How Biden's executive order pushes tech to flag AI content
President Biden issued an executive order to try to tackle some of AI's biggest issues.
TruePic CEO Jeffrey McGregor says this executive order incentivizes tech companies to adopt technologies to authenticate digital content and indicate if it's AI-generated. McGregor states that this is “critically important” due to the pace and freedom that exists in the world of AI. McGregor explains how “content credentials” will help consumers tell if the content they are viewing was generated by a human or AI.
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Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: Let's bring in Jeffrey McGregor. He's TruePic CEO. And Jeff, we should point out that your company, for years, has really been trying to tackle distortion of images, we should say, that's partly created by AI as well. But let me just get your reaction to what was unveiled by the White House yesterday. Knowing what you know in terms of the content that's out there right now, how comprehensive is this?
JEFFREY MCGREGOR: Akiko, it's great to see you. And look, let me-- let me just start by saying that I want to live in a world where when I'm scrolling through my newsfeed, or looking at social media, or doing anything else online, I know if images are created by computers, or if they're created by humans, and whether I should trust them or not. And I think that's fundamentally important.
And what the EO does is it starts to align incentive structures for big tech to adopt technologies that do create this kind of visibility for consumers around the origin of content, the history of content, and allows them to make decisions on whether they should trust that content that they're consuming. And I think that's critically important at this stage as AI continues to accelerate, it continues to create challenges in terms of trusting the information we're consuming, and we need the right incentive structures to be able to create adoption of the technologies that exist today.
- So Jeffrey, what were those incentives look like in this space of authenticating digital content, and how might we also see that show up as a consumer? I know putting watermarks on some of these images and content has been one of the suggestions from the White House.
JEFFREY MCGREGOR: Look, I think-- I think social media companies in particular have proven over the years that sometimes financial incentives don't always match the incentives for consumer safety and health. And in this case, I do think regulation plays a very important role in urging these companies to adopt technologies that do exist today that do help consumers make more informed decisions.
And to your second question, the way that this manifests is a very simple icon that starts to appear on images and videos that we see online. It's called Content Credentials. And Content Credentials, when you tap on that icon or scroll over it with your mouse, you'll essentially see verified, cryptographically secured information on where that content originated from, what the history of that content is, and ultimately if it's been generated by computers or if it came from a camera and is an authentic human creation.
