ALT Still, it seems noteworthy that the most accessible tools we have for creating synthetic media are more restrictive than the tools we have for distributing it. Meta’s synthetic media policy, which would fit on the back of a napkin, is roughly as permissive as YouTube’s. (TikTok is the only one of the three to ban synthetic videos of non-public figures.) Perhaps all this will balance out over time. For the moment, though, it seems strange that the likeliest source of harms from AI comes from not from leading AI companies, which will block it at the source of creation, but from open-source tools used to create materials hosted and distributed by tech giants.