Washington: The White House has pitched for legislation to protect people from deepfakes generated by AI after the spread of fake photos of Taylor Swift went viral on social media this week.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the incident “alarming” and said it’s among the AI issues the Joe Biden administration has been prioritising, reports The Verge.
“This is very alarming. And so, we’re going to do what we can to deal with this issue. So, while social media companies make their own independent decisions about content management, we believe they have an important role to play in enforcing, enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation, and non-consensual, intimate imagery of real people,” said Jean-Pierre at a news briefing, reports Reuters.
Jean-Pierre added that the US Congress should take legislative action.
The deepfake images of the singer went viral on X, with one reaching 45 million views before being taken down. The platform was slow to respond, with the post staying up for around 17 hours.
In a statement, X said that "posting Non-Consensual Nudity (NCN) images is strictly prohibited on X and we have a zero-tolerance policy towards such content."
Jean-Pierre said social media platforms “have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules” to prevent this type of material from spreading.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has said that the explicit Swift AI fakes are “alarming and terrible”. In an interview with NBC Nightly News, Nadella said that “I think it behooves us to move fast on this.”
According to The Indian Express, 404 Media traced the AI deepfake images of Swift to a specific Telegram group dedicated to abusive images of women. One of the tools that the group uses is a free Microsoft text-to-image generator.
Deepfake refers to images or videos created using adversarial networks that are trained on one face and replace it on another body. Instead of using AI to add the singer’s face onto a real pornographic image, this one was made from scratch using generative AI.
Swift is reportedly weighing possible legal action against the website responsible for generating the deepfakes.
With agency inputs