With so many elections happening globally this year, TrueMedia founder Oren Etzioni hopes the company's deepfake detection tool can help reduce disinformation. Here's how.
TrueMedia evaluating a piece of content. TrueMedia.org How prevalent are political deepfakes? Most relatively informed citizens can recall major instances of synthetic political content, such as the apparent "robocall" made by President Joe Biden in January to voters in New Hampshire, which turned out to be a synthesized voice created by AI. While there is no authoritative statistic on artificial intelligence (AI) deepfakes, a skeptic might think they're not common, given that only a high-profile few are widely reported on. But, according to one AI scholar, it's more likely that AI deepfakes are on the rise in advance of the US presidential election in November -- you just don't see many of them. Also: 80% of people think deepfakes will impact elections. Here's how to prepare "I would take an even-odds bet of a thousand dollars that we are going to see an unprecedented set of these [deepfakes]" come November, "because it's become so much easier to make them," said Oren Etzioni, founder of the non-profit organization TrueMedia, in an interview with ZDNET last month. "I would not encourage you to take that bet, because I have more information than you do," he continued with a laugh. TrueMedia runs servers that assemble multiple AI-based classifier programs for the sole purpose of telling whether an image is a deepfake or not. The organization is backed by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp's charitable foundation, Camp.org. When a user uploads an image, TrueMedia will produce a label that says either "uncertain," in a yellow bubble, "highly suspicious," in red, or a green bubble with "authentic" if the AI models have a degree of certainty it's not a deepfake. You can see a demo and sign up for beta access to the program here. Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington, is also founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, which has done extensive work on detecting AI-generated material. "We see trial runs, we see trial balloons, we see people…