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.Oren Etzioni is leading the nonpartisan TrueMedia deepfake detection initiative. (AI2 Photo)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 with GeekWire 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

OpenAI said companies can use its latest large language model (LLM), GPT-4, to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted content moderation systems. Using GPT-4, companies can perform content moderation with more accurate and consistent labels, a faster feedback loop for policy refinement and a reduced need for human intervention, the company said in a Tuesday (Aug. 15) blog post. “We believe this offers a more positive vision of the future of digital platforms, where AI can help moderate online traffic according to platform-specific policy and relieve the mental burden of a large number of human moderators,” OpenAI said in the post. “Anyone with OpenAI API [application programming interface] access can implement this approach to create their own AI-assisted moderation system.”

Now, Hive is unveiling the most ambitious of its Intelligent Search services yet: Web Search, for visual comparisons to content on the open web.