A new nonprofit, nonpartisan technology organization called TrueMedia is developing an AI-powered tool to detect deepfake videos, photos, and audio, aiming to combat political disinformation in the leadup to the 2024 elections.
Founded and led by Oren Etzioni, University of Washington professor and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, the Seattle-based group is backed by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp through his Camp.org nonprofit foundation.
The plan, in essence, is to use AI to fight AI.
“Disinformation, transmitted virally over social networks, has emerged as the Achilles heel of democracy in the 21st Century,” the group said in its announcement Wednesday morning, predicting “a tsunami of disinformation” in the 2024 election due to a sharp decline in the cost of using AI to create deceptive media.
TrueMedia plans to release a free, web-based tool in the first quarter of this year that combines advances from TrueMedia with existing deepfake detection tools in areas including computer vision and audio analysis. It will be available initially for use by journalists, fact-checkers, and online influencers before broader public release later in the year.
The group is far from the first to take on this challenge, but Etzioni said he believes TrueMedia will be in a strong position to address it.
“We think that both the particular focus on political deepfakes, and the particular expertise that we’re bringing together, is going to allow us go further, faster than has been done in the past,” Etzioni said in an interview this week.
TrueMedia’s technology will analyze media uploaded by users and indicate the likelihood that the content is manipulated by artificial intelligence, along with an explanation of its assessment.
In the meantime, the organization is taking signups for a waitlist and encouraging visitors to its website to submit examples of political deepfake content that they discover online, to help develop its tools.
Etzioni said he was inspired to start looking into the problem after taking part in a meeting President Biden held with tech leaders this summer. At the same time, he emphasized the nonpartisan nature of the project. TrueMedia’s AI tools will make a technical assessment about uploaded media, not a political judgment about the underlying content.
“This wasn’t what I was focused on [before the meeting]. I just realized how potentially horrific this can be in a narrowly divided election,” he said. “As an AI person and a technologist, I asked myself, well, what can we do about it?”
Etzioni acknowledged that the technical problem is “extremely difficult.” Even as tech companies move to watermark AI-generated content, for example, advances in AI are empowering bad actors to create increasingly convincing deepfakes, as evidenced by the AI-generated robocalls that impersonated Biden in New Hampshire.
“Where it used to be that this was only something that state actors could do, now, unfortunately, anybody could do it,” he said. He added that he is especially concerned about the possibility of “a kind of disinformation terrorism.”
Etzioni is stepping down from his board seat at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) to focus on the initiative, while continuing his work with the AI2 Incubator, venture capital firm Madrona, and the University of Washington.
The initial TrueMedia team includes operations leader James Allard, who is leaving his role as AI2 chief operating officer; Michael Bayne and Aerin Kim in engineering; Arthur Min in partnerships; Oren Zamir in research; and design advisor Vitor Lourenco. Camp, who is funding the multimillion-dollar project, is also directly involved as an advisor.
Etzioni said TrueMedia is hiring, and the team could double in the next year.
TrueMedia’s scientific advisory board is Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory; Darrell M. West, senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution; Siwei Lyu, director of the University of Buffalo’s Media Forensic Lab; and Jevin West, director of the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public.
Jevin West was among the speakers at a panel on the topic in Seattle this week, where he indicated that there’s separately a role for commercial ventures to help solve the larger problem. “There is big business in fighting misinformation,” he said.
TrueMedia’s initial partners include Hive, Clarity, Reality Defender and Sensity.
The group is focused heavily on the 2024 election, going so far as to put a countdown clock to Nov. 5 on its homepage. Asked about long-term plans beyond this year, Etzioni said TrueMedia needs to prove itself first.
“At the end of the day, we could ask two questions: What was the accuracy of our assessments in the context of this election cycle? And to what extent did it have an impact?” he said. “While we can’t solve the problem or wave a magic wand, we want to have a genuine impact.”
