Meta to combat deepfakes with this open-source AI watermarking tool
Meta is releasing a new tool that can add an invisible watermark to videos generated using artificial intelligence (AI). The new tool, called Video Seal, joins the company’s existing watermarking tools, Audio Seal and Watermark Anything. The company suggested that the tool will be open source, but the code has yet to be published. Interestingly, the company claims that the watermarking technique will not affect video quality, but will withstand common methods of removing them from videos.
Deepfakes have swept the internet since the rise of generative AI. Deepfakes are synthetic content, usually generated using AI, that depicts false and misleading objects, people or scenarios. Such content is often used to spread disinformation about a public figure, create fake sexual content, or conduct fraud and scams.
Additionally, as AI systems improve, deepfake content will become harder to spot, making it even harder to distinguish itself from real content. According to a McAfee questionnaire70 percent of people already feel unsure about their ability to tell the difference between a real voice and an AI-generated voice.
According to internal data According to Sumsub, deepfake fraud will increase by 1,740 percent in North America and 1,530 percent in the Asia-Pacific region in 2022. The number appeared to increase tenfold between 2022 and 2023.
As concerns about deepfakes grow, many companies developing AI models have started releasing watermarking tools that can distinguish synthetic content from real ones. Earlier this year, Google released SynthID to watermark AI-generated text and videos. Microsoft has also released similar tools. In addition, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is also working on new standards to identify AI-generated content.
Now Meta has done that issued its own Video Seal tool to watermark AI videos. The researchers emphasize that the tool can watermark each frame of a video with an imperceptible tag that cannot be tampered with. It is said to be resistant to techniques such as blurring, cropping and compression software. However, despite adding the watermark, the researchers claim that the quality of the video will not be compromised.
Meta has announced that Video Seal will be open source under a permitted license, but it has yet to release the tool and code base into the public domain.
