vera.ai featured at Global Fact 10 in Seoul, Korea

Our innovation manager Denis Teyssou (AFP) conducted a 50 minutes dedicated breakout session entitled AI vs disinformation: the vera.ai project: enhancing the InVID-WeVerify plugin. at Global Fact 10 in Seoul, Korea. Around 40 participants, including well-known fact-checkers like Craig Silverman (ProPublica), attended the session in person. The talk was recorded for online participants on the Global Fact 10 website.

Denis Teyssou presenting the vera.ai project at Global Fact 10 in Seoul, on June 30.
Denis Teyssou interacting with the public attending the breakout session about the vera.ai EU project(c) AFP Jung Yeon-Je Reproduced for vera.ai with AFP's permission.

Denis presented the project, the consortium and outlined vera.ai's roadmap to develop innovative tools for the fact-checking community at Global Fact 10 in Seoul, Korea (see presentation). He shared the promising preliminary scientific prototypes for debunking deepfake videos and synthetic images such as those produced by the MidJourney or Stable Diffusion frameworks. 

He also showcased how to use the CheckGIF tool to build evidence of forgeries in images and video keyframes. Those multimedia objects can also be used by fact-checkers as standalone evidence of forgeries on social networks to decrease the curb of disinformation more rapidly. The session allowed to gather valuable feedback on this latter topic from professional fact-checkers.

On the same day, just before Denis' presentation, Craig Silverman had already presented the verification plugin, an essential toolbox for fact-checkers. He outlined the CheckGIF component to reveal image forgeries between a suspicious image to fact-check and a previous one, retrieved by similarity search on the main image reverse search engines. 

Craig Silverman showcasing the plugin CheckGIF feature
Craig Silverman presents the CheckGIF feature of the plugin at Global Fact 10 in Seoul.(c) Denis Teyssou

Denis also shared the latest news about the verification plugin which has reached +95k active  weekly users in 224 countries at the time of his presentation. 

A new milestone version of the plugin (0.76) was published while the conference took place in Seoul, adopting the latest "manifest v3" framework (which Google will make compulsory for browser extensions in the coming months). Among the novelties of this new version, the plugin’s interface is now available in Arabic, thanks to a partnership with ARIJ and the Arab fact-checkers network.

Global Fact 10, the world's most important fact-checking summit, took place this year in Seoul. 506 participants came together in the Korean capital, while more than 1000 individuals participated online. Attendees came from 75 countries.

For three days, participants could attend conference sessions, panel discussions, presentations of success stories, breakout sessions about relevant topics for the fact-checking community, such as the latest news from platforms like Meta, TikTok or Twitter, and more. Global Fact 10 also included specialist topics such as the Korean perspective on fact-checking, and others with wide-ranging and cross-border relevance, such as new tools and old tactics used in investigative journalism. Overall, a very worthwhile conference that also allowed for the refreshing of old contacts and making new friends.

 

Author: Denis Teyssou (AFP)

Editors: Anna Schild / Jochen Spangenberg (DW)

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