Yesterday (1 September) saw the official roll-out of China’s new law designed to tackle online misinformation and fraud by mandating social media players label all AI-generated content.
China’s major social media platforms have all rushed to comply as the roll-out of a new law began yesterday (1 September) that requires all AI-generated content online to be labelled, whether it is text, images, video or audio, implicitly and explicitly.
The law which was announced back in March by China’s watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), requires explicit markings on all AI-generated content, and implicit markings such as watermarks on images and videos must be included in the file’s metadata. The Chinese government has said the law was designed to protect online users from misinformation, online fraud and copyright infringement.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), it reflects growing scrutiny from Beijing into all things AI. It follows the recently launched Qinglang (‘clear and bright’) CAC campaign which aims to clean up the online world in China, and has a major focus on AI.
Tencent’s WeChat, the huge WhatsApp-style messaging platform, and ByteDance’s Douyin – the equivalent of TikTok in China – have all rushed to implement new features in order to comply with the new law, posting messages to inform their users of the new rules and features, as did Weibo and RedNote.
Mandatory labels would certainly go some way to helping online users identify so called AI ‘slop’. It may be a sign that countries are starting to wake up to the need for such identifiers as some US companies such as Google are beginning to build such labelling into their tech.
The recently launched Google Pixel 10 phones, for example, implements C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) credentials in the camera application, enabling people to identify is an image was edited using AI. According to Engadget, the feature will roll out to all phones running Google’s photo app in coming weeks, and will eventually be baked into Google Search.
For now, China has stolen a march on other countries with its wide-ranging AI labelling law. Is it just a matter of time before other countries follow suit?
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
A man has been arrested after he was caught climbing into an enclosure of Moo Deng,…
Tencent Holdings’s net income stayed largely in line with analyst expectations in the fourth quarter…
Singapore, Singapore's iconic Indian vegetarian restaurant, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hosted to a…
For now, individuals should verify the source, look out for facial glitches, odd lighting or…
With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, Saudi Arabia has activated the one piece of…
AI will take your job. We all have likely heard something like this in the…