Yahoo and McAfee are working together to verify the authenticity of news images
Yahoo News Enlists a Partner to Keep Disinformation at Bay.
The news distribution giant, holder of one of the most read sites on the Internet, has signed a pact with McAfee that will use the latter’s deepfake image detection technology to identify images and photos that may have been generated by AI and possibly altered in a meaningful way.
“We think it’s an incredibly important tool, and could be an important part of the ecosystem in the future,” said Matt Sanchez, president of the home ecosystem and the director overseeing Yahoo News and other key areas.
McAfee technology identifies images that may have been produced or modified using AI and flags them for review by Yahoo News’ editorial standards team. This team then determines whether the flagged images meet the platform’s editorial guidelines.
In the past, more “guardrails” existed to prevent images from being modified, says Steve Grobman, McAfee’s chief technology officer. Right now, he says, individuals have more power to create and distribute their own images, even if they have been altered in meaningful or misleading ways, such as making it look like a politician is holding a gun instead of a microphone.
McAfee “will continually evaluate the landscape for AI-generated images and technology and continually update our models,” he says. “That automatically provides updates to the process that Yahoo News uses.”
Others have become more concerned about fake images. Team One, an agency part of French advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe, has introduced a new technology called Faikchek that allows marketers to scan for “deepfake” spoofs and images of their brands and advertising messages.
Yahoo News’ decision to use the new McAfee protections underlines its power in distributing content. The site has attracted an average of 191 million unique visitors per month to date, according to data from Comscore, which lists Yahoo News as the top news and information site in the US.
The tool will only be used in the US for images on Yahoo News.
