Government to come up with regulations to tackle deepfakes, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister of Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw.

The government will begin work on a regulation dedicated to tackling deepfakes, Minister of Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw said on November 23 after a meeting with social media platforms, as concerns mount over the use of artificial intelligence tech to spread disinformation.

"We will start drafting the regulations today itself and within a very short timeframe, we will have a separate regulation for deepfakes," Vaishnaw said.

Vaishnaw said that the new regulation will have provisions of penalties on persons who upload or create such deepfakes. There are also likely to be provisions that lay down ways in which users can demarcate between deepfakes and original content.

"Users have a right to know what is natural and what is artificially generated. There is an agreement that there should be labelling and watermark. However, people have found ways to bypass watermarking and labelling," Vaishnaw said.

"We can bring the regulation in the form of new rules, new law or even an amendment to existing rules," Vaishnaw said, adding the government would hold a public consultation on the draft regulation.

Meeting again in December

Apart from that, within the next 10 days, the government would come up with clear actionable items on "four pillars" — detection (of deepfakes, misinformation), how to prevent the spread of misinformation, how to strengthen reporting mechanisms (in-app reporting mechanisms have to be strengthened) and increasing awareness, the minister said.

India’s fight against deepfakes

With these aims in mind, Vaishnaw said that the government would again meet social media companies in the first week of December, where follow-up actions on decisions taken on November 23 would be discussed.

The two sides also discussed AI-generated deepfakes use in advertisements, he said. "There was also a discussion on whether apps that create deepfakes should be disallowed, or there be some sort of control on such apps. We have asked to come with their thoughts," Vaishnaw said.

The companies shared the government's concern. "They have understood that this is not free speech, that this is something very harmful… they have understood the need for regulation," he added.

Post the completion of the meeting, Google in a statement to Moneycontrol said, " “We appreciate the opportunity to meet with the government, jointly with industry stakeholders, to discuss the need to develop safeguards around synthetic content and share how we are building tools and guardrails to address associated risks. We are committed to continue this collaboration and share our expertise and knowledge towards our collective goal of responsible AI development." A representative of Google had attended the meeting.

Deepfake is a piece of technology that leverages AI to alter a person's appearance, voice, or actions in a way that can be realistic and challenging to discern from authentic, unaltered content.

A few weeks ago, a digitally altered video of actor Rashmika Mandanna went viral, highlighting the worries posed by the easy availability of the technology that can alter reality.

As the video circulated widely, the ministry warned social media platforms that failure to remove deepfake content could attract penalty such as losing the so-called safe-harbour provisions.

The safe-harbour provision gives internet platforms legal immunity against content shared by users on the platforms.

Platforms had responded to the advisory and detailed how they deal with such content but the government felt they needed to do more, Vaishnaw had said.

That was also the reason that he met representatives of the social media platforms earlier in the day to “brainstorm” on the issue.

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As reported by Moneycontrol, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar will also meet social media platform representatives on November 24.