‘AI godfather’, others urge more deepfake regulation in open letter

Artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, including one of the technology’s trailblazers Yoshua Bengio, have signed an open letter calling for more regulation around the creation of deepfakes, citing potential risks to society.

“Today, deepfakes often involve sexual imagery, fraud, or political disinformation. Since AI is progressing rapidly and making deepfakes much easier to create, safeguards are needed,” the group said in the letter, which was put together by Andrew Critch, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley.

Deepfakes are realistic yet fabricated images, audios and videos created by AI algorithms, and recent advances in the technology have made them more and more indistinguishable from human-created content.