trainedAlgorithmicMedia, not “deepfake”: IPTC

Following up on some of the open questions from my previous post, I found an official-looking IPTC blog post describing these new parameters for digitalSourceType.

They explicitly call out not using the term deepfake here, which I agree with:

It is important to note that we are only describing the way a media object has been created: we are not making any statements about the intent of the user (or the machine) in creating the content. So we deliberately don’t have a term “deepfake”, but we do have “trainedAlgorithmicMedia” which would be the term used to describe a piece of content that was created by an AI algorithm such as a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).

Its interesting this distinction they are making between trainedAlgorithmicMedia and algorithmicMedia, which they describe as:

Media created purely by an algorithm not based on any sampled training data, e.g. an image created by software using a mathematical formula

Generative AI images are trained though, so we’ll go back to that category here. They include a more detailed set of examples here than in that other schema page previously linked to:

Term ID	trainedAlgorithmicMedia
Term name	Trained algorithmic media
Term description	Digital media created algorithmically using a model derived from sampled content
Examples	* Image based on deep learning from a series of reference examples * A “speech-to-speech” generated audio or “deepfake” video using a combination of a real actor and an AI model * “Text-to-image” using a text input to feed an algorithm that creates a synthetic image

So based on that, the current breed of generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, Midjourney all appear to cleanly fall under, “‘Text-to-image’ using a text input to feed an algorithm that creates a synthetic image.”