the 'misrepresentation' of individuals, and the legal precedent has nothing whatsoever to do with the means of reproduction.

If you 'fake' a representation of a celeb or public figure, and the EU wants to make that illegal for whatever reason, then that's fine, but it has nothing to do with AI.

The legislators are misinterpreting the nature of this new branch of computing.

This is pretty concerning, if not scary:

> “users of AI systems who use the same to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content that appreciably resembles existing persons, objects, places or other entities or events and would falsely appear to a reasonable person to be authentic [or truthful], shall disclose that the content has been artificially created or manipulated. This obligation shall not apply where necessary for the purposes of safeguarding public security [and other prevailing public interests] or for the exercise of a legitimate right or freedom of a person and subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third parties.”.

So, if "for the public good", it's all good for government and others to fake all they want without disclosing that manipulation has taken place.

It depends on the text of the regulation, it may be written in a way that bans all uses not explicitly allowed, which I believe is common for EU regulations.

Funny you should mention political satire. Is it protected speech to show a to-be mob a deepfake video of a political rival in a secret meeting saying that they enjoy causing suffering of the weak?

This is just one example. People are very easily manipulated and these days tribes are operating in a post-fact era manner. The prospect of readily available deepfakes makes this problem much worse.

There is a phenomenon of minor celebrities making a porn tape to cash in on their 15 minutes of fame, but sometimes they hire an actor to stand in for them, and it is clearly a different person. I wonder if one place where the displayed person will consent, is using deepfake technology to better make the actor look like the celebrity.

If anything, this is quite welcome as it allows for plausible deniability if one's private nudes were leaked or other such matters.

Just like a huge percentage of the population doesn't believe that the Covid pandemic is a hoax or that masks are useless against it?

Oh, the eternal optimism...

I highly doubt that's an comparable comparison.

But anyway, even today people have hard time to distinguish unprocessed photo from one that was "enhanced" for social media purposes so imagine how hard for them will be to tell if video material was real or a generated one; hell, in time probably even experts will have hard time to tell the difference.

I can hardly see any benefits in deepfakes technology - there are more obvious threats that might affect our everyday life, our society and how we might perceive the truth in the future.

Our brains are probably also only a lot of mathematics.

The border between intelligence and non-intelligence is either a very wide grey area with bricks on one side and Einstein on the other, or it's a well-defined line and much closer to the bricks than to us.

The exceptions are odd and in my view indicate that some government agencies are already using deepfakes for questionable purposes or at least want to have the option to do so.

Other than that, I agree. Having to clearly label deepfakes is enough, and makes the use of deepfakes for deception illegal (except for the ominous exceptions).

So all movies with CGI now need a disclaimer?

> How would you enforce that?

The same way every law is enforced - by prosecuting those who break it. Theft or murder being unlawful doesn't stop them from happening either, yet I think we can still agree that it's indeed very useful to have them be crimes, no?