Associated Incidents
On April 12, the Ministry of Public Security announced 10 typical cases of cracking down on illegal crimes of online rumors, of which 4 typical cases involved the use of artificial intelligence (hereinafter referred to as AI) technology to fabricate false information; on April 23, the Beijing Internet Court held a trial and pronounced a judgment on the infringement of personality rights of AI-generated voices...
In recent years, with the rapid development of AI technology, more and more people have begun to enjoy the new experience brought by this technology in their work and life, but with it comes the increasing number of illegal and criminal activities using or abusing AI technology (hereinafter referred to as AI crimes).
In response to this, the political and legal authorities perform their duties in accordance with the law, continue to dig deep and thoroughly investigate AI crimes, continuously expand the results of case handling, strive to improve the quality and effectiveness of crackdown and governance, and make every effort to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the people.
"Political and legal authorities are based on their main responsibilities and main business, play their functional role, and make every effort to crack down on and govern AI crimes, prevent criminals from using or abusing AI technology to infringe on citizens' rights and endanger public safety, and ensure that AI technology always develops along the right track." Cui Junjie, associate professor of the Law Department of the School of Political Science and Law of Capital Normal University, told the Legal Daily reporter.
AI crimes are endless
"Computer AI removes clothes at a bargain price."
In June 2023, Bai, a technician at an Internet company in Beijing, came across the AI technology of "one-click removal" on overseas social media and started to think crookedly.
Bai posted advertisements on overseas websites and sold nearly 7,000 deep fake pornographic pictures on a social software, making a profit of more than 10,000 yuan. At present, Bai has been prosecuted.
What kind of technology is "one-click removal"? The reporter learned that this technology is not really "removing clothes", but based on the picture, it uses AI to calculate and use related pornographic image materials to redraw the picture. Like "AI face-changing" and "AI voice-changing", it is a technology that uses AI deep learning, virtual reality and other generation and synthesis algorithms to produce text, images, audio, video, virtual scenes and other information.
"Electronic fraud gangs can use AI technology to 'change faces', 'change voices', or even 'dynamically change faces', which increases the harmfulness of traditional criminal activities and creates new types of illegal behaviors. For example, paintings generated using AI 'painting' technology may infringe on the copyright of others." Cui Junjie said that AI technology has been used by criminals in five aspects: phishing, deep forgery, bypassing identity checks, "jailbreak" services, human flesh searches, and surveillance, further lowering the threshold for crime.
On the afternoon of May 6, the Yujiang District People's Court of Yingtan City, Jiangxi Province, publicly sentenced the first "AI game plug-in" case in the country, and sentenced the defendant Wang Mouhe to three years in prison and five years of probation for providing programs and tools for intrusion and illegal control of computer information systems. After the verdict, Wang Mouhe expressed his obedience to the verdict and did not appeal.
After trial, it was found that Wang Mouhe made profits by making and selling "AI plug-ins". In 2022, he contacted Wan Mouzhi, Zhang Mou (handled in another case) and others to write "AI plug-in" programs. By the time the case was discovered, Wang had made a total of more than 6.29 million yuan in illegal profits.
It is reported that the program can obtain the screen data of multiple games without authorization and modify the mouse data instructions processed in the game without authorization, causing players to "automatically aim" and "automatically shoot" without operation when playing games, which interferes with the normal operation environment of the game and is a destructive program.
In Cui Junjie's view, AI technology has a low degree of standardization, strong customizability, and a wide range of application scenarios. The criminals' methods of committing crimes are becoming more and more diverse, resulting in the continuous derivation and escalation of AI crimes. If they are not cracked down on and governed in a timely manner, it will bring severe challenges to network security and even the safety of life and property of the general public.
Severe crackdowns form effective deterrence
In response to the challenges, the political and legal authorities have taken a series of measures to crack down on AI crimes, maintain a good development environment for AI technology, and avoid disorder and anomie in its application.
In September 2023, the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Punishing Cyber Violence Crimes in accordance with the Law", which clearly stipulates that "using generative artificial intelligence technologies such as 'deep synthesis' to publish illegal information" will be punished severely.
