[HN Gopher] European Union allowing the use of deepfakes
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European Union allowing the use of deepfakes
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-04-15 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.lukaszolejnik.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.lukaszolejnik.com)
| remix2000 wrote:
| That's fine, people will probably just gain immunity to that,
| like when they realized that train on a movie is not gonna run
| over them, or when they realized that the king of Sweden isn't
| actually wearing silly hats.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| If anything, this is quite welcome as it allows for plausible
| deniability if one's private nudes were leaked or other such
| matters.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Agreed on this point. Revenge porn is devastating in that
| there is no way to solve the problem. Deniability will give
| small something back to victims.
| oblio wrote:
| Just like a huge percentage of the population doesn't believe
| that the Covid pandemic is a hoax or that masks are useless
| against it?
|
| Oh, the eternal optimism...
| laurent92 wrote:
| President of France and all its government said during the
| entire first lockdown that masks were useless against Covid.
| People would behave a teeeent bit better if they didn't know
| they were blatantly lied in their faces as a common way of
| governing.
| jariel wrote:
| They need to completely reconsider their approach because
| regulating 'AI' really doesn't make any sense, and there's hardly
| a way to even define in legal terms what 'AI' is.
|
| Instead - they should focus on applied outcomes that may be
| affected and signal their intent to monitor events in those areas
| and regulate only if necessary.
|
| 'Deep fakes' illustrates this quite well. If someone can manually
| photoshop a 'fake' would that be legal?
|
| What if they used tools that leveraged AI?
|
| Does it have to be 'automatically generated' to be AI?
|
| If there were to be legislation it would be around
| 'misrepresentation' in this case, and should meaningfully be
| applied to the outcome, not the technology.
|
| They mention surveillance and other scenarios, again, the 'means'
| really doesn't matter that much - what matters is privacy, where
| and when people are monitored, etc..
|
| We use considerably amounts of real world data to build models
| for a variety of things - whether it's spreadsheets, algorithms,
| Machine Learning or Neural Networks, or more likely a variety of
| those things together ... doesn't matter. What matters is what
| people are doing with it and how citizens are affected.
| canjobear wrote:
| It's weird to me that they even considered banning it. How would
| you enforce that?
| qayxc wrote:
| > How would you enforce that?
|
| The same way every law is enforced - by prosecuting those who
| break it. Theft or murder being unlawful doesn't stop them from
| happening either, yet I think we can still agree that it's
| indeed very useful to have them be crimes, no?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Can't stop it, and there is some reasonable use cases. So why not
| prohibit missuse by other legislation? Defamation laws already
| exist.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > shall disclose that the content has been artificially created
| or manipulated.
|
| That's it. That's the condition. (With some exceptions there but
| anyway)
|
| It's a non-issue pretty much.
| 13415 wrote:
| The exceptions are odd and in my view indicate that some
| government agencies are already using deepfakes for
| questionable purposes or at least want to have the option to do
| so.
|
| Other than that, I agree. Having to clearly label deepfakes is
| enough, and makes the use of deepfakes for deception illegal
| (except for the ominous exceptions).
| FredPret wrote:
| So all movies with CGI now need a disclaimer?
| jhgb wrote:
| They already have it, don't they? In the form of "Special
| Effects by XYZ" the credits, I believe.
| raverbashing wrote:
| No, because "unless this is obvious from the circumstances
| and the context of use,"" as it says in TFA
|
| But to a point, photoshopped images also require a disclaimer
| in some countries (e.g. France)
| zajio1am wrote:
| Why should not? Deepfake technology is just a tool, that has both
| legitimate and illegitimate usages. Can be used with consent of
| displayed person, or e.g. in political satire.
| willis936 wrote:
| Funny you should mention political satire. Is it protected
| speech to show a to-be mob a deepfake video of a political
| rival in a secret meeting saying that they enjoy causing
| suffering of the weak?
|
| This is just one example. People are very easily manipulated
| and these days tribes are operating in a post-fact era manner.
| The prospect of readily available deepfakes makes this problem
| _much_ worse.
| lozenge wrote:
| That's covered by the proposed regulations(it wouldn't be
| allowed).
|
| It's no use banning "deepfake technology"- you can't outlaw
| maths.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think the problem can get worse. Or at
| least, it won't get worse because of more information. The
| capacity of the human mind for rationalization is already
| essentially infinite, people are manipulated because they
| want to be manipulated.
|
| It's pretty much to be expected, the world is really quite
| complicated and without a drive for consensus independent
| thought would lead you astray a hundred times before leading
| you to water.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| There is a phenomenon of minor celebrities making a porn tape
| to cash in on their 15 minutes of fame, but sometimes they hire
| an actor to stand in for them, and it is clearly a different
| person. I wonder if one place where the displayed person will
| consent, is using deepfake technology to better make the actor
| look like the celebrity.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| I wonder how they define "Artificial Intelligence". Is that the
| same term being thrown around by Silicon Valley grifters (hello
| HN readers!)? Can I just claim my "video manipulation software"
| is just a lot of mathematics, and it's not "intelligent"? Are
| they going to add the Turing test into legislation?
|
| It would be funny if in the future some stupid software can be
| classified "intelligent" because some stupid bureaucrats made a
| dumb definition...
| FredPret wrote:
| Our brains are probably also only a _lot_ of mathematics.
|
| The border between intelligence and non-intelligence is either
| a very wide grey area with bricks on one side and Einstein on
| the other, or it's a well-defined line and much closer to the
| bricks than to us.
| ORioN63 wrote:
| Great!
