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A new startup setting out to combat the scourge of deepfakes and spoofed evidence in the age of AI is showing off its wares on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 this week. ForceField is building a set of “patent-pending” APIs dubbed MARQ, the first of which is designed to authenticate content.
For context, a 2022 report from European law enforcement agency Europol predicted that 90% of all online content will be AI-generated by 2026. The internet is already awash with manipulated content — either entirely machine-generated, or made with the help of AI — forcing big tech companies to develop new tools to address the problem. Google last month announced that it will soon begin flagging AI-generated images in its search engine, following in the footsteps of Meta, which was already doing so on Facebook and Instagram — though with questionable accuracy.
YouTube, meanwhile, now allows people to request the removal of content that simulates their face or voice.
The issue of “fake” content isn’t going away, and it’s a problem that has given rise to a swathe of startups that are tackling the problem through various means, such as Clarity, Reality Defender, and Truepic, which have all raised sizeable sums from big-name backers in recent years.
ForceField, for its part, is focusing on the device level rather than the content — this means any data stream, on any device, where ForceField’s technology is present. This could be a mobile app with ForceField’s API integrated, or a surveillance camera’s video-management system or drone’s hardware — it can “sign and hash for verification” in real-time.
‘Chain of custody’
ForceField’s first product, called HashMarq, verifies content submissions and labels it as authentic, replete with a badge of authenticity. Rather than using tangential techniques such as adversarial AI (i.e. fighting AI with AI) or watermarking, Forcefield’s technology establishes a “chain of custody” to establish provenance by figuring out whether a specific piece of content has been altered — it does so by looking at metadata from data streams and connected devices. What we’re talking about here is blockchain technology, though ForceField founder and CEO MC Spano (pictured above) stresses that this isn’t a “web3” startup.
“We’re leveraging blockchain, we’re not using coins or crypto — we’re not a web3 company,” Spano told TechCrunch. “We’re using blockchain in the most innate and purposeful way, which is smart contracting. We authenticate anything collected, like a video, photo, an audio file, a screenshot on a mobile device — but we also secure and authenticate any multimedia collected on any IoT, which means anything from a BlackBerry to a robot. But any streaming data as it’s collected, we’re signing it, we’re hashing it, and then we’re using ledger technology.”
These “smart contracts” live on the blockchain (though ForceField doesn’t reveal which one) to ensure their security, transparency, and immutability — they can’t be changed. Enterprise customers — which may include anyone from chief information officers to trust and safety teams — can access the technology through an API or SDK which they integrate into their own applications. So HashMarq basically serves as a digital certificate for content that has passed its proof checks.
“We’re building tech for the good guys — we’re anticipating that the market, meaning governments, enterprises, small companies, even individuals, will need to prove what they’re putting out in the world is real,” Spano said. “This is compared to something like what Meta and other companies are doing, where they’re basically labeling something that’s generated by AI.”
So what, exactly, does ForceField’s technology look at when assessing the veracity of a given asset?
“We’re looking at about 90 proof points, but I can’t share all of them,” Spano said. “The notion is that we’re looking at the geospatial intelligence around that device, what was around at the time, what signals, what other devices, and the time. What time was this device, specifically, collecting this video? And how long was it from the collection to the submission? Those points alone can tell journalists or news organizations or law enforcement so much more than what they would originally have, and it also can pinpoint a geographic location.”
Though ForceField formally came to fruition in 2021, Spano says the genesis for the product came in 2018 when she was assaulted in New York City, and subsequently faced major obstacles both in gathering and submitting the evidence required by law enforcement.
“I knew that there were cameras, I knew that the evidence was able to be gathered,” Spano said. “But when I dealt with NYPD to get the evidence, they wouldn’t get a subpoena — so I had to go to the owner of the camera myself to request the footage. I recorded it with my phone, and when I turned that recording into NYPD, they said it wasn’t admissible. And that’s when I realized the justice system starts way earlier than in the courts.”
And this gets to the crux of the problem that Spano and ForceField are trying to solve — a problem that has become even greater in the age of generative AI, where anyone with a laptop is able to create plausible, but entirely fake, “evidence.”
Proof-of-concept
It is still early days, but ForceField is developing a proof-of-concept (PoC) with insurance giant Erie, while Spano says the company also has letters of intent signed with three additional customers, with plans to finalize the PoC and launch commercially in Q1 2025.
While insurance will be a big market for ForceField at first, Spano says that with the advent of AI and the ability for pretty much anyone to create authentic-looking assets, there’s no real limits on the industries in which it can apply to. A citizen journalist, for example, who has captured a video on their mobile device, could submit it to a news station, which would integrate with ForceField’s API to determine the authenticity of the source data. Law enforcement, too, could use the technology to verify witness or victim submissions.
In terms of financing, the company has so far been funded via a mixture of bootstrapping (Spano sold a previous company) and capital provided by angels, including actor Debra Messing, as well as Wilfredo Fernandez, X’s head of government affairs and a scout at VC firm Lightspeed. ForceField has also received money through its participation in Techstars last year, while it’s just taken on its first institutional funding via a strategic investment from its customer, Erie Insurance.
Spano also said that she hopes to close a seed round by the end of the year, adding that she believes one of the most important facets of the company is that it is an entirely woman-led company in a very male-dominated space.
“There’s a really big issue with funding solo women teams here in the U.S.,” Spano said. “I am the only woman building this type of technology right now, every other competitor are all led by men — so having a woman’s voice, and transparency, and honesty, and truth… is really important.”
