Microsoft MSFT recently announced new tools to tackle the menace of deepfake content and disinformation.

In a blog post, the company unveiled Microsoft Video Authenticator, developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with its AI, Ethics and Effects in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee and Responsible AI Team.

The tech giant also introduced another tool that includes two components to enable people to differentiate between authentic and fake media.

Notably, the first component will give content creators the ability to latch data tags hashes and certificates to the content which will remain live as metadata with the content as it is posted online.

Meanwhile, the second component is a reader tool that will verify these hashes with the certificates and reveal information about the producers, thereby assuring the readers of the content’s veracity.

Microsoft’s latest tools to fight misinformation are well timed with the 2020 presidential election fervor dominating the United States.

What Investors Should Know?

Microsoft along with other tech majors, especially social media companies, have drawn the ire of governments and regulators for having failed to combat the fabricated news menace. Dissemination of fake news has become a major security issue plaguing the world and these companies are under tremendous pressure to step up and combat this problem.

Microsoft will also be working alongside several reputed media and social media companies and publishing houses to test its fake news identifying technology.

In fact, the company has struck alliance with San-Francisco based AI Foundation. This will enable the company to make Authenticator tool available to the organisations like political campaigners and news outlets.

Markedly, Video Authenticator will assign confidence scores to the photos and videos after examining the content for manipulation. Per Microsoft, the manipulation will be detected by analysing a slight fading or greyscale elements that appear at the blending boundary of the engineered content, which  normally cannot be observed by humans.

For videos, the score will be provided for every frame in real-time. This tool was developed and tested by utilizing public dataset from Face Forensic++ and the DeepFake Detection Challenge Dataset.

The new offerings, aimed at curbing the fake news menace and spread of disinformation, are expected to boost the company’s brand reputation and instill investors’ optimism in the stock.

Notably, shares of the company have returned 44.1% in the year-to-date period compared with the industry’s rally of 37.1%.

Nevertheless, the tech giant has issued a word of caution. The synthetic media AI is constantly evolving and these tools are not a final answer to curb fake news. Also, the company noted that the tools will work in the short run to help readers discern facts from fake news. Microsoft also underscored its commitment to keep working on new technologies to deal with this menace.

Deepfake Content has Wider Proliferation

Deepfake content is altered by using cutting-edge AI to make people do or say things that are inappropriate and often are used to insinuate public, polarize opinions and create sensitive situations.

The engineered content is then circulated through bots and fake profiles that use cookies to track people’s website visits. Based on that data, trolls and bots draw users to see fake content. This not only spreads misinformation but also creates cybersecurity threats.

Apart from Microsoft, Facebook FB, Alphabet’s GOOGL Google, Twitter TWTR and several other social media companies have designed their own policies to detect deepfakes to rebuild their public images. 

In April, Google made it mandatory for all advertisers to verify their identity before buying any advertising space on its platform. Furthermore, Facebook eliminated a category called pseudoscience as an option for advertisers in April 2020. In January, Facebook announced a ban on all misleading media, including edited images and deepfakes, ahead of the U.S. presidential elections in 2020.

Zacks Rank

Microsoft currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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