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Open-access content Tanya Weaver —
Fri 14 Jun 2024
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With voters heading to the polls in just a matter of weeks, a Centre for Policy Studies report warns that with deepfake content already spreading rapidly, this could become the UK’s first deepfake election.
You may have come across some suspicious videos on social media platforms recently. Perhaps you have seen a satirical TikTok video showing Rishi Sunak saying that he could not care less “about energy bills being over £3,000”? Or maybe a video of the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting calling his Labour colleague Diane Abbott a “silly woman” on Politics Live?
A report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) called Facing Fakes warns that given the current general election campaign, we should be particularly wary of deepfakes aimed at spreading election misinformation and disinformation.
At E+T, we covered this topic in our March-April 2024 issue. The challenge is that the technology is there to very easily and cheaply create and spread realistic fake footage.
The CPS report warns against the inevitable knee-jerk reaction to electoral misinformation of regulating or banning deepfake technology. It argues that this technology does have valuable applications – for example, in the arts, journalism, documentaries and education.
“With three weeks before the UK heads to the polls, politicians and the public are right to be concerned about the threat deepfakes pose to democracy. However, the worst possible response would be a knee-jerk ban on the technology underpinning it,” said report author and CPS head of tech and innovation Matthew Feeney.
Rather than banning the technology used to create deepfakes, the report argues that the best approach to deepfake technology is to update existing laws, rather than create new regulations.
Feeney said: “There is no realistic way to turn back the tide – nor should we seek to. AI-generated imagery has enormous potential – in the creative industries, for example. Politicians should focus on updating existing legislation amd policing the content rather than the technology used to create it.”
The report calls on whichever party is in power after the election to build on the creation of the AI Safety Institute in 2023 – which established the UK as one of the world’s hubs for AI safety public policy research – via the creation of its very own deepfake taskforce.
“This would mean that the government is up to date on relevant threats and detection methods, as well as the state of deepfake detection technology. It would also ensure the British state is as prepared as any to tackle deepfake harms – because as the election campaign shows, we will soon be in a situation where voters may struggle to have confidence in the veracity of anything they see or hear on screen,” concluded Feeney.
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