Prime Minister Narendra Modi has warned that ‘deepfakes’ can cause a major crisis and even fuel discontent in a diverse society like ours. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Friday that he saw a morphed video of himself doing Garba, highlighting the misuse of artificial intelligence for creating deepfakes. “I watched my deep fake video in which I’m doing garba, but in reality, I haven’t done garba since high school. Someone made my deepfake video,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while speaking to journalists at the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Diwali Milan program in the national capital.
Modi also warned that deepfakes could cause a major crisis and even fuel discontent in a diverse society like ours. The Prime Minister told reporters, “A new crisis is emerging as a result of deepfakes produced by artificial intelligence. There is a very big section of society which does not have a parallel verification system.”
Narendra Modi addresses the AI danger:
#WATCH | PM Modi says, " …There is a challenge arising because of Artificial Intelligence and deepFake…a big section of our country has no parallel option for verification…people often end up believing in deepfakes and this will go into a direction of a big challenge…we… pic.twitter.com/akT17qGNGO
— ANI (@ANI) November 17, 2023
Modi’s remarks come just days after a ‘deepfake’ video of actor Rashmika Mandanna went viral on social media. The original video was said to be of a British-Indian influencer whose face was edited to look like Mandanna’s. Earlier, Bollywood actresses like Katrina Kaif and Rashmika Mandanna were a victim of this dangerous technology.
The video sparked widespread calls for technology regulation. Union Minister for Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated on the social media platform X that deepfakes are the latest and “more dangerous and damaging form of misinformation” that social media platforms must deal with. He also mentioned social media platforms’ legal obligations and IT rules concerning digital deception.
Earlier this month, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology directed social media platforms to take the steps required by Indian law to weed out misinformation and deepfakes. The two letters, dated November 6 and 7, were issued by the ministry’s cyber laws division as follow-ups to the February advisory on deepfakes. They reminded social media platforms of their responsibilities under the 2021 Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code).
