Google Colab Bans Deepfakes
Google has banned the use of deepfaking software in Colab. Whether for ethical concerns or mitigating resource hogging, producing deepfakes has been added to the list of restrictions in the terms of service.
Created on June 2|Last edited on June 2
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Deepfakes are a notorious application of machine learning due to it's numerous ethically dubious applications. On top of that, it's also a very computationally heavy process even as far as machine learning goes.
Google Colab has always been a platform for easy access to cloud computing on Google hardware farms, a privilege many might not deserve. Now sitting among other banned uses of the platform like mining cryptocurrency and p2p file sharing, training and running deepfake models is now disallowed by an update to the terms of service. People using deepfake software may now face a warning message threatening their ability to use Colab in the future if they continue code execution.
Whether you think the change is for ethical reasons or for mitigating resource hogging, the change is going to send users of popular deepfaking models and libraries to other platforms, or even back onto personally-owned hardware racks.
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