|
| 1. What would be the point of a deepfake prohibition? The tech is
| here and it can be useful. Prohibition only leads to further
| issues legislating against actual bad actors.
|
| 2. People like images/videos, people mostly trust images/videos,
| but for that same reason they're commonly the best tools to
| deceive and deceit. Here's to hoping that deepfakes will increase
| their scrutiny and awareness.
| 3np wrote:
| This is pretty concerning, if not scary:
|
| > "users of AI systems who use the same to generate or
| manipulate image, audio or video content that appreciably
| resembles existing persons, objects, places or other entities
| or events and would falsely appear to a reasonable person to be
| authentic [or truthful], shall disclose that the content has
| been artificially created or manipulated. This obligation shall
| not apply where necessary for the purposes of safeguarding
| public security [and other prevailing public interests] or for
| the exercise of a legitimate right or freedom of a person and
| subject to appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms
| of third parties.".
|
| So, if "for the public good", it's all good for government and
| others to fake all they want without disclosing that
| manipulation has taken place.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Weird exceptions indeed. I don't know in which case it would
| apply.
|
| To me, it just sounds like this is a "low priority" law.
|
| For example, if you are allowed to use deception, for example
| in the context of a criminal investigation, or if a citizen
| needs to protect himself, then the new law doesn't change
| that fact.
| openfuture wrote:
| It's incredible that "safeguarding public security" is
| unqualified, there should be a law that specifies exactly how
| such things are evaluated or it should be forbidden to put
| such loopholes in law.
|
| My respect for law as a field of study is starting to be
| around the same as my respect for finance as a legitimate
| business.
|
| The people who actually study how to write law are
| mathematicians (including to various extent the applied
| mathematicians, which range from programmers through
| engineers and all the way to the probability theorists a.k.a.
| "scientists").
|
| One day I hope we can clear up the misunderstanding in our
| society about the extent of our reliance on mathematics and
| stop acting as if "we cannot engineer solutions to social
| problems" - these glorified scammers that write the law and
| run the economy are the cancer that is killing everything.
| squarefoot wrote:
| There's something in that text that I find worrying:
|
| "... shall disclose that the content has been artificially
| created or manipulated. This obligation shall not apply where
| necessary for the purposes of safeguarding public security [and
| other prevailing public interests] or for the exercise of a
| legitimate right or freedom of a person and subject to
| appropriate safeguards for the rights and freedoms of third
| parties.".
|
| Does the above mean that the powers can create deepfakes, but
| given certain conditions, they're not obligated to reveal their
| nature? There's huge room for bending these rules to disseminate
| fake news to attack opponents, falsely accuse innocent people of
| crimes or save others from crimes they have committed. These laws
| will be abused, that's for certain, because they look exactly
| like they were thought with abuse in mind.
| jariel wrote:
| "Does the above mean that the powers can create deepfakes, but
| given certain conditions, they're not obligated to reveal their
| nature?"
|
| There's a similar, obvious loophole, in the statement from the
| released EU doc:
|
| "users of AI systems who use the same to generate or manipulate
| image, ..."
|
| Basically limiting the regulatory concern to the 'use of AI' in
| the process.
|
| So what if 'AI' is not used?
|
| If you create 'fakes' manually - by some non-AI process, by
| dubbing over a voice - that's cool then?
|
| Because if that statement were used in a legal context, then
| the notion of 'users of AI' seems fairly explicit.
|
| I've been downvoted into oblivion for the the very clear
| observation: it's nary impossible to legislate using specific
| technologies, especially as they are ill-defined.
|
| The issue here is not 'AI' - it's the 'misrepresentation' of
| individuals, and the legal precedent has nothing whatsoever to
| do with the means of reproduction.
|
| If you 'fake' a representation of a celeb or public figure, and
| the EU wants to make that illegal for whatever reason, then
| that's fine, but it has nothing to do with AI.
|
| The legislators are misinterpreting the nature of this new
| branch of computing.
| IanCal wrote:
| Those get-outs are pretty standard boilerplate. They're there
| even when it comes to human rights - as otherwise certain
| actions by the state would not be permitted (for example jail).
|
| > There's huge room for bending these rules to disseminate fake
| news to attack opponents, falsely accuse innocent people of
| crimes or save others from crimes they have committed
|
| I'm not sure how well that would work in court. Which is where
| you'd go if you think the government in your country has broken
| the law, isn't that the process?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| When has that not been the case? There is no obligation to
| label your centurion helmet or novelty photoshop of the
| presidentbwalking down the white house lawn without pants as
| fake.
|
| The actual misdeeds themselves are the crimes like false
| accusations.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Title should say "European Union not prohibiting deepfakes"
| Wohlf wrote:
| It depends on the text of the regulation, it may be written in
| a way that bans all uses not explicitly allowed, which I
| believe is common for EU regulations.
| [deleted]
| superkuh wrote:
| This is a pleasant surprise. If photo editing is legal (and it
| obviously should be) then editing the frames of videos should be
| legal. Modern technology just allows for individual people to
| feasibly do large number of frames.
|
| It's good to democratize what was previously the domain of only
| institutions and corporations. As for the claims of ownership on
| derived works from public data, well, the only reason that's even
| being entertained as a valid legal claim is technological
| ignorance and the catchy name "deepfakes".
| sewercake wrote:
| While I'm not sure where I stand on this ruling, there's a flaw
| in this form of reasoning. Namely, I don't think this is merely
| (or at least usefully) reducible to 'efficiently editing a
| series of frames'. The ability to do so has emergent effects,
| and that should be taken seriously!
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