Verance said it is offering watermarking technology designed to protect broadcast news from airing deep fake video generated using artificial intelligence.

The Verance Aspect technology uses open watermarking standards to enable social media platforms to authenticate broadcast content in user upload, enhancing public trust in media and reducing the impact of disinformation.

Broadcasters including Graham Media Group, Gray Media, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Capitol Broadcasting have already deployed watermarketing using Verance Aspect. 

"These tools we are providing to enable reliable authentication of broadcast news content through open standards like ATSC watermarking and C2PA provenance are essential,” said Nil Shah, CEO of Verance. “They represent a significant step toward maintaining public trust and ensuring the integrity of the information that shapes our world in this contentious election year and beyond."

Verances technology stems from watermarking standards developed and published by the ATSC and the provenance authentication technology standards consortium C2PA. 

C2PA authentication requires signed metadata that cannot be transmitted through existing content distribution paths. ATSC watermarking enables recipients of broadcast content to locate the absent C2PA metadata by embedding imperceptible URLs throughout the broadcast audio and video that survives any distribution path.

"At Gray, we believe in the power of trustworthy journalism. By integrating Verance Aspect watermarking with C2PA standards, we're not just protecting our content; we're reinforcing the credibility of broadcast news in an age where AI-driven misinformation is a significant threat. This technology is an important part of ensuring the public receives verified, unaltered information,” said David Burke, senior VP and CTO of Gray, 

“Ensuring our viewers have the highest confidence in our programming is critical to our business,” added Mike Kralec, senior VPand CTO for Sinclair. “We believe C2PA, through its ability to authenticate the name of content creators or distribution services, can play a central role in future end-to-end technical architectures and workflows. We applaud C2PA and Verance for recognizing that authentication of creators and distributors is absolutely essential to the advanced workflows our industry will rely on in the future."

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.