China regulators held talks with Alibaba, Tencent, 9 more on deepfake tech

BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese regulators recently summoned 11 domestic technology companies including Alibaba Group, Tencent and ByteDance for talks on use of ‘deepfake’ technologies on their content platforms, stepping up scrutiny of the sector.

China’s cyberspace administrator said in a statement on Thursday that it and the public security ministry met with the companies to talk about potential problems with deepfake technologies. Kuaishou Technology and Xiaomi Corp also attended the meeting, it said.

All the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to create hyper-realistic but fake videos or audios where a person appears to say or do something they did not.