SACRAMENTO, CA -- California is looking to further criminalize the use of "deepfakes."
A new bill introduced last month would define a deepfake as a recording that has been created or altered in a manner that it would falsely appear to be an authentic record of the actual event it is depicting.
It would also allocate $25 million dollars from the General Fund to the University of California to fund research to identify and combat the inappropriate use of deepfake technology.
Last year the private sector also took a stand against deepfakes. Amazon teamed up Facebook in a Deepfake Detection Challenge.
Amazon offered $1 million dollars in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits to help teams develop technology that will spot deepfakes. Facebook also giving researchers 5,000 sample videos to use.
Deepfakes are videos that have been altered using artificial intelligence to mislead the viewer.
“The same technology which has given us delightfully realistic animation effects in movies and video games, has also been used by bad actors to blur the distinction between reality and fiction. ‘Deepfake’ videos manipulate audio and video using artificial intelligence to make it appear as though someone did or said something they didn’t,” AWS described in a statement.
AWS says they’ll host the datasets from the competition available later this year as well as the support of their Amazon machine learning experts to help the teams get started.
Experts say the use of artificial intelligence to create deepfakes will only get worse as technology advances.
The Deepfake Detection Challenge kicked off last December.