Months after China’s Intermediate People’s Court ruled against a company using AI to liquidate an employee’s position, the country’s highest judicial body has come out with another whopper: a massive crackdown on AI deepfakes.

In a new ruling on Monday, China’s Supreme People’s Court — the top judicial organ in the country — issued new guidance on how judges in lower courts should handle civil issues arising from abuse of AI tools. As the South China Morning Post reports, the court’s opinion spans 24 articles, establishing official guidance on disputes around AI-generated video and audio, sexualized content, financial misconduct, digital privacy, and surveillance pricing.

One of the key platforms of the opinion revolves around deepfakes, which are lifelike images, video, and audio modeled after existing people — tech, as the ruling observes, that can easily be used to “bring the dead back to life.” This kind of content has exploded across the internet as sophisticated generative AI models become increasingly accessible to the general public, resulting in a staggering rise in scams, misinformation, and abusive content.

“In practice, many people express their strong concerns about AI deepfakes. AI face-swapping technology can indiscriminately harvest anyone’s likeness, making ordinary people potential targets of deepfakes,” Si Yanli, deputy head of the Supreme People’s Court’s research office, said in a statement. “AI voice cloning technology can also ‘steal’ voices at a very low cost, with results that can be convincingly realistic.”

Now, the SCMP notes that courts across the People’s Republic are being advised to view disputes around such content with an eye toward protecting individual identities, personal traits, and reputations.

Beyond abuses of AI, the new opinion also includes guidance on cases of doxing, or the practice of obtaining and spreading others’ personal information online.

“Doxing has emerged as a prominent form of cyberbullying, gravely violating victims’ privacy, disturbing their daily lives and eroding public security in cyberspace,” Si explained.

It’s worth noting that China uses a civil law system, so courts don’t follow the common-law principle of stare decisis. This means that, unlike the US, lower Chinese courts aren’t automatically bound by precedent set by other court rulings.

However, guidance issued by the Supreme People’s Court carries significant legal weight, with lower court bodies required to refer to such opinions in their own rulings — making the recent issuance a hefty rebuff against potential abuses of AI.

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