Surrounded by a seemingly endless swirl of digital media, today’s consumers are often left to face the dangers of disinformation without the knowledge or tools to combat them. To tackle this growing challenge, we must embrace technology solutions that will help consumers verify the validity or truthfulness of digital content. This solution will require a strong collaboration between the government, media, and technology companies who together can help create a consumer base that isn’t as easily influenced by the content they consume.
That’s why we at Adobe strongly support the Deepfake Task Force Act (S. 2559), which would establish a National Deepfake and Digital Provenance task force comprised of members from the private sector, the federal government, and academia to address the problem of disinformation. We’re encouraged to see government leading the charge and bringing together the nation’s collective expertise to find a solution — one which we feel must be grounded in technology and championed across industries.
While the concept of disinformation has been around for centuries, recently, those wishing to spread it have taken advantage of social media and easy-to-use editing technologies to do so at an alarming pace. In the last year alone, disinformation has eroded confidence in elections and spread deadly untruths about COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness.
And as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, it will become even easier to manipulate all types of media — and even more difficult to detect manipulation when it occurs. Think altered photos, videos, audio — all with the intent to mislead.
The Deepfake Task Force Act focuses on an important aspect of the solution to disinformation: digital content provenance. The bill defines this as “the verifiable chronology of the origin and history of a piece of digital content, such as an image, video, audio recording, or electronic document.” In other words, the ability to see where a piece of content came from and what happened to it along the way. The stated goal of the Task Force is to explore how the development and implementation of digital provenance standards could assist in verifying online information and reducing the proliferation and impact of disinformation.
This is the same approach we took at Adobe when we founded the Content Authenticity Initiative. The Content Authenticity Initiative is a provenance-based tool that attaches tamper-evident attribution data like name, location, and edit history to a piece of media, allowing creative professionals to get credit for their work while empowering consumers with a new level of transparency about what they’re seeing online.