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The Digital Safety Research Institute will work with the US defence research agency to advance deepfake detection and attribution.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has partnered with the Digital Safety Research Institute (DSRI) of UL Research Institutes to continue research and develop techniques to detect, attribute, and characterise AI-generated media such as deepfakes.
Under the new agreement, DSRI will manage the open competition of DARPA’s Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program, which was initially set up in 2020 and concluded in 2024. DSRI will also manage the AI Forensics Open Research Challenge Evaluations, award research grants, and announce challenge results.
While DSRI manages the remaining elements of the SemaFor program, DARPA continues to work with the US government to transition and commercialise the tools and technologies already established.
“Innovation does not occur in a vacuum, so it’s important for us to communicate about the work we’re doing to engage with industry, academia and potential transition partners to develop the technology for practical applications,” said Wil Corvey, DARPA’s SemaFor program manager.
“DSRI’s mission of product testing and evaluation, specifically with respect to the complex and evolving sociotechnical environment in which products will be deployed, makes them an ideal fit for this area of transition.”
Dr Jill Crisman, ULRI’s executive director of DSRI, said that attribution is an important tool to inform the public.
“It is important for the public to know the genre and provenance of the content presented in our digital information ecosystem – much in the same way physical libraries label the genre, like fiction [versus] non-fiction and cite the provenance of their materials,” Dr Crisman said.
“DSRI aims to enable digital information testing and inspection tools [to] keep pace with the rapid advances of generative AI.”
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.