The White House’s messaging on deepfakes is confused
Compared with President Biden’s executive orders on AI, the brand new motion plan is generally devoid of anything related to creating AI safer.
Nonetheless, there’s a notable exception: a piece within the plan that takes on the harms posed by deepfakes. In May, Trump signed laws to guard people from nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes, a growing concern for celebrities and on a regular basis people alike as generative video gets more advanced and cheaper to make use of. The law had bipartisan support.
Now, the White House says it’s concerned in regards to the issues deepfakes could pose for the legal system. For instance, it says, “fake evidence may very well be used to try to deny justice to each plaintiffs and defendants.” It calls for brand spanking new standards for deepfake detection and asks the Department of Justice to create rules around it. Legal experts I’ve spoken with are more concerned with a distinct problem: Lawyers are adopting AI models that make errors corresponding to citing cases that don’t exist, which judges may not catch. This is just not addressed within the motion plan.
It’s also price noting that just days before releasing a plan that targets “malicious deepfakes,” President Trump shared a fake AI-generated video of former president Barack Obama being arrested within the Oval Office.
Overall, the AI Motion Plan affirms what President Trump and people in his orbit have long signaled: It’s the defining social and political weapon of our time. They imagine that AI, if harnessed appropriately, might help them win every little thing from culture wars to geopolitical conflicts. The appropriate AI, they argue, will help defeat China. Government pressure on leading corporations can force them to purge “woke” ideology from their models.
The plan includes crowd-pleasers—like cracking down on deepfakes—but overall, it reflects how tech giants have cozied as much as the Trump administration. The indisputable fact that it accommodates almost no provisions difficult their power shows how their investment on this relationship is paying off.
