Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

Summary

A member of the UK Parliament's lower house who was the victim of a deepfake AI campaign this week had a rare chance to confront the Big Tech executives who helped spread it. Their answers disappointed. Representatives from Meta, Google, and X stumbled, offered platitudes, and explained their respective policies, but did little to compensate for spreading the potentially ruinous AI fake, or commit to ensuring it could not happen again after Conservative MP George Freeman confronted them. Last autumn, Freeman was the subject of an AI-created fake that falsely claimed he had defected to a rival party, Reform. This was plausible enough, given several genuine Conservative defections in recent months, but entirely fabricated Not only was it damaging to his reputation, but allowing political misinformation to continue to spread unchecked could end the democratic process in the UK, he argued. Freeman said platforms spreading the content are failing to respond. "There's no redress. There was no statement or principle that it was a problem," he said in Parliament yesterday, labeling the event a "serious disruption to democratic representation." Step forward Google, which owns YouTube. "We have policies about election ads which are aimed at ensuring that people are allowed to participate in free and fair elections just during election time," Zoe Darme, director for trust, knowledge and information products, told the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. For videos that are "violative" under Google's definition, it might be picked up by a "classifier" or if not, "reported and reviewed against community guidelines and removed." However, Darme was unable to say whether something so demonstrably false would in itself be "violative." Next up, Wifredo Fernández, director of global government affairs at X (formerly known as Twitter), said: "We have our deceptive identities policy so that deals with impersonation, and we have our synthetic and manipulated med...