• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 15, 2024

Fox is in discussions with media companies to use its blockchain protocol called Verify, a distributed internet database of content media that is cryptographically authenticated, particularly pieces created by artificial intelligence (AI).

The open-sourced tool is just the beginning of the media conglomerate building out technology to support the business.

The move is a response to the future of verified content and the challenges presented by AI-generated media.

False and manipulative content is cited as one of the main challenges. Consumers rely on brands they trust to deliver information, but malicious actors exploit that trust by manipulating data.

The company also cited a lack of control around how content is indexed, transformed and presented by the AI platforms -- and the fact that the commercial relationship between AI platforms and content companies is still very much a “work in progress.”

Earlier this month, Fox open-sourced the AI protocol. The plan is to use the tool to make content licensing agreements transparent.

Fox’s Paul Cheesbrough, CEO at Tubi Media Group, and Melody Hildebrandt, executive vice president of engineering and CIO, pointed to one challenge in a blog post. Axel Springer announced the global licensing deal with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT; and then The New York Times launched a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. 

“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,” Cheesbrough and Hildebrandt wrote. “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.”

Fox’s Blockchain Creative Labs, incorporated under the Fox-owned streaming service Tubi, built the technology, which took more than a year.

Cheesbrough wrote that Verify was “somewhat inspired” by the AI optimism of Marc Andreessen, a16z venture capital firm founder, who wrote about the potential for cryptographic signatures to prevent malicious AI content. 

The protocol is the registry and a way to verify the origin of the content, with the content graph smart contract -- a representation of articles, text, videos and images that stores the references to licenses, metadata and content -- and an identity registry where signing key pairs are associated with a real-world identity.

Three components collectively enable what the Fox executives in the blog post call a “reverse lookup of any content” that will produce the origin of the metadata and a publisher’s name.

This allows for tracking the origin of digital content and provides a single source for access and licensing with software-encoded rights and restrictions.

The group also is exploring other applications for the protocol as it builds out its own technology team, from weighted attribution methods to news summaries.

The next version of Verify protocol will be released in February, which will migrate to Fox’s own application specific blockchain, which is being designed to operate one specific application rather than many.