New York politician says ‘one of the most dangerous’ uses of AI can be fixed with 1990s tech that made online banking possible

New York politician Alex Bores has said that the problem of deepfakes – highly-realistic AI-generated photos – can be fixed, and solution is not training humans to spot them but to incorporate a technology that saved the early internet and is the foundation of online payments. Bores, a Democrat currently running for Congress in Manhattan’s 12th District, says that a return to the cryptographic tools can mitigate the “crisis” of AI-generated misinformation.“Can we nerd out about deep fakes? Because this is a solvable problem and one that that I think most people are missing the boat on,” said Bores, who previously worked as a data scientist and federal-civilian business lead at Palantir, on a recent episode of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast (via Fortune). He suggested that the technology that made consumers trust online banking in the 1990s can be applied to verify the authenticity of every image, video, and audio clip online.

How digital certificates solved the ‘problem’ of internet banking

As per a report in Fortune, in the 1990s, some believed the internet would never be secure enough for financial transactions, however, this changed with the widespread adoption of HTTPS and digital certificates, which gave users a way to verify that a website was authentic and secure.Bores argues that the same “trust but verify” architecture is the key to neutralising deepfakes. He added, “That was a solvable problem. That basically same technique works for images, video, and for audio.”

Alex Bores backs C2PA: The new digital certificate

Bores’ proposal is an open-source standard called C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) – a metadata standard that can act as a “tamper-evident” credential attached to a file. It can record the file’s origin – whether it’s captured on a physical camera or generated by AI; Editing trail like how it has been modified and the creator which is a cryptographic proof of who or what produced the media.Bores says that the challenge is not the technology but its adoption because for cryptographic proof to work, it must become the industry standard. “The challenge is the creator has to attach it and so you need to get to a place where that is the default option,” Bores said, adding that the goal should be to reach a point where if people “see an image and it doesn’t have that cryptographic proof, you should be skeptical.”He likened the trust with the shift from HTTP to HTTPS, where consumers instinctively know to not trust a banking site that lacks a secure connection. “It’d be like going to your banking website and only loading HTTP, right? You would instantly be suspect, but you can still produce the images,” he added.