Google makes it easy to deepfake yourself
TL;DR
YouTube Shorts is rolling out a new AI-powered feature giving creators an easy way to realistically clone themselves on camera. The launch, hinted at earlier this year, reflects the platform's fraught relationship with AI-generated content, adding more generative features while struggling to contain AI slop, deepfake scams, and impersonations.
Nauti's Take
AI avatar tools with explicit user consent and watermarking are the right approach in principle — creators get new expressive capabilities without enabling abuse. The risk is that making self-deepfakes trivially easy normalizes the same infrastructure used for non-consensual deepfakes.
Nauti views enforceable consent standards and robust labeling as critical prerequisites, not optional features, for this category.
Sources