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As a follow-up to yesterday’s news on Google using IPTC metadata to mark AI-generated content we are happy to announce that generative AI tools from Midjourney and Shutterstock will both be adopting the same guidelines.
According to a post on Google’s blog, Midjourney and Shutterstock will be using the same mechanism as Google – that is, using the IPTC “Digital Source Type” property to embed a marker that the content was created by a generative AI tool. Google will be detecting this metadata and using it to show a signal in search results that the content has been AI-generated.
A step towards implementing responsible practices for AI
We at IPTC are very excited to see this concrete implementation of our guidance on metadata for synthetic media.
We also see it as a real-world implementation of the guidelines on Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media from the Partnership on AI, and of the AI Ethical Guidelines for the Re-Use and Production of Visual Content from CEPIC, the alliance of European picture agencies. Both of these best practice guidelines emphasise the need for transparency in declaring content that was created using AI tools.
The phrase from the CEPIC transparency guidelines is “Inform users that the media or content is synthetic, through
labelling or cryptographic means, when the media created includes synthetic elements.”
The equivalent recommendation from the Partnership on AI guidelines is called indirect disclosure:
“Indirect disclosure is embedded and includes, but is not limited to, applying cryptographic provenance to synthetic outputs (such as the C2PA standard), applying traceable elements to training data and outputs, synthetic media file metadata, synthetic media pixel composition, and single-frame disclosure statements in videos”
Here is a simple, concrete way of implementing these disclosure / transparency guidelines using existing metadata standards.
Moving towards a provenance ecosystem
IPTC is also involved in efforts to embed transparency and provenance metadata in a way that can be protected using cryptography: C2PA, the Content Authenticity Initiative, and Project Origin.
C2PA provides a way of declaring the same “Digital Source Type” information in a more robust way, that can provide mechanisms to retrieve metadata even after the image was manipulated or after the metadata was stripped from the file.
However implementing C2PA technology is more complicated, and involves obtaining and managing digital certificates, among other things. Also C2PA technology has not been implemented by platforms or search engines on the display side.
In the short term, AI content creation systems can use this simple mechanism to add disclosure information to their content.
The IPTC is happy to help any other parties to implement these metadata signals: please contact IPTC via the Contact Us form.
In association with World News Day, IPTC is presenting a webinar on our efforts to help news organisations address trust, credibility and misinformation via our standards.
Through our work with The Trust Project, Reporters Sans Frontières’ Journalism Trust Initiative, Credibility Coalition and others, we have been able to create extensions to IPTC standards to enable news organisations to express various “Trust Indicators”.
Learn more about how this works and how it can lead to a more trustworthy news media.
Register for the webinar here via Zoom
UPDATE: The webinar has now ended, but you can view the recording by registering on the link above.
For information on other World News Day events, please see the main site at https://worldnewsday.org/
At the IPTC Autumn Meeting in Toronto in 2018, IPTC considered the issues of “trust and credibility” in news media. We looked at the existing initiatives and considered whether IPTC could contribute to the space.
We concluded that some existing efforts were doing great work and that we should not create our own trust and credibility standard. Instead, our resources could best be put towards working with those groups, and aligning IPTC’s standards — particularly our main news standards NewsML-G2 and ninjs — to work well with the outputs of those groups.
Since that time, the IPTC NewsML-G2 Working Group has been collaborating with several initiatives around trust and misinformation in the news industry. We have been working mainly with The Trust Project and the Journalism Trust Initiative from Reporters Without Borders, but have also been in communication with the Credibility Coalition, the Certified Content Coalition and others to identify all known means of expressing trust in news content.
Our aim is to make it easy for users of NewsML-G2 and ninjs to work with these standards to convey the trustworthiness of their content. This should make it easier for news publishers to translate trust information to something that can be read by aggregator platforms and user tools.
In particular, we want to make it as easy as possible for syndicated content to be distributed and published in alignment with trust principles.
A new IPTC Guideline document
To that end, we are publishing a “public draft” of a new IPTC guideline document: Expressing Trust and Credibility Information in IPTC Standards. While not complete, we hope that it helps IPTC members and other users of our standards to understand how they can express trust indicators.
To go along with the draft, we are proposing some changes to existing IPTC standards, including updates to NewsML-G2 and to ninjs, and a new Trust Indicator taxonomy created as part of the IPTC NewsCodes.
New Genres in NewsCodes and changes to NewsML-G2 and ninjs
To accommodate the new work, we will be adding some new entries to the NewsCodes Genre vocabulary. Some genres required for this work such as “Opinion” and “Special Report” were already in the genres vocabulary, but we are proposing to add new genres including “Fact Check” and “Satire“, and some genres to handle sponsored content: Advertiser Supplied, Sponsored and Supported.
We will also be making some small changes to the existing ninjs and NewsML-G2 standards to accommodate some new requirements, such as being able to associate a publisher with another organisation, to indicate membership of The Trust Project, Journalism Trust Initiative or a similar group.
From trusted agency to publisher and then to a user
By following the guidelines, a news agency can add their own trust information to the news items that they distribute. A publisher can then take those trust indicators and convert them to the standard schema.org markup used to convey trust indicators in HTML pages (initially created via a collaboration between schema.org and The Trust Project in 2017).
The schema.org markup can then be read by search engines, platforms such as Facebook, and specialised trust tools such as the NewsGuard browser plugin, so that users can see the trust indicators and decide for themselves whether they can trust a piece of news.
Please give us your feedback
The document will not be final until after those changes have been approved by IPTC members at our next meeting in May.
We have published the draft to ask for feedback from the community about how we could improve our guidance, ask for any trust indicators that we have missed, and to ask for implementation feedback.
Please use the IPTC Contact Us form to send your feedback.
About the Trust Project
The Trust Project is a global network of news organizations working to affirm and amplify journalism’s commitment to transparency, accuracy and inclusion. The project created the Trust Indicators, which are a collaborative, journalism-generated standard for news that helps both regular people and the technology companies’ machines easily assess the authority and integrity of news. The Trust Indicators are based in robust user-centered design research and respond to public needs and wants.
For more information, visit thetrustproject.org.
The Trust Project is funded by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, Facebook, Google and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
About the Journalism Trust Initiative
The Journalism Trust Initiative aims at a healthier information space. It is developing indicators for trustworthiness of journalism and thus, promote and reward compliance with professional norms and ethics. JTI is led by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in partnership with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Global Editors Network (GEN) and Agence France Presse (AFP).
For more, visit https://jti-rsf.org/en/