Social media giant, TikTok, has begun labelling AI-generated content uploaded to its platform with Content Credentials, with additional support promised for the future.
TikTok, which boasts more than 170 million users in the United States alone, is the first social media platform to support Content Credentials by joining the Adobe-founded Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). The move has been taken to help users safely and responsibly express their creativity with AI-generated content (AIGC) and navigate AIGC and misinformation online. TikTok will also launch new media literacy resources, which we developed with guidance from experts including MediaWise and WITNESS.
There are two parts needed for an effective digital literacy campaign addressing the dangers of deepfakes. First, people must understand that AI generated content can be used to deceive them. Just like any other educational campaign about the implication of new technologies, the public needs to understand that powerful AI can create realistic synthetic content, and that they need to be skeptical when viewing any digital content. With tools like Content Credentials, there are ways that they can identify content that can be trusted.
Since its establishment in 2019, the Content Authenticity Initiative has grown to include more than 3,000 members, who are committed to producing trusted digital content in a world where altered and misleading images are not only plentiful but becoming indistinguishable from real images. Content Credentials include metadata that can provide information such as a creator’s name, what device was used to create the content, date and time of creation, access to the original content, and edit history, including whether AI was used. Providing any or all of this information allows the creator to establish levels of authenticity with their viewers, giving them a way to be trusted in this digital age.
Click here for more information about the TikTok initiative.