We asked three industry leaders for their insights on what the coming year means for visual content online.
 

“An informed citizenry is the foundation of democracy. Deepfakes are becoming more sophisticated, making it increasingly hard to distinguish reality from harmful fictions. I’m excited about the promise of media provenance technologies to help protect people and society from bad actors, who seek to persuade, mislead, and sow division.“
– Dr. Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer, Microsoft
 

“Video is already the most important medium of human communication: over 80% of all internet data will be video in 2022. It will also be a breakthrough year for synthetic video. As AI-generated synthetic media technologies mature, expect the proliferation of billions of user-generated synthetic media clips in 2022. In addition, watch out for the emergence of a few new synthetic media generation companies. The best of these may well become the new tech giants of the next decade,“
– Nina Schick, Author, Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse
 

“The growing sophistication, power, and democratization of access to deep-fake technologies, paired with the ubiquity of social media, are leading us into a world where the authenticity of any visual data can reasonably be called into question. When anything can be fake, then nothing has to be real, and anyone can easily dismiss inconvenient facts. Our economy, society, and democracy -- requiring a shared set of facts and knowledge -- will be placed at significant risk when this shared knowledge ceases to exist.“
- Dr. Hany Farid, Professor, UC Berkeley, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Audio and visual deception, fraud, and disinformation are serious considerations for all businesses and industries. The emerging use of synthetic media for maligned purposes and financial fraud is a concerning trend which businesses should take note of.

In March 2021, the FBI warned that “Business Identity Compromise” would become an “evolution” in fraudulent and deceptive techniques using advanced tools to “develop synthetic corporate personas or to create a sophisticated emulation of an existing employee.” Most recently, WilmerHale’s Matt Ferraro explained in Corporate Counsel how viral disinformation combined with synthetic media represent growing dangers for the business community. Ignoring the risk of malicious synthetic media is a threat that no business can afford to take.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) has helped raise awareness on the potential of digital content provenance as a counter weight to image and audio fabrication and synthesis. In 2021, various governments around the world recognized this potential and began passing and introducing legislation with regard to digital content provenance and its utility to increase transparency online.

We expect this trend to continue into 2022:

• United States: Senators Gary Peters (D-IL) and Rob Portman (R- OH) introduced the Deepfakes Task Force Act (2021) to establish the National Deepfake and Digital Provenance Task Force, co-chaired by the Department of Homeland Security and White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), which will explore how the development and deployment of provenance standards could assist with reducing the proliferation of disinformation and digital content forgeries.
• UK: In August 2021, The UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) issued a report to the UK government on the role of AI in addressing misinformation on social media platforms. Digital content provenance and emerging open standards from the C2PA are cited as an example of how transparency can support platforms to deal with misinformation.
• Australia: Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation was signed by tech companies in response to the government’s request for a framework to provide safeguards against harm associated with such content and that empowers users to make better-informed decisions around digital content.