Companies must use advanced tools to detect and stamp out misinformation and deepfake content to help counter growing risks of election interference and financial fraud, the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union urged in a report on Friday, July 11.
Deepfakes such as AI-generated images and videos, and audio that convincingly impersonates real people, pose mounting risks, the ITU said in the report released at its “AI for Good Summit” in Geneva.
The ITU called for robust standards to combat manipulated multimedia and recommended that content distributors such as social media platforms use digital verification tools to authenticate images and videos before sharing.
“Trust in social media has dropped significantly because people don’t know what’s true and what’s fake,” Bilel Jamoussi, Chief of the Study Groups Department at the ITU’s Standardization Bureau, noted. Combatting deepfakes was a top challenge due to Generative AI’s ability to fabricate realistic multimedia, he said.
Leonard Rosenthol of Adobe, a digital editing software leader that has been addressing deepfakes since 2019, underscored the importance of establishing the provenance of digital content to help users assess its trustworthiness.