On April 23, the first AI-generated voice personality rights infringement case in the country was heard and sentenced in the first instance in the Beijing Internet Court. The court determined that the defendant used the plaintiff's voice and developed the AI text-to-speech product involved in the case without obtaining legal authorization, constituting infringement, and compensated the plaintiff for various losses of 250,000 yuan and apologized in writing.
On June 25, the People's Procuratorate of Zhangjiagang City, Jiangsu Province, filed a public prosecution against the Municipal People's Court for a case of extortion and fraud. It is reported that the domestic gang where the suspect is located packaged themselves as Chinese female students studying abroad on dating software through virtual positioning and AI technology synthesis photos, and then asked for money from students studying abroad in the name of love. It has been verified that the gang extorted and defrauded more than 50 people, and the amount involved reached more than 1 million yuan.
Since the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued the "Procuratorial organs' work on combating telecommunications network fraud and related crimes (2023)" in November last year, procuratorates across the country have stepped up their efforts to crack down on crimes that infringe on citizens' personal information, especially the illegal acquisition of sensitive information such as faces and voiceprints, the use of cutting-edge technologies such as AI to forge faces and voiceprints, and the acquisition of other information in accordance with relevant requirements.
In addition, last year, public security organs across the country organized a special campaign based on the "Net Cleaning" special operation to crack down on the source of crimes such as leaking ID card photos and other image information, cracked 79 cases of fraud using AI technology to "change faces", arrested 515 criminal suspects, and effectively curbed the momentum of such crimes.
The political and legal authorities cracked down on AI crimes in accordance with the law, and formed a deterrent by handling typical cases, so that those who want to use AI technology to make illegal profits will be afraid.
Strengthen governance to achieve both symptomatic and root cause treatment
Reporters learned that in the process of cracking down on AI crimes in accordance with the law, the political and legal authorities have dug deep into the regular characteristics of this crime, insisted on opening the way, fighting and preventing at the same time, source governance, and comprehensive measures, and worked with relevant departments and units to deepen industry governance and comprehensive governance, consolidate the main responsibility, strengthen industry supervision, plug regulatory loopholes, and fully squeeze the space for related illegal and criminal activities, accelerate the improvement of normalized governance mechanisms, and effectively increase the cost of their violations.
It is reported that in order to prevent and combat "AI face-changing" crimes, public security organs across the country have jointly carried out security assessments of face recognition and liveness detection technologies with national key laboratories and other units, covering key apps such as instant messaging, live streaming, online social networking, e-commerce platforms, and financial payments, timely discovering the risks and hidden dangers of face recognition verification systems, and notifying operating entities to upgrade security protection measures and face recognition algorithms, so as not to give criminals an opportunity to take advantage of them.
At the same time, various forms of publicity and education have helped the masses to more clearly understand the legal risks brought about by the use or abuse of AI technology, and enhanced everyone's awareness of prevention of AI crimes.
In April this year, the police in Hefei City, Anhui Province, revealed the rumor-making process in the program "AI software becomes a rumor-making tool" through the central media, allowing netizens to more intuitively deepen their understanding of AI rumor-making, which has achieved good publicity effects.
Since 2024, Linping District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province has used the "Anti-Fraud Intelligent AI Publicity and Prevention Outbound Call System" to automatically identify, analyze and warn of potential fraud risks, and send reminder information to citizens in the form of telephone voice, which not only greatly improves work efficiency, but also effectively improves citizens' awareness of fraud risks and reduces the incidence of fraud cases.
"With the rapid iteration of AI technology, higher requirements have been put forward for its prevention and control by criminals. For example, AI crimes are more hidden and complex, and evidence collection is difficult." Cui Junjie said, therefore, how to better prevent and control AI crimes has posed challenges to all parties including content generation platforms, industry regulatory departments and even political and legal organs.
Cui Junjie suggested that we should adhere to scientific and appropriate governance methods and means to respond to technological development and social changes. In view of the characteristics of AI crimes, relevant departments need to promptly promote the establishment, amendment, repeal and interpretation of relevant laws, promote good governance with good laws, and improve the level of governance according to law; increase the intensity of crackdowns across the entire chain, strengthen the coordination and cooperation of various departments, strengthen the application of big data legal supervision models, be good at discovering key supervision clues and difficult problems in social governance, realize precise and effective supervision, and achieve precise governance on the basis of ensuring the healthy development of the industry.