Can Truepic protect the truth and restore trust in online media?

It started with porn. Of course it did. In November 2017, an anonymous Reddit user launched the /r/deepfake subReddit message board, where they published a series of AI-generated videos that mapped the faces of Gal Gadot and Scarlett Johansson onto porn stars, creating fake but near-believable videos. The deepfake genie was out of the bottle.

Lawmakers in California and China don’t typically agree on much, but fears around the risks and impacts of deep fakes have caused them both to act. In late 2019, California passed two laws focused on deepfakes. Law AB730 makes it illegal to distribute deepfakes of politicians within 60 days of an election, while AB602 allows subjects of deepfake pornography (still the most common use of the technology) to sue its creator. Meanwhile, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued regulations requiring any content that was made with or manipulated by AI to be clearly labeled.

The volume of ‘synthetic media’ (that produced or manipulated by AI) will only increase as new, more powerful tools spread. In June 2020, the research lab OpenAI released a beta of its GPT-3 tool, a radically more powerful AI that can generate largely coherent text. The Guardian newspaper published an op-ed generated by the tool. A student used GPT-3 to generate self-help blog posts, some of which were upvoted by human users to the top of Hacker News.

It doesn’t take long to imagine potential use cases. NGOs and citizen journalists are already using Truepic’s standalone app to capture verified images from conflict zones. Similarly, insurance companies have a vested interest in confirming the authenticity of images. But other sectors should watch with interest: ecommerce, peer-to-peer platforms (dating, property listings) to name a few.

Given how media-rich our lives are, the benefits of being able to trust media are huge. Sherif Hanna, VP of R&D at Truepic notes that, “85% of the photos taken are on smartphones. If you want to restore trust in videos and photos, you need to figure out a way to get this into people’s hands.” Social media wasn’t a factor a generation ago when Francis Fukuyama wrote Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity, but his central argument still holds. A society riddled with distrust can not be an economically — or indeed a socially — prosperous place.

We don’t have universally authentic media, yet. Indeed, events in the next few days might make you question if this will ever be possible. But when you’re thinking about Certified Media, try the questions below as a starting point. How would you fare it became the Future Normal?

The Future Normal is our attempt to give you a simple, accessible and deeply practical guide to the biggest opportunities of the next decade. But we don’t want to do this alone. We’re connected to thousands of smart people working at the frontiers of literally every industry and market in the world. We know you know the instigators that will change our world for the better.

We’d love your feedback, tips and advice. Will we win the battle against disinformation? Will regulators have to step in, or can the platforms figure out how to stop fake news and hate speech? Will technology save us, or will humans (gasp!) still be required to solve this very human phenomenon? Where are the signs of hope?

Let us know by in the comments below, so that others can benefit from your insights.

Next week, we’ll be exploring the Future Normal: Carbon Counting. See you then!

Henry & Rohit

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