OpenOrigins Raises £3.5M to Build Blockchain-Powered Provenance for a World of AI-Generated Content
August 2, 2024
OpenOrigins, a London-based technology company, has raised £3.5 million from Galaxy Interactive, Galaxy Ventures, and Unbound to build the content provenance infrastructure it believes the internet urgently needs. As AI-generated imagery, video, and audio proliferates at scale, and as synthetic media — including deepfakes, AI-generated profiles, and fabricated news — becomes increasingly indistinguishable from authentic content, OpenOrigins is developing a blockchain-based system for cryptographically verifying the origin and authenticity of digital assets.
The problem the company is addressing has moved from a theoretical concern to an immediate practical crisis. Deepfake technology has advanced to the point where synthetic video of real people — politicians, executives, public figures — can be produced with minimal technical expertise and distributed at internet speed. AI-generated images have been published mistakenly by journalists and circulated as authentic documentation of events that never occurred. AI-generated social media profiles interact with real users and influence political discourse. The content provenance problem, long discussed as a future risk, is now a present one, and the mechanisms the internet relies on to establish trust — reputation, platform curation, visual familiarity — are increasingly inadequate.
OpenOrigins addresses this by implementing a provenance layer using blockchain technology to create a tamper-evident, auditable record of a piece of content's origin, creator, and modification history. When content is created using OpenOrigins' system, a cryptographic fingerprint is generated and recorded on the blockchain at the point of creation or publication. If the content is subsequently modified, copied, or redistributed, the blockchain record allows downstream platforms, consumers, and verification tools to trace the content back to its origin and identify any divergence from the original authenticated version. This can flag AI-generated content, deepfakes, and synthetic profiles with a degree of confidence that purely visual or heuristic detection methods cannot achieve.
Galaxy Interactive and Galaxy Ventures are investment arms of Galaxy Digital, the institutional digital assets business, giving OpenOrigins strong backing in the blockchain and digital infrastructure space. The funding will be used to develop the platform's technical infrastructure, build commercial partnerships with publishers and platforms, and advance the company's integration with the emerging content credentials standard being developed across the industry. OpenOrigins is operating in a space that has attracted significant attention from regulators in the EU and US, both of which have introduced or proposed legislation requiring AI-generated content to be labelled and traceable.
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