We are well into the era of highly believable fake photos and videos. The major crises of disinformation that these fake photos will enable are still ahead of us, and they could be very damaging.
Swift (or Mark Twain?) was right: a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. We have to slow down the uptake of fake media at the point of spread. Imagine the impact of a convincing but fake photo of a Presidential candidate in a compromising situation, released just a few days before the election? There won’t be enough time to debunk it and undo even a fraction of the damage.
We have to move to affirmative sourcing of online media, so that individuals can have confidence in the source of an image, and hopefully become dubious of images without a confirmed source. C2PA is the way to do that, and it seems to have momentum.
Adobe markets this as Content Credentials, and Microsoft as Content Integrity. And they really need to settle on one name, come on people!
LinkedIn is surfacing some of this metadata. Meta, too. It’s not good enough yet, but it’s getting there.
Browsers need to get in the game, flagging content as you navigate the Web.
And phones need to do it too, when creating content. We have the technology to tag real photos and videos as “produced by iPhones” in a way that would be very hard to fake. And it could be done in a privacy protecting way that doesn’t link different photos to the same device. Come on Apple, you’ve got the tech chops by a mile. Let’s do this.
Benlog 