Look, forgive me, all right? It's Friday afternoon as I write this, and I know I've picked a silly image to go with an article on what is quite an important topic. But Meta has called its new AI-generated video watermarking tool the Video Seal, and sometimes the header image picks itself.
Let's get down to brass tacks. Or beach balls, one of the two. (Stop it now - Ed). Deepfakes are a serious concern, with a recent Ofcom survey reporting that two in five participants said they'd seen at least one AI-generated deepfake in the last six months.
Deepfake content has the potential to harm and spread disinformation, so Meta releasing a tool to watermark AI-generated videos is probably a net benefit for the world (via TechCrunch). Meta Video Seal is open source, and designed to be integrated into existing software to apply imperceptible watermarks to AI-generated video clips.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Pierre Fernandez, an AI research scientist at Meta, said: "We developed Video Seal to provide a more effective video watermarking solution, particularly for detecting AI-generated videos and protecting originality.
"While other watermarking tools exist, they don’t offer sufficient robustness to video compression, which is very prevalent when sharing content through social platforms; weren’t efficient enough to run at scale; weren’t open or reproducible; or were derived from image watermarking, which is suboptimal for videos."
Meta has already released a non-video specific watermarking tool, Watermark Anything, and a tool specifically for audio, called—you guessed it—Audio Seal. This latest video-focussed effort is designed to be much more resilient than similar software from DeepMind and Microsoft, although Fernandez admits that heavy compression and significant edits may alter the watermarks or "render them unrecoverable."
Still, anything more resistant to removal than the current options strikes as a good thing, as a quick Google reveals multiple methods of AI-generated content watermark removal, which I won't link to here. Still, the info is out there, and that means potentially harmful content is currently going unchecked.
With a watermark in place, news outlets and fact checkers the world over can correctly determine whether a video is potentially real, or created by AI. The real uphill battle now is widespread adoption, as no matter how effective the tool is at flagging AI videos, it'll matter not a jot if no-one uses it.
To that end, Meta also has plans to launch a public leaderboard, called the Meta Omni Seal Bench, which will compare the performance of watermarking methods, and is currently organising workshops at next years ICLR AI conference. Fernandez says the team hopes more AI researchers and developers will integrate watermarking into their work, and that they want to collaborate with the industry and academic community to "progress faster in the field."
So come for the seals, stay for the fight against AI-generated misinformation. Sometimes it can feel like we're drowning under a wave of an AI industry moving incredibly quickly into the future—with minimal checks and balances—so it's difficult not to applaud Meta for making attempts to rein in some of the more egregious side effects.
Particularly if it makes me think of this fella. You're welcome.
