Fake Taylor Swift porn. Photorealistic—yet fictional—images of Gaza. The list of alarming deepfakes goes on and on, and – as deepfake tools become easier and cheaper to use – the waves of fakes are coming faster and wilder.
According In a recent Pew Center poll, about two-thirds of Americans (66%) say they at least sometimes encounter altered videos and images intended to mislead, with 15% encountering them often. In separate overview of AI experts from Axios and Syracuse University, 62% said disinformation will be the biggest challenge to maintaining the authenticity and credibility of news in an era of AI-generated content.
So what is the answer? There is one;
If you talk to people like Michael Matias, cyber expert and co-founder and CEO of Clarity, they will tell you that they are deepfake detectors. Matias started Clarity with Gil Avriel and Natalie Fridman in 2022, with the goal of developing technology to identify AI-driven media — primarily images.
Clarity is among several vendors large and small competing to develop deep spam detection tools. Others include Reality Defender, which offers a platform for isolating text, video and image deepfakes, and Sentinel, which focuses on deep fake images and videos.
It’s hard, actually, to tell Clarity’s offerings apart from the others out there — at least for this writer. Like rival vendors, Clarity maintains a scanning tool available through an app and API that leverages multiple AI models to compare uploaded media — video, images and audio — against a database of deepfakes and AI-generated images. In addition, Clarity provides a watermark format that clients can use to indicate that their content is legitimate.
But Matias insists the differentiators are not above but below the surface, with Clarity’s rapid response to new types of deepfakes.
“At its core, Clarity leverages artificial intelligence but operates as a cybersecurity company,” Matias said. “Clarity treats deepfakes like viruses, acting like pathogens that rapidly divide and reproduce. Therefore, its solution was also built to break down and replicate to maintain adaptability and resilience… The team built infrastructure and AI models dedicated to fulfilling the challenge.”
Of course, accuracy in the realm of detecting deepfakes is a moving target. Even with the best know-how and the best technology stack money can buy, it’s an impossible game to win considering the rate at which applications that create deeply false GenAIs are improving. This is perhaps why some major players, such as Google, Microsoft and AWS, are adopting more sophisticated watermarking and provenance metadata as alternative – albeit imperfect – countermeasures to deep fake.
Regardless, Clarity had no trouble attracting support. The New York startup, with 13 employees, recently closed a $16 million seed round led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Secret Chord Ventures, Ascend Ventures and Flying Fish Partners.
And he seems to have carved out a niche for himself. Initially, Clarity – which sells subscriptions as well as pay-as-you-go plans – sought clients in news publishers and the public sector, including the Israeli government. (Matias claims that Clarity helps authenticate and verify footage from the Israel-Hamas conflict.) But it has since expanded to identity verification providers and other, unnamed “big businesses.”
“This is a fast-paced arms race, just like traditional cyber security,” Matias said. “Any company that wants to tackle deepfakes needs to move as fast as those who create and spread them.”
