Deepfakes: General Election

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

The Government set out in their White Paper response that off-the-shelf AI software that can in part be used to create these kinds of deepfakes is not, in and of itself, something that we are considering placing any ban on. However, there are ranges of software, a sort of middle layer to the AI production, that can greatly facilitate the production of deepfakes of all kinds, not just political but other kinds of criminal deepfakes—and there the Government would be actively considering moving against those purpose-built criminal tools.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, given the use of deepfakes and malign disinformation facilitated by data theft, has the noble Viscount taken note of what the Biden Administration decided to do last week? The President signed into law the ability to ban TikTok, and the Chinese-owned company that owns it, because of America’s experience in the mid-term elections in 2022 and the elections in Taiwan earlier this year. Does the Minister not worry that, unless we take similar powers in the United Kingdom, the same thing will happen here?

[Viscount Camrose (Con)]

Well, some of the enforcement measures under the Online Safety Act do allow for very significant moves against social media platforms that misuse their scale and presence to malign ends in this way, but of course the noble Lord is absolutely right and we will continue to look closely at the moves by the Biden Administration to see what we can learn from them for our approach.