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>> I recall the golden era of news broadcasting.
I remember as a kid sitting with
my family watching the news broadcast.
That was our window to the world.
Whatever came to the screen is what we saw as the real-world.
Today, there are so many screens,
there are so many sources of information.
We really have difficulty believing in everything we see.
It's important for us with
this multitude of screens and sources to bring
back to society the trust we used to have in the news sources.
It's clear that a healthy democracy requires healthy journalism.
Yet, in the current climate of
fake news and polarized political events,
people around the world are having
a tough time relying on the mass media.
Advances in computer graphics and machine learning have led into
general availability of easy to use
tools for modifying and synthesizing media.
That threatens to cast a doubt on the veracity of our media.
At what point do we question everything we see and hear?
Innovation is centered on
our ability to see the world differently.
Breaking perceived boundaries and looking between the lines
to solve some of the world's toughest challenges.
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Since its inception,
media manipulation has come in many forms.
The most dangerous, seamlessly
tip toeing the line between fact and fiction.
Sometimes even videos and images
that have been just slightly cut in
manipulation can modify the meaning of what you're trying to say.
With the evolution of AI,
we're going beyond just simply cutting and pasting.
With deep fakes we can create videos and images that really mimic
the likeness of a person and that can have very harmful effects.
Today, creating deep fakes
doesn't require Hollywood level resources anymore.
Thanks to the widespread and easily accessible AI technology,
anybody can create really convincing, deep fakes.
So convincing that no person or
not even AI technology itself can detect if the media is a fake.
All this backs the question, as citizens,
how can we be sure of the authenticity that we're seeing?
Can we trust our eyes and ears?
In principle, the answer is no.
In the long term, detecting deep fakes will not work because of
increased sophistication and ease of use of the AI tools.
What can we do if we can't detect the deep fakes?
We believe the long-term answer
relies on authenticating the source of media.
We need to establish a chain of
trust from the publisher to the consumer.
Securing provenance is a complex endeavor
and requires buy-in from many organizations.
To address that, we're forming a coalition
of many institutions including the BBC,
the CBC Radio Canada,
The New York Times, and Microsoft.
We call this coalition Project Origin.
The Technical layer of Project Origin is
a process of authentication that links the media to its publisher.
Then if there's any modification,
any change in that media,
in the distribution process,
we alert the user that that media has been tampered with.
In short, we are building a chain of provenance.
Now just to be clear,
Project Origin is not about
establishing the trustworthiness of a piece of media.
We just established the publisher.
In doing so, we hope to rekindle the user stress that
the content they are consuming is
directly linked to a known source.
Ultimately, it's up to the viewer to decide
if the source itself is trustworthy or not.
A challenge like this requires
collaboration and commitment to an open standard approach.
Our hope is that this standard will be used
by large and small news organizations,
to solve the media provenance problem
requires a multidisciplinary teams.
We need expertise from technologies, immediate processing,
security, as well as
understanding of the publishing processes of news.
[MUSIC]
Let's imagine I'm a news producer
and I'm ready to push the publish button.
As part of the publication process,
the new tools will create
a digital fingerprint that gets stored in a Cloud service.
In return, I've received for certification of authenticity,
which then gets stored in the distributed ledger.
The advantage of a distributed ledger is that you have
multiple servers spread across companies.
That means there is no single controlling entity.
Instead, you have a federation of entities,
much like a block chain,
that databases are cryptographically secure.
Another important aspect is the user experience.
We need to develop good user interfaces so that
users feel comfortable in
knowing the source of the media they are seeing.
It can take awhile for users to
get comfortable with new interfaces.
What we hope to see in the future is that
all publishers will use a verification system
like the one we're designing that will allow
people to trust their chosen media sources.
A significant first step towards rebuilding trust is
the establishment of
a formal industry standard for media provenance.
[MUSIC]
The goal of
Project Origin is establishing an open standard for
media provenance and its widespread adoption.
We look forward to working with
others to establish this new standard.
There's no one company that can solve this problem on their own.
When it comes to our news and media,
trust is essential in safeguarding our freedom and democracy.
Every step Project Origin takes is
a step towards protecting that trust.
[MUSIC]