INSIDE INDIA'S ATTEMPT TO TAME DEEPFAKES

Detection tools today are not universal or consistent across languages

- Shadma Shaikh

In June, a video clip of actor Shah Rukh Khan promoting a 'passive income' app allegedly linked to Mukesh Ambani went viral on social media. The clip portrayed it as being part of a news segment featuring journalist Anjana Om Kashyap and even had a top political leader endorsing the crypto scheme and asking people to register for it. While it all looked convincing, the video was far from real.

Fact-checkers at Factly, a civic-tech and fact-checking initiative based in Hyderabad, ran the three-minute-long video through multiple artificial intelligence (AI) detection tools. They found that the voices had been fabricated. A website link in it led to a fraudulent clone of a government portal.

By the time the clip reached Factly's newsroom, it had already flooded WhatsApp groups across the country.

Rakesh Dubbudu, who founded Factly, says he instinctively knows which videos are fake. Cues such as body language, added sound and the brazenness of what the video is trying to portray give it away. "If the duration of a video clip is less than 10 seconds, which we see happening more often now, existing detectors can't conclusively prove that it is synthetically generated," says Dubbudu.

Across India, the scale of the problem has grown manifold in recent months. Deepfakes are now showing up in newsrooms, election campaigns and courts. India now ranks among the top countries targeted by synthetic celebrity videos.

In October, actors Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan filed a lawsuit against YouTube and Google over manipulated videos showing them in a sexually suggestive manner. The couple sought sweeping injunctions to curb the circulation of such videos, in what was one of the first high-profile deepfake cases to reach the Bombay High Court. The case brought much-needed national attention to a pressing issue.