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Yahoo and McAfee work together to verify the authenticity of news images

Yahoo and McAfee work together to verify the authenticity of news images

Yahoo News hires a partner to help keep misinformation at bay.

The news distribution giant, owner of one of the most read websites on the Internet, has struck a deal with McAfee that will use the latter's deepfake image recognition technology to identify images and photos that may have been meaningfully altered by AI.

“We think it's an incredibly important tool and could be an important part of the ecosystem in the future,” says Matt Sanchez, president of the Home ecosystem and general manager of Yahoo News and other key areas.

McAfee technology identifies images that may have been created or modified using AI and flags them for review by the Yahoo News editorial team for standards. This team then determines whether the reported images adhere to the platform's editorial guidelines.

In the past, there were more “protections” in place to prevent images from being altered, says Steve Grobman, McAfee's chief technology officer. Today, he says, individuals have more opportunities to create and distribute their own images, even if they have been altered in meaningful or misleading ways, such as portraying a politician as holding a gun and holding a microphone.

McAfee “will continually assess the landscape for AI-generated images and technologies and continually update our models,” he says. “This will automatically provide updates to the process that Yahoo News uses.”

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Others are increasingly concerned about fake images. Team One, an agency part of French advertising group Publicis Groupe, has launched a new technology called Faikchek that can help marketers search for “deepfake” parodies and images of their brands and advertising messages.

Yahoo News' decision to leverage new McAfee protections underscores Yahoo News' content distribution power. According to data from Comscore, which ranks Yahoo News as the top U.S. news and information site, the site has attracted an average of 191 million unique visitors per month since the beginning of the year.

The tool is intended to be used only for images on Yahoo News in the US.

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