China clamps down on deepfakes with new regulations

GANs N' Roses: Stable, Controllable, Diverse Image to Image Translation
(Image credit: GANs N' Roses: Stable, Controllable, Diverse Image to Image Translation)

Deepfakes are a problem. That has become clear over the years with people using artificially intelligent deep synthesis programs to scam, defame, and generally spread misinformation. China has made a step in tackling the issue of deepfakes with a new law that requires anything made with the use of deep synth tech to be tagged as such.

The regulations are laid out in a recent announcement from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and even the Ministry of Public Security, collectively (via zdnet). It goes into detail about the worries that have led up to the law being passed and denotes a very long list of the affected technologies.

"While deep synthesis services meet user needs and improve user experience, they are also used by some unscrupulous people to produce, copy, publish, and disseminate illegal information, slander, belittle the reputation and honor of others," it says (machine translated).

And it's not just facial replacement that's being targeted by the new regulations. It also relates to any kind of face manipulation, gesture manipulation, and anything involving deep learning, virtual reality, text/audio/image generation via synthetic algorithms, virtual scenes, and even anything generated using text-to-speech technology will need to be tagged as such. The list goes on. It makes sense as advancements have made it extremely difficult to detect deepfake content with the naked eye.

Of course, there is tech meant to detect deepfakes, such as Intel's FakeCatcher which works with around 96% accuracy, but it goes without saying that we shouldn't need to resort to such tactics just to confirm whether something is real. The average person on Facebook isn't going to bother running everything they scroll past through detection apps, and that certainly has the potential to disturb what the announcement calls a "good ecology of cyberspace."

Your next upgrade

(Image credit: Future)

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest

Honestly, it's a wonder deepfakes have been allowed to go unchecked in China for this long. As for the US, the IACP's Police Chief Magazine explains that "Due to a lack of awareness, deepfake-specific laws exist in only a few states." Election influencing deepfakes are banned in Texas, deepfake porn is disallowed in Virginia, and California has banned "malicious deepfakes within 60 days of an election and nonconsensual deepfake pornography." Which although it's a step in the right direction, it's nowhere near as thorough as China's revised take on the phenomenon.

Part of the reasoning behind bringing in these regulations, the announcement notes, is to "promote the standardized development of in-depth synthesis services." Whether the regulations will result in a stifling of creativity alongside it remains to be seen. I think we can all get behind laws against nonconsensual deepfake pornography, at the very least.

Katie Wickens
Hardware Writer

Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.

Read more
Nvidia headquarters
Nvidia denounces Biden administration's 'rigged' and 'misguided' new AI chip export restrictions
America to the rescue
US pressures Malaysia to stop banned AI chips potentially entering China by monitoring 'every shipment that comes to Malaysia when it involves Nvidia chips'
SUQIAN, CHINA - JANUARY 27, 2025 - An illustration photo shows the logo of DeepSeek and ChatGPT in Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, January 27, 2025. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
China's DeepSeek chatbot reportedly gets much more done with fewer GPUs but Nvidia still thinks it's 'excellent' news
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
ChatGPT faces legal complaint after a user inputted their own name and found it accused them of made-up crimes
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
If you don't let us scrape copyrighted content, we will lose out to China says OpenAI as it tries to influence US government
Trump AI order
Oh well, looks like the next 4 years are going to be an AI free-for-all as Trump nixes Biden administration's safety order
Latest in AI
Otter AI Meeting Agent
As if your work meetings weren't already fun enough, now Otter has a new all-hearing AI agent that remembers everything anyone has said and can join in the discussion
Image for
'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon'
CHINA - 2025/02/11: In this photo illustration, a Roblox logo is seen displayed on the screen of a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
'Humans still surpass machines': Roblox has been using a machine learning voice chat moderation system for a year, but in some cases you just can't beat real people
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
ChatGPT faces legal complaint after a user inputted their own name and found it accused them of made-up crimes
Public Eye trailer still - dead-eyed police officer sitting for an interview
I'm creeped out by this trailer for a generative AI game about people using an AI-powered app to solve violent crimes in the year 2028 that somehow isn't a cautionary tale
Closeup of the new Copilot key coming to Windows 11 PC keyboards
Microsoft co-authored paper suggests the regular use of gen-AI can leave users with a 'diminished skill for independent problem-solving' and at least one AI model seems to agree
Latest in News
A gigantic terracotta sentinel made of living armor
Total War: Warhammer 3's army of Cathay has broken containment and is making its way to tabletop Warhammer at last
Two brightly colored stormtroopers dressed like Run-DMC stand in front of PAX Australia's WELCOME HOME banner.
Tickets for PAX Australia 2025 are on sale now
An Enshrouded player in a recreation of Erebor from The Lord of the Rings
Kings under the Mountain! 33 Enshrouded players spent 10,000 hours to recreate this iconic location from The Lord of the Rings
A mech awakens.
Mecha Break developer is considering unlocking all mechs following open beta feedback
Lara Croft Unified Art
Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics lays off 17 employees 'to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success'
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm