Meta's deepfake-fighting AI video watermarking tool is here, and for some reason it's decided to call it the Video Seal

pcgamer.com:

Look, forgive me, all right? It's Friday afternoon as I write this, and I know I've picked a silly image to go with an article on what is quite an important topic. But Meta has called its new AI-generated video watermarking tool the Video Seal, and sometimes the header image picks itself.

Let's get down to brass tacks. Or beach balls, one of the two. (Stop it now — Ed). Deepfakes are a serious concern, with a recent Ofcom survey reporting that two in five participants said they'd seen at least one AI-generated deepfake in the last six months.

Deepfake content has the potential to harm and spread disinformation, so Meta releasing a tool to watermark AI-generated videos is probably a net benefit for the world (via TechCrunch). Meta Video Seal is open source, and designed to be integrated into existing software to apply imperceptible watermarks to AI-generated video clips.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Pierre Fernandez, an AI research scientist at Meta, said: «We developed Video Seal to provide a more effective video watermarking solution, particularly for detecting AI-generated videos and protecting originality.

»While other watermarking tools exist, they don’t offer sufficient robustness to video compression, which is very prevalent when sharing content through social platforms; weren’t efficient enough to run at scale; weren’t open or reproducible; or were derived from image watermarking, which is suboptimal for videos."

Meta has already released a non-video specific watermarking tool, Watermark Anything, and a tool specifically for audio, called—you guessed it—Audio Seal. This latest video-focussed effort is designed to be much more resilient than similar software from DeepMind and Microsoft, although Fernandez admits that heavy compression and significant edits may alter the watermarks or «render them unrecoverable.»

Still, anything more resistant to removal than the current options strikes as a good thing, as a quick Google reveals multiple methods of AI-generated