Three weeks out from polling day, a new report warns of the dangers of ‘realistic fake footage that is cheap to create and spread across the internet’ impacting the UK general election.
A number of deepfake videos have appeared in recent weeks, with high-profile politicians targeted in an attempt to spread false information. In one, Wes Streeting was shown apparently calling his Labour colleague Diane Abbott a ‘silly woman’ on Politics Live. Another video falsely showed Labour’s North Durham candidate, Luke Akehurst, using crude language to mock constituents.
‘Facing Fakes’ by Matthew Feeney, Head of Tech and Innovation at the Centre for Policy Studies, warns that technological advances have made such ‘deepfakes’ easier and cheaper than ever to produce. However, the paper warns against the inevitable kneejerk reaction to such technology, citing the precedent of other recent attempts to regulate new technologies.
The report recommends that the Government should focus on updating existing laws and regulations, adhering to the existing principle that it is the content itself which should be legal or illegal rather than the means of its creation. However, it urges the Government to expand on Britain’s existing world-leading work on AI safety by setting up a deepfake taskforce as part of its AI safety efforts, as well as sponsoring further deepfake detection contests and supporting the development of watermarking technologies.
