The Future of Verified Content

Introducing Verify, the Blockchain-Based Protocol for Content Verification and Traceability

Today we’re open sourcing a new AI-centric protocol, called Verify, that our FOX Corp R&D team has been working on over the past year, as first reported by Axios.  The creation of this protocol stems not only from our own needs, but from a range of conversations with publishers and technology companies where a number of common themes persist:

• Consumers rely on the brands they trust to deliver them information, but malicious actors exploit that trust via AI manipulation of data and false attribution

• A lack of control exists around how content is indexed, transformed and presented by the AI platforms 

• The commercial relationship between the AI platforms and content companies is still very much ‘work in progress’

Still early innings 🏏⚾️

It’s fair to say that content creators and publishers hold a wide range of emotions about AI and the approaches being taken by the technology companies and their ultimate agenda in this space.  This was illustrated by what we saw last month – on one end of the spectrum Axel Springer announced a global licensing deal with OpenAI, and just two weeks later the New York Times launched their high profile, high stakes lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.  The debate is still lively and ongoing, and will inevitably roll for some time.

Image created by DALL-E

We sought to chart a different path, at least during these early innings.  When you get inside of forward-leaning creative and journalistic organizations, you find real optimism around the potential of AI. But you also find the expectation that organizations should control how their intellectual property is used and commercialized within AI models - whether that is LLM training or real-time Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) via chatbots. As part of the ‘AI optimistic’ camp, we set out to build what we hope will be the basis of a standard for creators and publishers of all sizes. An open source starting point grounded in technical solutions to the real problems in front of us, that we believe will enable new commercial opportunities and improve consumer confidence in the source of the information they see.

Today we’re open sourcing Verify, the protocol behind that solution, and releasing the first application built upon it, the Verify Tool.

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What is Verify? 🪪 

We agree with, and were somewhat inspired by what Marc Andreessen wrote in his missive “Why AI Will Save the World” -

“For example, if you are worried about AI generating fake people and fake videos, the answer is to build new systems where people can verify themselves and real content via cryptographic signatures. Digital creation and alteration of both real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to ban word processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to build a system that actually solves the problem.”

Put simply, Verify is a method for creators and publishers to cryptographically sign content upon publication, building a central repository for content licensing and provenance. As a flexible integration point between content publishers and the large language model (LLM) providers, it provides the opportunity for the technology and publishing industries to coalesce around a common integration standard. We believe an open source, publicly verifiable and legitimate method of content ingestion from trusted sources is the better, safer way for models to be trained and to reference published content.

Image created by DALL-E

A level deeper, the protocol is composed of three components:

1. A metadata standard for the registry and attestation of content provenance.

2. The content graph smart contract, a hierarchical representation of articles, text, videos and images which stores the references to licenses, metadata and content.

3. An identity registry where signing key pairs are associated with a real world identity.

These components collectively enable a reverse lookup of any content in Verify, and will produce provenance metadata and a named publisher. This allows for tracking the origin of digital content and provides a single source for access and licensing with software-encoded rights and restrictions.

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What is the Verify Tool? 💻

The Verify Tool is the first application built on top of the Verify protocol. It allows any user, anywhere, to validate that the content they see attributed to a source that they trust actually was published by that source¹.

We launched Verify Tool on our top level domain to signal to our users that they could Verify any content from within the FOX ecosystem. In essence, upon publication, every piece of content we distribute online is cryptographically signed and can be verified using the tool.

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What’s Next ⏭

Open sourcing the Verify protocol is really the first step in moving the creator and AI platform integration conversation forward, down what we hope is a constructive and open path. We look forward to engaging with other builders in this space to extend and integrate the solution and we hope that the broader publisher community will contribute concepts, ideas and code to what we’ve open sourced today.

Alongside this, we’re exploring numerous new applications for the protocol - from weighted attribution methodologies to news summarization. We’re also actively building and will be releasing our next version in February, where we migrate to our own appchain.

If you’re a publisher looking to publish on Verify or a builder looking to build on the protocol, we want to hear from you! You can check out our docs here and get in touch with us here.

And of course, if you’d love to join the team to help build and ship some of the most exciting products, platforms and technologies in the media space, we’re hiring 🚀.

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Technology Partners 🤝

To build this solution, our engineering team worked with a few key partners outside of our own companies and brands:

Polygon Labs is our blockchain partner. Polygon is at the forefront of chain scaling and we knew that at the scale of thousands of transactions per day per publisher, we would need to make signing affordable.  We are continuing to improve scaling by creating an application specific blockchain using Polygon’s chain development kit, which will be our next release.

Lit Protocol is our decentralized key management network based on threshold cryptography. In Verify, all content must be publicly accessible, but Lit enables publishers to encrypt their content and only allow decryption by parties that retain the necessary license for a given asset. 

1. Whereas the Verify protocol uses the cryptographic hash function keccak256, as used by Ethereum, to extract a unique, deterministic ID from each piece of content, for the Verify Tool, we added a perceptual hash to allow for more “fuzzy matching”. For example, the Verify Tool supports comparisons of screen-shotted images from the web against original files, which introduces some variance. For our first release, we kept the hamming distance quite constrained, but as we gain usage, we will re-evaluate the precision target. We expect different publishers may choose their own thresholds. This means the initial results won’t always be perfect when images have been cropped, compressed or resized, but we’re going to use the learnings from this initial launch to train and tune the Verify Tool as we go.