China’s Top Court Clarifies Legal Liability for AI Face and Voice Cloning

Dragon Media News Desk

Beijing. China’s Supreme People’s Court has clarified that the use of artificial intelligence to clone another person’s face or voice, spread false information or discriminate against consumers through algorithms can lead to legal liability.

The Supreme People’s Court issued new guidelines on Monday to provide judicial guidance for disputes involving AI deepfakes, voice cloning, algorithmic price discrimination and false information generated by artificial intelligence.

Under the guidelines, individuals may not use AI to create or distribute recognizable digital replicas of another person’s face or voice without consent. Such conduct may infringe the rights of the individual concerned.

Legal liability may also arise when AI-generated faces or voices are used to spread false claims, damage a person’s reputation or produce defamatory content.

The move comes as AI-generated impersonation becomes increasingly easy to produce and more difficult to distinguish from authentic material. In some cases, only a handful of photographs or a short voice recording may be enough to create a convincing digital replica.

The guidelines also address algorithmic discrimination against consumers. Businesses may be held liable if they use algorithms to offer different prices or transaction terms for the same goods or services without reasonable justification and the practice causes harm to consumers.

Zhou Jiahai, head of the research office of the Supreme People’s Court, said consumers cannot be expected to become experts in identifying technologically enabled deception and that the law must intervene promptly to protect their legitimate rights and interests.

The guidelines also cover false or inaccurate information generated by AI systems, often referred to as AI hallucinations.

AI service providers may be held liable if they are notified that their systems have generated content infringing an individual’s rights but fail to take timely and appropriate action.

Users can also be held responsible for the misuse of AI. A person who deliberately uses prompts or other methods to induce an AI system to generate infringing content and causes harm to another person may face legal liability.

The guidelines further allow individuals to seek urgent judicial protection when AI-generated content threatens to cause serious and irreversible harm.

For example, if someone’s face is digitally altered and used to spread false and defamatory sexual claims, the affected person may ask a court for an injunction if delaying action could result in harm that would be difficult to remedy later.

China has been accelerating efforts to build legal and judicial safeguards around artificial intelligence while continuing to promote the technology’s development, with growing emphasis on protecting personal rights, consumers, information integrity and digital security.