A day after Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced a crackdown on the deepfake menace with new rules and regulations, Karnataka’s information technology and biotechnology minister, Priyank Kharge, has said that fake news and misinformation present a bigger threat than deepfakes. “The government of India has got its priorities wrong. Deepfakes are definitely a threat to democracy and society. But our priority now should be to combat misinformation, malinformation and fake news, which is a bigger threat. The Supreme Court, the prime minister and the Election Commission have expressed concern over fake news. But what has been done to address it? Nothing,” he told reporters in Bengaluru on Saturday. “The current threat at our doorstep is misinformation. Deepfake is a menace, it will be a menace and we should tackle it, but right now it is a very expensive thing to go after. The Karnataka government’s focus is on misinformation now.” In October, the Karnataka government floated an expression of interest asking for relevant bids to set up a fact-verification team, an analytics squad and a capacity development team to develop and lead public awareness campaigns. The proposed unit will have a committee consisting of police officers, technical experts, academics and public policy experts, among others. Union minister Vaishnaw, after chairing a meeting with social media platforms, artificial intelligence companies and industry bodies, said the government would come up with a “clear, actionable plan” to tackle deepfakes and misinformation in the next 10 days. He said the plan would have four key pillars: detection of deepfakes, their prevention by removing or reducing their virality, strengthening reporting mechanisms, and spreading awareness about the technology. Using artificial intelligence, deepfakes convincingly replace a person’s likeness with that of another, so that they appear to be someone else. These videos are often used maliciously or to spread disinformation. The authorities’ attention was recently drawn to the menace by a viral deepfake video of a woman resembling actress Rashmika Mandanna entering an elevator in revealing clothes. The original video featured a British Indian woman, Zara Patel. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called for understanding how artificial intelligence works and urged the media to spread awareness about deepfakes.
