We Need to Know How AI Firms Fight Deepfakes
The work done by the firms selling tools to make photorealistic content needs to come out in the open.
Everyone’s vulnerable.
Photographer: OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFPWhen people fret about artificial intelligence, it’s not just due to what they see in the future but what they remember from the past -- notably the toxic effects of social media. For years, misinformation and hate speech evaded Facebook and Twitter’s policing systems and spread around the globe. Now deepfakes are infiltrating those same platforms, and while Facebook is still responsible for how bad stuff gets distributed, the AI companies making them have a clean-up role too. Unfortunately, just like the social media firms before them, they’re carrying out that work behind closed doors.
I reached out to a dozen generative AI firms whose tools could generate photorealistic images, videos, text and voices, to ask how they made sure that their users complied with their rules.1 Ten replied, all confirming that they used software to monitor what their users churned out, and most said they had humans checking those systems too. Hardly any agreed to reveal how many humans were tasked with overseeing those systems.