Blockchain tech is working to combat AI-based deepfakes (w/ Melody Hildebrandt and Mike Blank)

Fox Corporation and Polygon Labs Partnership

• Fox Corporation and Polygon Labs collaborated to address the challenges posed by deep fakes and AI-generated content for news organizations.
• Polygon's blockchain technology offered solutions for establishing content veracity, leading to the development of Verify, an open-source technical protocol.

Verify: An Open-Source Technical Protocol

• Verify enables media companies to register content and grant usage rights to AI platforms, allowing consumers to verify content through Polygon's technology.
• It aims to address concerns about content licensing, compensation for content creators, and the need for guardrails to protect original content in the age of AI.

Benefits and Reception of Verify

• Verify has received positive feedback from publishers who seek to impose technical guardrails on their content while participating in the AI ecosystem.
• The market-driven solution offered by Verify aims to prevent the need for heavy-handed government intervention.
• Its adoption is expected to accelerate as it provides a legal and sustainable way to consume content, similar to the impact of Spotify and Apple Music in the music industry.

Challenges and Opportunities

• There is a need for a legitimate access point with a common format that allows AI companies to ingest data from thousands of publishers.
• Blockchains can enhance trust with audiences by providing data provenance, zero-knowledge attestations, authenticity verification, and digital property rights.
• Deepfake manipulation can be tackled by verifying content integrity from the moment of publication using cryptographic approaches.

Verify as a Tool for Content Verification

• Verify allows users to check the authenticity of images or articles published by specific publishers.
• It combats misinformation and deepfakes by providing a way to verify content authenticity.
• Publishers can sign their content using Verify, creating a tamper-proof record of ownership and publication.

Concerns and Potential Solutions

• There is concern that deepfakes and imposter technology may continue to grow at the same rate as verification technologies, challenging consumers' ability to discern real from fake content.
• Aggregators that consume verified content can help train AI models on real data, improving the quality of AI-generated content and preventing a "death spiral" of AI-generated content training on AI-generated content.

Perspectives from Melody and Mike

• Melody believes allowing organizations to put their names behind content and using AI-generated technologies to train on that content can scale the solution to misinformation.
• Mike expresses skepticism about bad actors subverting the truth at scale but sees the potential for technology to solve this problem.
• Both agree that consumers will demand real and verifiable content, and brands will require it to establish trust.
• They identify news media and talent representation as areas of content most susceptible to harm and in need of technology solutions.

VerifyMedia.com and Verified.Fox

• VerifyMedia.com is a platform where developers can find information about building applications on the protocol, including the GitHub repository, documentation, and community feedback.
• Verified.Fox is an application built on the protocol that allows users to verify the authenticity of images attributed to Fox.

Conclusion

• Polygon is interested in supporting builders in finding novel solutions to interesting problems in the AI space and believes that blockchain can be a supporter of that.