New AI video tools increase worries of deepfakes ahead of elections
Al JazeeraThe video that OpenAI released to unveil its new text-to-video tool, Sora, has to be seen to be believed. “We already need tougher measures from social media platforms on that existing problem.” Several companies that offer generative AI image makers, including Midjourney, OpenAI and Microsoft, have policies that are supposed to prevent users from generating misleading pictures. “And it tells you how little, really, we’ve achieved in the last 10-15 years.” With potentially highly charged elections taking place in the European Union, the UK, India and the US this year, Big Tech companies have once again pledged, individually and collectively, to reduce the spread of this kind of disinformation and misinformation on their platforms. “Disinformation, hate speech, AI, whatever.” The confluence of unregulated AI and unregulated social media worries many in civil society, particularly since several of the largest social media platforms have cut back their “trust and safety” teams responsible for overseeing their response to disinformation and misinformation, hate speech and other harmful content. “We are in a doubly concerning situation, where spreaders of election disinformation have new tools and capabilities available to them, while social media companies, in many cases, seem to be deliberately limiting themselves in terms of the capabilities they have for acting on election disinformation,” CCDH’s Hood said.