It’s easier than ever to create a fake clip of someone else’s voice or face, but at least YouTube is making some small changes that make reporting a video that uses your image without your consent a little easier.
You can now request the removal of deepfake videos from YouTube through the privacy request process, whereas in the past, you could only report deepfake videos as misleading. This shift tells us that YouTube is thinking of deepfake videos as a privacy issue, not a content moderation issue — which is actually a privacy issue. And the more AI tools we have at our disposal, the more those tools will be misused.
YouTube says it won’t automatically remove these videos — instead, it will consider factors like whether they’re parodies or satire, whether the person making the request can be identified, or whether they’re impersonating a public figure, in which case YouTube says there will be a higher bar. The platform is also working on a process like this to remove fake videos of copyrighted music, which has become increasingly common with tools like Suno and Udio.
The success or failure of this step depends on how well it is implemented. If YouTube can speed up the process of removing potentially harmful content, we will consider that a success.