China’s Cyberspace Administration has announced new rules on deepfakes in a bid to stop “unscrupulous” people taking advantage of the burgeoning technology. Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to alter and manipulate images, creating what appears to the blind eye as realistic depictions of people, usually via video. They first appeared in 2017, according to Scientific American, but have evolved as social media inhales content. The technology has the obvious potential to falsify and mislead audiences—leading China this week to issue regulations prohibiting the creation of such tech without the subject’s consent. In addition, “services that provide functions such as intelligent dialogue, synthesized human voice, human face generation, and immersive realistic scenes that generate or significantly change information content, shall be marked prominently to avoid public confusion,” the country’s Office of Central Cyberspace Affairs declared. The agency also implemented a host of other rules, claiming deepfakes are being “used by some unscrupulous people to produce, copy, publish, and disseminate illegal and harmful information, to slander and belittle others' reputation and honor.”
