Security News > 2022 > May > Google quietly bans deepfake training projects on Colab
Google has quietly banned deepfake projects on its Colaboratory service, putting an end to the large-scale utilization of the platform's resources for this purpose.
Colab is an online computing resource that allows researchers to run Python code directly through the browser while using free computing resources, including GPUs, to power their projects.
Due to the multi-core nature of GPUs, Colab is ideal for training machine learning projects like deepfake models or for performing data analysis.
Based on archive.org historical data, the ban took place earlier this month, with Google Research quietly adding deep fakes to the list of disallowed projects.
The impact of this new restriction is expected to be far-reaching in the deepfake world, as many users utilize pre-trained models with Colab to jump-start their high-resolution projects.
Colab was making this process very easy even for those with no coding background, which is why so many tutorials suggest Google's "Free resource" platform to launch deepfake projects.