India demands beta AIs secure government permission before going public

India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued an advisory last Friday stipulating AI technology still in development acquire government permission prior to release to the Indian public. "The use of under-testing/unreliable Artificial Intelligence model(s) /LLM/Generative AI, software(s) or algorithm …

[Pascal Monett]

"labelling deepfakes with permanent unique metadata or other identifiers"

I really wonder how that will work reliably. I imagine that some kind of watermark will be visible on the video, likely not in the middle. So, if it is at the bottom or along a side, anyone who cares can just crop the watermark out and republish the video without it. If the watermark is on the top, that would likely risk cropping the person's head and that would rather severely impact the efficiency of the deepfake, so maybe the watermark should be on the top.

But, given that I have no idea what the identifiers are supposed to be, I might just be spouting nonsense.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "labelling deepfakes with permanent unique metadata or other identifiers"

In most cases, deepfakes of living people will already be illegal under various applicable laws, so I'm guessing anybody creating them isn't going to be too fussed about complying with new laws anyway. Whether it's a watermark or more subtle forms of steganography, these would be relatively simple to remove - especially if you configure a relatively simple AI service to remove it.

I work for a regulator, non-compliant stuff is an endless problem for us, and despite having laws and standards that say what is permitted, plus the power to seize dodgy stuff, we play a continuous game of whack-a-mole against companies who choose not to comply with the rules. As they're invariably outside the UK there's limits to what we can do to track back to the source, and the big tech firms remove content or listings when the authorities complain, but do nothing to stop new ones being added. The EU I believe has similar thoughts to the Indian authorities, I daresay the Anglophone countries will go in a similar direction.

We could lock things down (products, software, services, information) to a point where non-compliance is absolutely minimal, and attempts to evade the regulations more likely to be detected than not, but that would be a very different world to the one most Western citizens live in. I foresee AI regulators will be created, and do things to prove their worth, without being fast enough or comprehensive enough to actually deal with the issues they were created for.