Claire Poirson provided legal clarifications as part of RTL’s FOcUS podcast on #deepfakes, presented by Martial YOU and with Gerald Holubowicz, founder of the “Synth” newsletter and Benjamin Hue, specialist Tech journalist at RTL.

Topic: Do deepfakes threaten our democracy?

Deepfake: hyper-faking technique using artificial intelligence #AI which consists in particular of superimposing human features on the body of another person, or manipulating sounds, to generate a realistic human experience.

 Thanks to AI, we can therefore modify an image, a video, an audio, a voice to give someone behavior or comments that they did not make.

 At first glance, the goal is often to create fake news and hoaxes and to make us laugh. ex) The Pope in a down jacket, Obama and Merkel making sand pies…

But the reality can be quite different:

The dangers of deepfakes are real and difficult to curb:

1.for people: 94% of deepfakes are pornographic and the vast majority affect women. Due to the viral effect of deepfake, the invasion of privacy is potentially very serious
2. for #companies, which can be victims of scams that are even more difficult to foil (with the face and voice of the President…), deepfakes increase their #cyber risk, or even their reputation in the event of a false declaration of the management on #socialnetworks, on the hacked company website…
3.for #democracy: deepfakes can prove to be a formidable communication weapon in the destabilization of countries in times of war, in the wake of the “cold war” and during elections.

Claire Poirson recalled the legal actions that could be taken against the authors of deepfakes. The legislative arsenal exists, both civil and criminal, which must be reinforced by the bill aimed at securing and regulating the digital space (if this law sees the light of day) and the European IA ACT regulation.
Faced with the objectives of speed and effectiveness of measures to combat deepfakes which for the moment are seriously lacking, she emphasizes that prevention also and above all remains essential.