Microsoft’s president and vice chairman Brad Smith has made some bold statements about how he expects the US government to regulate artificial intelligence in the next year. He made the remarks in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Smith wants it to be “unlawful” to remove the AI metadata that Microsoft and others are developing. Microsoft is also developing technology to be able to detect when the watermark is removed.
“We’ll need a system that we and so many others have been working to develop that protects content, that puts a watermark on it, so that if somebody alters it, if somebody removes the watermark, if they do that to try to deceive or defraud someone, first of all, they’re doing something that the law makes unlawful. We may need some new law to do that,” Smith said.
“But second, we can then use the power of AI to detect when that happens. So that means a news organization like CBS would have video that somehow could be identified. And I would guess and hope that CBS will be absolutely at the forefront of this.”
The president of the Big Tech behemoth explained that metadata within a file will identify when an image or video is AI generated and said that it should be illegal to remove it.
“You embed what we call metadata. It’s part of the file. If it’s removed, we’re able to detect it. If there’s an altered version, we in effect create a hash. Think of it like the fingerprint of something and then can look for that fingerprint across the internet.”
Smith said he wants the US to increase the pace of AI regulation.
“I was in Japan just three weeks ago, and they have a national A.I. strategy. The government has adopted it,” Smith said. “The world is moving forward. Let’s make sure that the United States at least keeps pace with the rest of the world.”
