Fighting deepfakes with content ‘nutrition labels’

How does genuine content prove that it is not manipulated? Some big moves are afoot.

- Irene Tham

There may come a time when "nutrition labels" for online content become mainstream, just as they are for packaged food.

It seems a bold vision and a tall order.

But for Mr Andy Parsons, senior director of content authenticity at Adobe, it is the need of the hour amid the urgency to protect online users from scams, misinformation and artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes.

"The reason that there are now laws coming to bear is because everyone is concerned about cryptocurrency scams and untrue news," said Mr Parsons in an interview with The Straits Times on May 27.

The European Union’s AI Act – which requires users to visibly disclose that they had used AI to manipulate or generate content – came into force in 2024, a world-first legislation to rein in AI harms.

A second, the California Digital Content Provenance Standards Act, which requires AI-generated images, video and audio to be identifiable as such through metadata, is expected to go into effect in 2026.

HOW BAD IS THE DEEPFAKE PROBLEM?

While creating deepfakes isn’t new, governments and think-tanks are alarmed about the levels of realism they can achieve, and the speed at which they can be churned out, with generative AI tools that have become widely available since 2022.

The potential for harm increases exponentially when deepfakes are shared via social media that amplify reach.

The most recent example involves Pope Leo XIV. He has been head of the Catholic Church for only a few weeks, and social media is already rife with AI-generated deepfake videos and images of the new pontiff.