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‘Saw my Garba video’: Victim of deepfakes, PM Modi gives AI warning
Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned that ‘deepfakes’ can cause a big crisis and even stoke the fire of disaffection in a diverse society like ours.
Flagging the misuse of artificial intelligence for creating deepfakes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that he even saw a morphed video of himself doing Garba.
'I watched my deep fake video in which I'm doing garba," the prime minister said.
“But the reality is that I have not done garba after my school life. Someone made my deepfake video," he added, addressing journalists at Bharatiya Janata Party's Diwali Milan programme in the national capital.
Modi also warned that deepfakes can cause a big crisis and even stoke the fire of disaffection in a diverse society like ours.
“A new crisis is emerging due to deepfakes produced through artificial intelligence,” the Prime Minister told journalists. "There is a very big section of society which does not have a parallel verification system."
Modi's statement comes days after a ‘deepfake’ video of actor Rashmika Mandanna went viral on the internet.
The original video was stated to be of a British-Indian influencer, whose face had been edited with Mandanna's face.
Read | How deep has deepfake struck Bollywood?
The video had led to widespread calls for regulation of the technology. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union minister for electronics and technology, had said on the social media platform X that deepfakes are the latest and a “more dangerous and damaging form of misinformation” that needs to be dealt with by social media platforms.
He also cited the legal obligations of social media platforms and IT rules pertaining to digital deception.
Earlier this month, the Union ministry of electronics and IT directed social media platforms to ensure that they act to weed out misinformation and deepfakes as mandated by Indian law.
The ministry’s two letters, dated November 6 and 7, were issued by the cyber laws division of the ministry as follow-ups to the advisory on deepfakes sent in February. They reminded the social media platforms of their obligations under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code), 2021.
