TrueMedia.org, a non-partisan, non-profit organization committed to fighting AI-based disinformation, is enhancing deepfake detection capabilities ahead of the 2024 U.S. election season.

This program, in collaboration with Microsoft, will include utilizing deepfake detection capabilities of Microsoft's AI for Good Lab to train AI detection models, share relevant data, evaluate, and refine new detection models, and provide feedback on quality and classification methodologies. 

Microsoft's AI for Good Lab is an applied research and data visualization lab that harnesses the power of big data, and Microsoft's cloud technology.

The collaboration comes amid a sharp rise in political deepfakes, which have been driven by the broad availability of generative AI and associated tools that facilitate manipulating and forging video, audio, images, and text. To address this growing issue, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary held a hearing earlier this month entitled “Oversight of AI: Election Deepfakes.”

Deepfakes remain a significant concern ahead of the 2024 U.S. elections, as a growing number of Americans obtain their news from social media channels, as evident in a recent Pew study which found the percentage of TikTok users that get news from the platform has doubled since 2020 and now stands around 43%. That same study found that over half of U.S. adults regularly get news from social media.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with Microsoft in this vital effort to safeguard the integrity of our elections,” said TrueMedia.org Founder Dr. Oren Etzioni. “TrueMedia.org now has the opportunity to harness the enormous power of shared technology and continue our mission of getting a state-of-the-art deepfake detection tool into the hands of staffers, newsrooms, and reporters across the country.”

This comes less than one month after the launch of TrueMedia.org’s deepfake detection tool, which is now available for government officials, fact checkers, campaign staff, universities, non-profits, and reporters of accredited news organizations.

“As deepfakes become easier to make and distribute, it’s important that we pair our expertise with organizations like TrueMedia.org to build public awareness of deepfakes and to combat efforts by bad actors ahead of the U.S. election and other elections happening globally,” said Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Chief Data Scientist and Director of the AI for Good Lab. 

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About TrueMedia.org
TrueMedia.org is a non-partisan, non-profit organization focused on fighting AI-based disinformation in political campaigns by identifying manipulated media (“deepfakes”). We partner with best-in-class technology providers, researchers, and academic labs to create a useful, easy to use, and highly reliable tool. We focus on high impact results in a very focused domain – namely identifying political disinformation via fake social media assets. TrueMedia.org is funded by Camp.org, the non-profit organization of Uber Co-founder Garrett Camp.

To learn more, please visit: www.TrueMedia.org

Media:
Bryce Tom
RUBENSTEIN
btom@rubenstein.com

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