Microsoft Joins the Fight Against Deepfakes: Helping US Politicians Take Action!
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Microsoft Corp. is providing a tool to US politicians and campaign groups to combat the increasing prevalence of deepfakes.
The new tool allows parties to authenticate their videos and photos with so-called watermarks, Microsoft President Brad Smith said on the company’s blog early Wednesday. Using encryption technology, the service creates a permanent record of the image or video, allowing anyone online to see whether it has been digitally altered or created with artificial intelligence over time, Smith said.
Initially, Microsoft plans to offer the tool for free to political candidates and may later expand it to more groups after the 2024 U.S. election, the person familiar with the situation said, asking not to be identified because the information is not public.
Microsoft’s bid concerns the proliferation of AI-generated images and videos and their potential to fuel misinformation as US citizens prepare to vote for a new president in November 2024. Several political scams have already emerged: Ron DeSantis was convicted in June of publishing fakes. pictures on social media platform X of Donald Trump cozying up to Dr. Anthony Fauci — an attempt to mock his Republican challenger. In April, the Republican National Committee released a fake video depicting an apocalyptic USA under President Joe Biden.
The extent to which politicians and their campaign teams will actually take up Microsoft’s offer and use its tool remains unclear. The deepfake offer has become a kind of election tradition for Microsoft, which in 2020 announced a tool to detect them and, accordingly, offered politicians a tool to verify the content.
And while Microsoft warns against deep counterfeiting and offers help in combating it, the company is also investing heavily in the generative AI space. Microsoft has pumped $10 billion into OpenAI, the creator of one of the most popular AI image generators, Dall-E.
Just weeks before Biden’s video was released, a doctored clip of Senator Elizabeth Warren saying Republicans should be banned from voting went viral.
A group of US senators introduced bipartisan legislation in September that would ban the use of deep fakes to influence elections or obtain political funding.
Microsoft also released a new threat intelligence report that doubled down on its previous concerns about attempts by foreign actors to influence campaigns. It is likely that China, Iran and Russia will try to interfere in US politics next year, the company said in the report.
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Attempted cyberattacks and influence from Russia were widely expected in the 2022 US midterm elections, Microsoft said in the report, but no major incidents were reported. Still, Russia remains “the most committed and capable threat to the 2024 elections,” the company said, adding that the country would likely use synthetic content to sow discord on social media.
“The Kremlin is likely to see next year’s race as a necessary political warfare that will determine the outcome of support for Kiev and the war in Ukraine,” Microsoft said in a report.
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