The sphere of AI challenged ‘information integrity’ is getting ever messier, with several feature launches and controversies sparking debate this week. A series of videos were linked on social media ostensibly to promote avatar generation from Arcads, but they sparked debate as to whether they were AI generated or not, or indeed were authorised by the person who’s likeness they contained. Stories continue to emerge of people being cloned to promote inappropriate products or experiencing non-consensual photo modifications. Knowing intuitively what is real and what is not is now essentially impossible. Meanwhile HeyGen announced a new feature they call ‘avatar in motion’ with an impressive demo showing a moving AI lip-synced video switching into alternative languages. Companies like Arcads and HeyGen will need to navigate the line between deepfake and avatar generation.
Content watermarking can’t become widespread soon enough. C2PA is an open approach providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media. Whilst this doesn’t stop deepfakes, a world where we are extra sceptical of anything we see online that doesn’t display clear ‘provenance’, is a world where the information integrity can be better managed.
But despite the BBC being a consortium member for example, it doesn’t appear that they are using the tech consistently to identify their web images. The C2PA standard is available in a selection of creative products such as Adobe’s suite and DALL·E 3 but is still not being widely adopted.
Takeaways: Using he C2PA watermarks is not straightforward but it is possible to start using a browser plugin to check for the credentials. Head over the plugin page to install and start checking images where available, the button that appears on images can indicate where the material came from and how it has been altered.