Banning of AI Auto-Generated Contents
China’s Cyberspace Administration recently issued regulations prohibiting the creation of AI-generated media without clear labels, such as watermarks—among other policies—reports The Register. The new rules come as part of China’s evolving response to the generative AI trend that has swept the tech world in 2022, and they will take effect on January 10, 2023.
AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease
In China, the Cyberspace Administration oversees the regulation, oversight, and censorship of the Internet. Under the new regulations, the administration will keep a closer eye on what it calls “deep synthesis” technology.
In a news post on the website of China’s Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, the government outlined its reasons for issuing the regulation. It pointed to the recent wave of text, image, voice, and video synthesis AI, which China recognizes as important to future economic growth (translation via Google Translate):
We as a Bradford based Marketing Ageny, have spent last couple of days looking into this matter.
The Regulations:
Under the regulations, new deep synthesis products will be subject to a security assessment from the government. Each product must be found in compliance with the regulations before it can be released. Also, the administration particularly emphasizes the requirement for obvious “marks” (such as watermarks) that denote AI-generated content:
Countries and Companies standing against AI
Further, companies that provide deep synthesis tech must keep their records legally compliant, and people using the technology must register for accounts with their real names so their generation activity can be traceable.
Like the US, China has seen a boom in AI-powered applications. For example, one of China’s leading tech companies, Baidu, produced an image synthesis model that is similar to DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
A growing number of tech experts have recently recognized that China and the United States face a coming wave of generative AI that could pose challenges to power structures, enable fraud, or even tamper with our sense of history. So far, the two countries have reacted with almost polar-opposite reactions—the US with non-binding guidelines versus China’s firm restrictions.
In 2019, China published its first rules that made publishing unmarked “fake news” deepfakes illegal. Those rules took effect in early 2020.
We would be curious to know what is your feedback on the banning of AI?