Meta is releasing a new tool that can add an invisible watermark to videos created using artificial intelligence (AI). Dubbed Video Seal, the new tool joins the company’s existing watermarking tools, Audio Seal and Watermark Anything. The company suggested that the tool would be open-sourced, however, it has not yet published the code. Interestingly, the company claims that the watermarking technology will not affect the video quality, yet will be resilient against common methods of removing them from videos.
Deepfakes have flooded the internet since the rise of generative AI. Deepfakes are synthetic content, usually generated using AI, that shows false and misleading objects, people, or scenarios. Such content is often used to spread misinformation about a public figure, create fake sexual content, or commit fraud and scams.
Additionally, as AI systems become better, deepfake content will become harder to detect, making it even more difficult to distinguish from genuine content. According to a McAfee survey, 70 percent of people already feel that they are not confident in telling the difference between a real voice and an AI-generated voice.
According to Samsub’s internal data, deepfake fraud increased by 1,740 percent in North America and 1,530 percent in the Asia-Pacific region in 2022. This number will increase tenfold between 2022 and 2023.
As concerns grow about deepfakes, many companies developing AI models have begun releasing watermarking tools that can identify synthetic content from real content. Earlier this year, Google released SynthID for watermarking AI-generated text and video. Microsoft has also released similar tools. Additionally, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is also working on new standards to identify AI-generated content.
Now, Meta has released its own Video Seal tool for watermarking AI videos. The researchers highlight that this tool can watermark every frame of the video with an imperceptible tag that cannot be tampered with. It is said to be resilient against techniques such as blurring, cropping, and compression software. However, despite adding the watermark the researchers claim that the quality of the video will not be compromised.
Meta has announced that Video Seal will be open-sourced under a permissive license, however, it has not yet released the tool and its codebase into the public domain.
