Top Hollywood agency WME taps AI Startup Vermillio to fight AI Deepfakes

As celebrities wage an increasingly fierce battle against AI-generated hoaxes — perhaps most notably Taylor Swift last week — popular talent agency WME has announced a deal with Chicago-based tech company Vermilio to better equip the performers it represents to prevent their images from being tampered with. And exploited online.

The deal with Vermilio, The New York Times reported Tuesday, will allow WME to enter digital tracking of its clients' images, called Track ID, which will then allow tracking and identification of actual images—and, in turn, provide a means of protection and protection. Monetizing their avatar.

While details about how the technology works are few, VermilioTrace uses blockchain technology to record and track ID images, the Times said.

Chris Jacquemin, WME's head of digital strategies, told the newspaper: “We've spent some time trying to solve this problem so that our customers can at least solve what is clearly a problem. You have no real ability to stop it without manual intervention,” Vermilio says, automating the process.

WME and Vermillio have not yet responded to Decrypt's request for comment.

Deepfake is increasingly common video or audio content created or manipulated by artificial intelligence that depicts fake events. With the growing power of generative AI platforms like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E, deepfakes are becoming more challenging to identify as fake.

As world leaders and law enforcement agencies repeatedly warn of the threat of AI deepfakes in elections, public safety and conflict zones, international megastar Swift has been at the forefront of the threat of AI-generated deepfakes with a flood of fake pornographic images. The Internet – or at least Twitter.

The images went viral on social media so much that Twitter removed the ability to search for Swift's name before restoring it on Tuesday.

Internet Watch Foundation CTO Dan Sexton previously told Decrypt: “There's a continuum where you don't believe things are real or not. “The things that tell us whether things are true or not are not 100 percent true, and therefore you can't trust them either.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.