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Google is making changes to its search engine in an effort to tackle deepfake pornography, as the tech industry grapples with the far-reaching social impacts of generative artificial intelligence.
Advances in generative AI mean that fake images have become more realistic and easier to create, prompting experts to warn that the use of people, without their knowledge or consent, in pornographic imagery has become more widespread.
Measures introduced by the tech giant on Wednesday include changes that would make it easier for victims of deepfake porn to have videos and images of themselves taken down from the internet.
Individuals currently need to make removal requests for each website address or URL. The latest changes would omit explicit results on related search terms that include a person’s name. The search giant will also downgrade the ranking of sites that have received a high volume of removal notices.
“In addition, when someone successfully removes an image from search under our policies, our systems will scan for — and remove — any duplicates of that image that we find,” Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Companies such as Google, Meta and X have been scrambling to tackle deepfakes on their platforms — images, video and audio that can be generated using AI in the likeness of both private and public individuals. Last week Meta’s independent Oversight Board called on the company to strengthen its rules on the removal of deepfake porn.
“We are in the middle of a technology shift,” said Emma Higham, a Google product manager who has been involved in the company’s fight against deepfakes. “As we monitor our own systems, we’ve seen that there is a rise in removal requests for this kind of content.”
The issue is coming under scrutiny from regulators: the UK’s Online Safety Act, passed in October and considered one of the strictest, makes it illegal to disseminate non-consensual pornographic deepfakes. In the US, legislation in several states targets those who create and share explicit deepfaked content.
Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University who studies regulations around pornography, said that the search engine has been slow to prevent such content from proliferating on the internet.
“Google’s delay in taking these obvious and necessary steps to reduce deepfake sexual abuse is inexcusable,” she said. “Google remains responsible for facilitating the exponential rise in deepfake sexual abuse by its high-ranking of deepfake apps, websites and tutorials for many years.”
The company said it has cut the amount of explicit deepfake content that has appeared on its search results by 70 per cent since the start of the year through initial policy changes and limited updates to its search engine.
However the company said there are limitations to the policy updates. Higham said that third-party media providers did not always share video data with Google, making it impossible to detect a potential duplicate.
There may exist “trade-offs” for adult performers who want to share consensual adult content on the search engine while having non-consensual material filtered out, Google added.
Google’s tweaks to its search results ranking system would demote websites that link to non-consensual AI-generated adult content while promoting non-explicit “high-quality” sites, including news articles.
“These are unsolved technical challenges for search engines,” Higham said. “So we’re getting to a point where we feel we can get more traction.”
The company has extensive policies in place to remove child sexual abuse materials and this year banned advertising for deepfake pornography.
Its latest policies stop short of de-indexing popular deepfake sites from search results altogether, a move that advocacy groups such as #MyImageMyChoice are pushing for.
Google said delisting sites entirely could block access to important information, such as how content can be removed from a host website.
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