The ideas behind this initiative—that a metadata-powered glyph will appear above or around content produced by generative AI technologies to inform individuals of the providence of content they come across—depend on a number of somewhat improbable things.
- A whole computing infrastructure based on tracking metadata reliably and then presenting it to users in ways they understand and care about, and which is adopted by the masses.
- That generative outputs will need to remain the exception as opposed to the norm: when generative image manipulation (not full image creation) is normal then how much will this glyph help to notify people of ‘fake’ imagery or other content?
- That there are sufficiently low benefits to offering metadata-stripping or content-modification or content-creation systems that there are no widespread or easy-to-adopt ways of removing the identifying metadata from generative content.
Finally, where the intent behind fraudulent media is to intimidate, embarrass, or harass (e.g., non-consensual deepfake pornographic content, violence content), then what will the glyph in question do to allay these harms? I suspect very little unless it is, also, used to identify individuals who create content for the purposes of addressing criminal or civil offences. And, if that’s the case, then the outputs would constitute a form of data that are designed to deliberately enable state intervention in private life, which could raise a series of separate, unique, and difficult to address problems.
Excited Pixels 