This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore. With the rise of AI-generated content online, it’s becoming more difficult—and more important—to help the public identify whether an image, audio clip, or video is real or fake. To combat the problem, a team of researchers from Microsoft; Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill.; and Witness, a nonprofit organization that assists activists and journalists in addressing the challenges associated with AI-generated content, have come together to create a novel dataset of AI-generated media to help build more robust detection systems.

The researchers describe their new dataset, called the Microsoft-Northwestern-Witness (MNW) deepfake detection benchmark, in a study published 10 April in IEEE Intelligent Systems. The dataset was intentionally built using diverse samples of AI-generated media in order to reflect the current AI-generation landscape as much as possible. Thomas Roca is a principal research scientist at Microsoft who researches security around generative AI. He says that the quality of media produced by generative AI is constantly improving, and virtually anyone can now use…