Project Demonstrates Potential of New Transparency Standard for Synthetic Media

Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press. The views expressed here are his own. With the proliferation of tools to generate synthetic media, including images and video, there is a great deal of interest in how to mark content artifacts to prove their provenance and disclose other information about how they were generated and edited. This week, Truepic, a firm that aims to provide authenticity infrastructure for the Internet, and Revel.ai, a creative studio that bills itself as a leader in the ethical production of synthetic content, released a “deepfake” video “signed” with such a marking to disclose its origin and source. The experiment could signal how standards adopted by content creators, publishers and platforms might permit the more responsible use of synthetic media by providing viewers with signals that demonstrate transparency. The video features a message delivered by a synthetic representation of Nina Schick, the creator of ‘The Era of Generative AI’ online community and author of the book ‘DEEPFAKES.’ The project follows years of effort by a wide variety of actors, including tech and media firms as well as nonprofit organizations and NGOs, to create the conditions for such signals to meet an interoperable standard. The video is compliant with the open content provenance standard developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an alliance between Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, Truepic, and a British semiconductor and software design company called Arm. A joint development foundation intended to produce such a standard, the C2PA itself emerged…Project Demonstrates Potential of New Transparency Standard for Synthetic Media