Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated on Friday that he witnessed a modified video of himself performing Garba, highlighting the abuse of artificial intelligence for making deepfakes.
‘I saw my profound false film of me playing garba,’ added the prime minister.
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“However, I haven’t done garba since I graduated from high school.” “Someone made my deepfake video,” he continued, speaking to media at the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Diwali Milan event in the national capital.
Modi also cautioned that deepfakes might cause a major dilemma and perhaps fuel discontent in a diverse society like ours.
“A new crisis is emerging as a result of deepfakes produced by artificial intelligence,” the Prime Minister told reporters. “There is a very big portion of society which doesn’t have a parallel verification system.”
Modi’s remarks come only days after a ‘deepfake’ video of actor Rashmika Mandanna went popular on social media.
The initial video was said to be of a British-Indian influencer whose face was modified to seem like Mandanna’s.
The video sparked widespread calls for technological regulation. Union Minister for Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated on the social networking site X that deepfakes are the latest and “more dangerous and damaging form of misinformation” that social media companies must deal with.
He also mentioned social media networks’ legal requirements and IT standards concerning digital deceit.
Earlier this month, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology instructed social media sites to take the steps required by Indian law to screen out disinformation and deepfakes.
The two letters, dated November 6 and 7, were issued by the ministry’s cyber legislation section as follow-ups to the February alert on deepfakes. They reminded social media sites of their responsibilities under the 2021 Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code).