‘Leading figures in AI call for increased regulation of deepfakes in public letter’
A group of artificial intelligence experts and industry leaders, including pioneering figure Yoshua Bengio, have penned an open letter advocating for increased regulation on the development of deepfake technology due to its potential societal dangers.
“Today’s deepfakes often involve sexual imagery, fraud or political disinformation. As AI advances rapidly and makes deepfakes much easier to create, safeguards are needed,” the group said in the letter, which was drafted by AI researcher Andrew Critch. researcher at UC Berkeley.
Deepfakes are realistic images, sounds and videos created by artificial intelligence algorithms, and recent advances in technology have made them increasingly indistinguishable from human-generated content.
The letter, titled “Disrupting the Deepfake Supply Chain,” includes recommendations to regulate deepfakes, including outright criminalization of deepfake child pornography, criminal penalties for individuals who knowingly create or promote harmful deepfakes, and requiring AI companies to ban their products. from creating harmful deep fakes.
By Wednesday morning, more than 400 people from various industries, including academia, entertainment and politics, had signed the letter.
The signatories were Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, two former presidents of Estonia, Google DeepMind researchers and an OpenAI researcher.
Ensuring AI systems don’t 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.
Prominent people have received several warnings about AI risks, most notably a letter signed by Elon Musk last year demanding a six-month pause in the development of systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model.
