One year after Global Fact 10 took place in Seoul, South-Korea, the progress accomplished by our project in detecting AI-generated content was presented to the international fact-checking community in a workshop held in Sarajevo's Dom Mladih amphiteater on 26 June 2024.
During the one hour session, Denis Teyssou, innovation manager of the vera.ai project, shared the latest improvements incorporated in the verification plugin and best practices to verify synthetic content and deepfakes.
Around 80 participants attended the talk and learned about new features available in the latest version of the verification plugin, published just on time for the event on 26 June. The improvements, detailed in the slides below, include a more explainable interface in voice cloning detection (provided by the Spanish startup Loccus.ai) and in deepfake and synthetic image detection (provided by vera.ai partners CERTH and UNINA).
Best practices to obtain better results with AI-generated images include using the Google Fact Check Explorer reverse image search feature (now also included in the verification plugin's contextual menu) and then the image context feature (presently in beta mode) to retrieve the first indexed similar images.
This heuristic approach, empirically tested in collaboration with fact-checkers, leads to a significant improvement in detection results.
Finally, the workshop was also an opportunity to discuss with participants about the known limitations of our verification tools and what to do to overcome them.
Following the feedback received during the previous summit in Korea, we also shared an improvement on our CheckGIF forensic feature (aiming to build an evidence of forgery with a manipulated image and the previous, original or copy, retrieved by similarity on search engines).
Our advanced users can now add a fake annotation (available in all the seven languages currently supported by the plugin) on the GIF or mp4 video export. This new feature allows users to build a timely evidence of forgery that can be shared on social networks to respond quickly to disinformation.
Below you can see an example of a recent image backing a conspiracy theory about the Donald Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania (US) on 13 July.
Author: Denis Teyssou (AFP)
Editor: Jochen Spangenberg (DW)