Facebook’s problems moderating deepfakes will only get worse in 2020
1Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/15/21067220/deepfake-moderation-apps-tools-2020-facebook-reddit-social-media
Reported today in The Verge.
Facebook's problems moderating deepfakes will only get worse in 2020
Last summer, a video of Mark Zuckerberg circulated on Instagram in which the Facebook CEO appeared to claim he had "total control of billions of people's stolen data, all their secrets, their lives, their futures." It turned out to be an art project rather than a deliberate attempt at misinformation, but Facebook allowed it to stay on the platform. According to the company, it didn't violate any of its policies.
For some, this showed how big tech companies aren't prepared to deal with the onslaught of AI-generated fake media known as deepfakes. But it isn't necessarily Facebook's fault. Deepfakes are incredibly hard to moderate, not because they're difficult to spot (though they can be), but because the category is so broad that any attempt to "clamp down" on AI-edited photos and videos would end up affecting a whole swath of harmless content.
Banning deepfakes altogether would mean removing popular jokes like gender-swapped Snapchat selfies and artificially aged faces. Banning politically misleading deepfakes just leads back to the same political moderation problems tech companies have faced for years. And given there's no simple algorithm that can automatically spot AI-edited content, whatever ban they do enact would mean creating even more work for beleaguered human moderators. For companies like Facebook, there's just no easy option.
"If you take 'deepfake' to mean any video or image that's edited by machine learning then it applies to such a huge category of thing that it's unclear if it means anything at all," Tim Hwang, director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, tells The Verge. "If I had my druthers, which I'm not sure if I do, I would say