A week after the Biden administration signed a sweeping order to curtail the risks and negative aspects of artificial intelligence in the US, Microsoft’s vice chair and president Brad Smith co-authored a blog post announcing the company’s new set of security tools intended to help safeguard upcoming elections.
Smith, along with Microsoft cvp of technology for fundamental rights Teresa Hutson penned a new blog titled, Microsoft announces new steps to help protect elections, where the two layout a set of new and updated technologies designed to protect up to two billion people around the world over the next 14 months as they vote in nationwide elections from the US to the UK, EU, India, and more.
Microsoft’s internal Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) recently published a threat analysis assessment in which it reports,
Protecting Election 2024 from Foreign Malign Influence, the world in 2024 may see multiple authoritarian nation states seek to interfere in electoral processes. And they may combine traditional techniques with AI and other new technologies to threaten the integrity of electoral systems.
Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President, and Teresa Hutson, Corporate Vice President, Technology for Fundamental Rights
Specifically, Microsoft wants to offer a solution to president Biden’s most clearly stated fear of Deepfakes sowing seeds of misinformation during the US 2023 special election cycle or the 2024 presidential selection.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) is new digital watermarking effort where users can attach or sort through a set of metadata that encodes details about published content via cryptography.
C2PA will allow users to attach Content Credentials to images and video that host data about when, and who created the original content as well as if AI was involved. The user added data will live as an embedded history with the content as its traverses through the internet.
These watermarking credentials empower an individual or organization to assert that an image or video came from them while protecting against tampering by showing if content was altered after its credentials were created. Built by Azure engineering, this service will launch in the spring as a private preview, which will first be made available to political campaigns.
Brad Smith, Microsoft Vice Chair and President, and Teresa Hutson, Corporate Vice President, Technology for Fundamental Rights
Another tool Microsoft will make available to political campaigns in particular is the Campaign Success Team within Microsoft Philanthropies Tech for Social Impact organization. I’m sure there is a clever acronym for the elongated titled commission but Campaign Success Team will have to suffice for now.
The Campaign Success Team, will be made available to “advise and support campaigns as they navigate the world of AI.” Microsoft didn’t elaborate on what the specifics of the specialized consultant team but referenced its use of Microsoft premier election protections cyber security platforms, M365 for Campaigns and AccountGuard.
Microsoft is also looking to coalesce its disparate government-grade security platforms and support teams communications into a new Election Communications Hub for “democratic governments around the world.”
The Election Communications Hub will be built upon the Azure for Elections security programs but will only be made available for US state and local agencies and their partners.
The last set of offerings from Microsoft are less technical and more pledges to that include providing more authoritative election sources via its Bing search engine by partnering with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), the EFE Spanish news agency, and Reporters Without Borders as well as standing with the US led bi-partisan bill Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act. As it is implied by the title, the Protect Elections bill is intended to prohibit the use and spread of AI generated material to deceive or falsely depict federal candidates in ads, stopping short of parody or satire exceptions.
Over the next 14 months, Microsoft will have its work cut out for itself as it looks to reign in the current use of AI in political ads as well as train campaigns and the news media at large on how to not only identify misleading uses of AI but how to stay ahead of its evolution.
