OpenAI Teases Tool That Can Detect AI Images for This Election Year
More than four billion people around the world are eligible to vote in elections in 2024, but some fear that artificial intelligence will interfere with democracy.
OpenAI, arguably the world’s most influential generative AI company, has moved to clarify its policies relating to elections, stating that people cannot use its GPT tools to impersonate politicians or try and dissuade voters from going to the ballot box.
But on the image side, OpenAI says it is experimenting with a provenance classifier; which is a new tool for detecting images generated by DALL-E.
“Our internal testing has shown promising early results, even where images have been subject to common types of modifications,” reads a blog update. “We plan to soon make it available to our first group of testers — including journalists, platforms, and researchers — for feedback.”
OpenAI also highlighted the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) program, software that encodes details about an image’s provenance using cryptography.
C2PA is the name of the standard at the core of the digital signatures that the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) developed to verify a photo’s provenance.
“Better transparency around image provenance — including the ability to detect which tools were used to produce an image—can empower voters to assess an image with trust and confidence in how it was made,” says OpenAI.
As PetaPixel explained earlier this month, the original premise behind content authenticity was not to fight AI — the CAI’s initiative and provenance standard predate the proliferation of AI images — but rather as a way for publications to certify that an image has not been altered after it was captured.
A Useful App
There have been numerous apps that claim to be able to detect AI images and so far none have proven to be reliable; some were even dragged into arguments over the conflict in Gaza.
Back in October, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati stated that the company was working on an AI image detector — the first mention the company was working on an AI image detector.
This recent update shows that perhaps the much-needed technology is imminent. Although, vast swathes of AI images are generated from models that are not DALL-E, so how useful such a tool will be remains to be seen.
