Davos 2024: YouTube will be 'incredibly vigilant' in combating deepfakes, says Neal Mohan

Neal Mohan, CEO, Youtube

YouTube will be "incredibly vigilant" in combating misinformation and deepfakes, chief Neal Mohan told Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in Switzerland.

These comments come ahead of a busy election season in India and several other countries, where governments are formulating strategies to regulate deepfakes and other artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content on the web.

"A third of humanity is going to go to the polls in one way or the other this year. The advent of this (generative AI) technology will lead to amazing things but will also be a tool that will be in the hands of bad actors. Fundamentally, what this generative AI tool can do is it can make the cost of producing that type of content to effectively zero," the YouTube CEO said.

Mohan said they plan to use the advances in AI technology to combat misinformation and deepfakes.

On January 16, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the government would be notifying stricter Information Technology (IT) Rules in the next seven days to address the issue of deepfakes on social media platforms. This is after the government has issued multiple advisories to social media companies to remove such content from their platforms.

In November 2023, YouTube said that creators would soon have to disclose if they upload altered or synthetic content that "appear realistic", including videos using AI tools.

In the coming months, the platform will enable creators to indicate that their videos contain altered or synthetic material to realistically depict events that never happened or show people saying or doing something they didn't actually do.

YouTube will also enable people to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic or altered content that simulates an identifiable person, including their face or voice, using its privacy request process, it had said.

Earlier this month, YouTube updated its cyberbullying and harassment policies to crack down on content that “realistically simulates” deceased minors and other victims of crimes narrating their deaths or the violence they faced, starting January 16.

These developments come as YouTube gears up to introduce its AI products on the platform. In September, it unveiled a suite of generative AI products and tools targeted at creators.

This includes the ability to create AI-generated video or image backgrounds for their short videos by just typing an idea into a prompt, helping creators come up with new video ideas, find music tracks for their videos and reach new audiences through features such as automatic dubbing.

"A combination of being both bold and responsible is going to be our approach here. It will of course apply to elections in places like India and throughout the world, but also more generally" Mohan said.