Microsoft has a new plan to prove what’s real and what’s AI online | MIT Technology Review

AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and racks up views, like the videos that Russian influence campaigns are currently spreading to discourage Ukrainians from enlisting.  It is into this mess that Microsoft has put forward a blueprint, shared with MIT Technology Review, for how to prove what’s real online.  An AI safety research team at the company recently evaluated how methods for documenting digital manipulation are faring against today’s most worrying AI developments, like interactive deepfakes and widely accessible hyperrealistic models. It then recommended technical standards that can be adopted by AI companies and social media platforms. To understand the gold standard that Microsoft is pushing, imagine you have a Rembrandt painting and you are trying to document its authenticity. You might describe its provenance with a detailed manifest of where the painting came from and all the times it changed hands. You might apply a watermark that would be invisible to humans but readable by a machine. And you could digitally scan the painting and generate a mathematical signature, like a fingerprint, based on the brush strokes. If you showed the piece at a museum, a skeptical visitor could then examine these proofs to v...