Ahead of the upcoming election season in India, YouTube, known for its robust stance on generative AI, user safety, and content integrity, has reassured its vigilance against misinformation and deepfakes on the platform.
“A third of humanity is going to go to the polls in one way or the other this year. The advent of this (generative AI) technology will lead to amazing things but will also be a tool that will be in the hands of bad actors. Fundamentally, what this generative AI tool can do is it can make the cost of producing that type of content to effectively zero,” Neal Mohan told Moneycontrol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in Switzerland.
Mohan said YouTube plans to use AI technology to combat misinformation and deepfakes.
In November 2023, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) met with the social media platforms and gave them a deadline to align their terms of service and other policies with Indian laws and regulations so that they can effectively address the issue of deepfakes on these platforms.
Chandrasekhar mentioned that deepfakes could be subject to action under Rule 3(1)(b) of the current IT Rules, which mandates the removal of 12 types of content within 36 hours of user complaints being filed.
The same month, YouTube put out a blog that said, “Generative AI has the potential to unlock creativity on YouTube and transform the experience for viewers and creators on our platform. But just as important, these opportunities must be balanced with our responsibility to protect the YouTube community. All content uploaded to YouTube is subject to our community guidelines—regardless of how it’s generated—but we also know that AI will introduce new risks and will require new approaches.”
The platform said they will introduce updates that inform viewers when the content they’re seeing is synthetic.