The Union government on Tuesday directed social media platforms to remove artificial intelligence-generated and altered content, including deepfake videos, within three hours of it being flagged by a competent authority or the courts.
Deepfakes are techniques to manipulate audio and video content with the help of artificial intelligence software to show people saying or doing things that they never said or did. The content is made to appear as realistic as possible and is often used with malicious intent.
On Tuesday, the Union government notified amendments to the 2021 Information Technology Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, which formally define AI-generated and synthetic content.
Issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the notice said that new rules will come into effect from February 20.
The amendments include definitions of “audio, visual or audio-visual information” and “synthetically-generated information”, while covering AI-created or altered content that appears authentic.
However, routine editing, accessibility improvements, and good-faith educational and design work have been excluded from the definitions.
Significant changes include treating synthetic content as “information”, while AI-generated content will be treated on par with other information for determining unlawful acts under IT rules, PTI reported.
Other changes include the mandatory labelling of AI content.
The notification also said that social media platforms enabling the creation or sharing of synthetic content should ensure that such content was clearly and prominently labelled and embedded with permanent metadata or identifiers, where technically feasible, The Indian Express reported.
Social media platforms cannot allow removal or suppression of AI labels or metadata once applied, it added.
The notification also said that social media platforms must act on government or court orders within three hours. The platforms were earlier given 36 hours to take action.
It further called for a ban on illegal AI content.
The notification said that social media platforms should deploy automated tools to prevent AI content that was illegal, deceptive, sexually exploitative, non-consensual, or related to false documents, child abuse material, explosives or impersonation.
Amendments introduce rights violations: Advocacy group
The advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation said that the new notification introduces “severe digital rights violations that fundamentally undermine constitutional protections”.
Drastically compressing content removal timelines turns intermediaries into “rapid fire censors”, said the group.
It added that the “impossibly short timelines” eliminate any meaningful human review, forcing social media platforms toward automated over-removal and creating a “prior restraint regime incompatible” with Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution on freedom of speech and expression.
The advocacy group said that the rules also introduce sweeping new prohibitions absent from the draft that was put to consultation. It added that the rules continue to impose proactive monitoring obligations that transform intermediaries from neutral conduits into “active censors of speech”.
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