TIKTOK has commenced automatically labelling of videos and images made with artificial intelligence (AI).
The Chinese-owned short-form video-sharing platform disclosed this in a statement recently.
The platform said it has teamed up with the Adobe-founded Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the Washington-based Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) to implement the initiative.
The collaboration will allow TikTok the use of the C2PA’s content credentials technology to show the source of a video and whether it was made using AI or not.
“AI enables incredible creative opportunities but can confuse or mislead viewers if they don’t know content was AI-generated. Labeling helps make that context clear—which is why we label AIGC made with TikTok AI effects, and have required creators to label realistic AIGC for over a year,” part of the statement read.
The platform revealed that AI-generated content on the app will now be tagged with “Content Credentials,” a digital watermarking technology from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.
“Content Credentials attach metadata to content, which we can use to instantly recognize and label [AI-generated content],” TikTok said. “This capability started rolling out today on images and videos, and will be coming to audio-only content soon.”
“Using Content Credentials as a way to identify and convey synthetic media to audiences directly is a meaningful step towards AI transparency, even more so than typical watermarking techniques,” Claire Leibowicz, head of the AI and Media Integrity Programme at the Partnership on AI, said in a prepared statement.
“At the same time we need to better understand how users react to these labels and hope that TikTok reports on the response so that we may better understand how the public navigates an increasingly AI-augmented world.”
TikTok already labels content created with its in-app AI effects and mandates that creators label any content containing realistic AI. This new initiative will extend automatic labelling to AI-generated content uploaded from other platforms.
The update is amid the growing concerns from lawmakers and experts about the potential threat AI poses in the upcoming 2024 election globally, particularly in light of the risk of deepfakes and misinformation.
Additionally, TikTok announced it will join the Content Authenticity Initiative, an Adobe-led group dedicated to setting standards for making the digital production of images, videos, or audio clips transparent and traceable across the industry.
TikTok said it is the first video-sharing platform to put the credentials into practice and will join the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative to help push the adoption of the credentials within the industry.
In February 2024, TikTok was one of 20 leading tech companies committed to combat AI misinformation in this year’s election cycle.
Nurudeen Akewushola is a fact-checker with FactCheckHub. He has authored several fact checks which have contributed to the fight against information disorder. You can reach him via [email protected] and @NurudeenAkewus1 via Twitter.
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