Lawmakers vigilant of use of AI in fraud

During a news conference of the National People's Congress Standing Committee held in Beijing on Sunday, Zang Tiewei, spokesperson for the country's top legislature, highlighted the urgent need to crack down on fraudulent acts using artificial intelligence face-swap technology.

"The swindlers synthesize videos using AI face-swap software for their businesses. That's no different from any other old fraudulent behaviors in essence," said Zang. "From the legal point of view, the Anti-Telecom and Online Fraud Law, Criminal Law and other relevant laws can provide sufficient support for combating these fraud activities that use new technologies."

Zang's remarks should serve to reassure people of the vigilance of lawmakers to such criminal activities and their readiness to provide law enforcers with enough legal support and basis to deal with the new forms of old tricks.

The application of AI face-swap technology, voice-changing, and AI chat based on deep synthesis technology has developed to such a degree that it can pass as the real thing.

On the one hand, the abuse of AI face-swap technology constitutes a universal threat to people's reputation and privacy, and may seriously infringe upon their property right. At the same time, it is difficult to bring the swindlers to justice if they are based overseas, as many fraudulent cases indicate.

On the other hand, such technology can also cause a crisis of trust in society, as the effectiveness of some civil actions will be disputed. For instance, it is now difficult to prove that the person signing the contract is the real person, if the whole process happens on video links. So the law must be updated to address the new problems.

Last year, the Cyberspace Administration of China published the Regulations on the Administration of In-depth Synthesis of Internet Information Services, which stipulate that the application of in-depth synthesis technology must not infringe on citizens' rights. According to the regulations, providers of the deep synthesis services, such as face-swapping, must provide "prominent identification functions", which should be able to identify the virtual synthesized "persons", if the service is "likely to cause public confusion or misidentification".

Now is the time to make the government regulations legally binding by clarifying the punishment, which should be proportional to the harm caused by the service providers turning a blind eye to the rules.

Every scientific and technological breakthrough is a double-edged sword, and the key is to steer its development in the right direction and restrict its potential of being used to commit crimes.