Verance said it has launched a watermarking system to help verify that news clips are coming from trusted sources.
The new product is designed to help with fact-checking and deter misinformation and deep-faked videos from getting on air, particularly as a presidential election campaign is getting underway.
The San Diego-based company has decided to make the system immediately available to political campaigns and other corporate and governmental organizations. Verance would work in partnership with the makers of TVs and consumer devices to protect their audience — and their reputation — against the increasing risks of online misinformation, misrepresentation and distortion.
Verance is now in advanced talks with TV and digital news operations, as well as consumer-electronics companies, about forming partnerships for the trusted news source watermarking system, which indicates whether a piece of content the media has been tampered with or modified during distribution.
“It is important to enlarge the body of authenticated news content to reduce the influence of content that could be fake, especially in a hotly contested election year,“ Verance CEO Nil Shah said. “Without universally trusted authenticity tools in this new era, the internet’s societal benefit as a means of accessing knowledge will precipitously decline. This presents a serious problem not only for large technology platforms such as Facebook and YouTube but also traditional news media that increasingly rely on the internet for sourcing and verification.”
The system is in line with President Joe Biden’s recent executive order requiring the industry to develop a number of safety and security standards before AI products can be introduced to the public, the company said.
Verance, whose watermarking systems have been standardized over the past nearly 30 years, has also been consulting with senior members of Congress and government officials on watermarking and policy.
