Facebook’s Metaverse Could Be Overrun By Deep Fakes And Other Misinformation If These Non-Profits Don’t Succeed

By Adam

An example of a deepfake and original Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg video. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post via Getty Images).

The Washington Post via Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual-reality universe, dubbed simply Meta, has been plagued by a number of problems from technology issues to a difficulty holding onto staff. That doesn’t mean it won’t soon be used by billions of people. Meta has been facing a new problem. Is the virtual environment where users can create their own facial designs, the same as for everybody? Or will companies and politicians have greater flexibility to alter who they look like?

Rand Waltzman is a senior information scientist from the non-profit RAND Institute. He warned last week that the lessons Facebook has learned in personalizing news feeds, and allowing hyper-targeted info, could be used to supercharge its Meta. In this Meta, even speakers can be personalized to appear more trustworthy to every audience member. Using deepfake technology that creates realistic but falsified videos, a speaker could be modified to have 40% of the audience member’s features without the audience member even knowing.

Meta has already taken measures to fix the problem. But other companies don’t hesitate. The New York Times and CBC Radio Canada launched Project Origin two years ago to develop technology to prove that a message came from its source. Project Origin, Adobe, Intel and Sony are now part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. Some early versions, including those that track the source of information online, of Project Origin software are already available. Now the question is: Who will use them?

“We can offer extended information to validate the source of information that they’re receiving,” says Bruce MacCormack, CBC Radio-Canada’s senior advisor of disinformation defense initiatives, and co-lead of Project Origin. “Facebook has to decide to consume it and use it for their system, and to figure out how it feeds into their algorithms and their systems, to which we don’t have any visibility.”

Project Origin, which was founded in 2020, is software that allows viewers to determine if the information claimed to have come from a trustworthy news source and to prove it. This means that there is no manipulation. Instead of relying on blockchain or another distributed ledger technology to track the movement of information online, as might be possible in future versions of the so-called Web3, the technology tags information with data about where it came from that moves with it as it’s copied and spread. A version early in the development of this software was made available to members and can be used now, he said.

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Meta’s misinformation issues are more than just fake news. In order to reduce overlap between Project Origin’s solutions and other similar technology targeting different kinds of deception—and to ensure the solutions interoperate—the non-profit co-launched the Coalition for Content Provenance and …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer