Microsoft OpenAI Deepfake Fund to Fight Election Deepfakes
In a major change to protect democratic processes, Microsoft and OpenAI have launched a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund. The fund aims to fight the rising threat of AI-generated deception, commonly known as deepfakes. These are being increasingly used to mislead voters and weaken democracy. This initiative comes at a critical time when a record 2 billion people are expected to participate in elections across 50 countries.
The Societal Resilience Fund is part of a wider responsible AI push, with the goal of promoting AI education and literacy among voters and helpless communities. The fund will issue grants to several organizations, including Older Adults Technology Services (OATS), the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), and Partnership on AI (PAI).
These grants aim to nurture a better understanding of AI and its capabilities across society. For example, OATS plans to use its grant for training programs aimed at those aged 50 and over in the U.S., covering the opening aspects of AI. The International IDEA, in the meantime, will train election agencies, the media, and others to deal with AI and deepfakes.
The C2PA offers a standard for tracing content sources. It will run a campaign to push authenticity tools like watermarking. OpenAI is concurrently joining the C2PA’s lead committee to help shape the standard. Partnership on AI (PAI) will use its share of the fund to expand its Synthetic Media Framework providing transparency about generative technologies.
In addition to the fund, OpenAI has launched a new deepfake detector for deception researchers, designed to help identify fake content generated by its own DALL-E image generator. The current technology correctly spotted 98% of DALL-E 3 images in a test, but the company wants to better handle image modifications that can prevent checks.
The fund and OpenAI’s tools could prove important this year. Major elections are being held in the U.S. and other key countries, and there’s concern that nations like China and Russia will use AI and deepfakes to spread deception. Greater literacy will theoretically limit these vote manipulation attempts.
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