UN report points to ‘serious and urgent’ concerns about AI deepfakes

The United Nations has called AI-generated media a “serious and urgent” threat to information integrity, particularly on social media.

In a June 12 report, the UN claimed that the risk of disinformation online has “exacerbated” due to “rapid technological advancements, such as generative artificial intelligence” and spoke in particular about deepfakes.

The UN said false information and hate speech generated by AI is “convincingly presented to users as fact”. Last month, the S&P 500 briefly slumped due to an AI-generated image and fake news report of an explosion near the Pentagon.

It called on AI stakeholders to tackle the spread of false information and asked them to take “urgent and immediate” action to ensure the responsible use of AI, adding:

“The era of Silicon Valley’s ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy must come to an end.”

On the same day, UN Secretary-General António Guterres held a press conference and said that “alarm bells” about generative AI are “deafening” and are “the loudest of the developers who designed it.”

Alarm about generative AI, as relevant as it is, should not obscure the damage being done by digital technology, which now allows the spread of hate speech, mis- and disinformation.

Fueling conflict and destruction.

Threatening democracy and human rights.

Subversion of public health & #ClimateAction. pic.twitter.com/XlisItDQIG

— Antonio Guterres (@antonioguterres) June 12, 2023

Guterres added that the report “will inform a UN Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms.” The code is being developed in the run-up to the Summit of the Future – a conference to be held at the end of September 2024, which aims to host intergovernmental discussions on a wide range of issues.

“The Code of Conduct will be a set of principles that we hope governments, digital platforms and other stakeholders will voluntarily implement,” he said.

‘Biggest policy challenge ever’

Meanwhile, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Conservative Party politician William Hague released a report on AI on June 13.

The pair suggested that the governments of the UK, the United States and “other allies” should “press for a new UN framework for urgent safeguards”.

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The advent of AI “could pose the biggest policy challenge ever” because of its “unpredictable development” and “ever-increasing power,” the pair said.

Blair and Hague added that the government’s “existing approaches and channels are poorly configured” for such a technology.

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