It's easier than ever to create deepfakes of someone else's voice or face, but at least YouTube is making some small changes that make it easier to report videos that use your likeness without your consent.
Previously, you could only report these impersonations as misleading, but now you can submit a deepfake removal request to YouTube through our privacy request process. This change shows that YouTube considers deepfakes as a privacy issue, not a content moderation issue. And it is a privacy issue. The more AI tools we have at our disposal, the more opportunities there are for those tools to be misused.
YouTube said it doesn't automatically remove these videos. It said it would consider factors such as whether it's parody or satire, whether the requester is identifiable, and whether it impersonates a public figure, with stricter standards in the latter case. The platform is also working on a similar process to remove deepfakes of copyrighted music, which have become increasingly common with tools like Suno and Udio.
The success of this measure will depend on how strictly it is enforced. If it speeds up YouTube's process for removing potentially harmful content, it will be a success.