Digital Replicas & Talent ID: Provenance, Verification and New Automated Workflows

IBC Accelerator Challenge

As part of the IBC Accelerator for 2024, this challenge addressed the evolving disruption within the Media & Entertainment industry in the authentication and management of talent in today's digital landscape. Specifically, it addressed issues tied to AI-generated content, virtual world representation, and talent provenance. By offering a distinct and standardized identification framework, this project aimed to streamline the authentication process, ensuring reliable verification of real individuals, virtual avatars, and fictional entities. This exploration responded to the urgent need from the media and entertainment industry for an agile solution to automate provenance, thus verifying the authenticity of digital personas and protecting against unauthorized virtual representations.

The POC also aimed to showcase how to minimize legal complexities and enhance transparency in talent utilization through streamlined collaboration and licensing across industry stakeholders, simplifying licensing agreements based on verified identities. In addition, it aimed to show how producers and distributors can easily identify and track the usage of talent across different platforms and formats, such as streaming services, podcasts, video games, and ensure that the rights and permissions of the talent are respected and enforced, preventing unauthorized or unethical uses of their digital likeness.

The POC Objectives:

• Creation of a consent-based Digital Replica of a notable legal and natural public figure

• Test new workflows that include tagging and labelling with resolvable, unique and interoperable public ID

• Explore Key Provenance information about the digital replica’s chain of custody with Champions responsible for NIL (name, image, likeness)- eg: Broadcasters and Talent Agencies

• Collaborate with C2PA to contribute to standards partners to embed cryptographic metadata in a watermark/fingerprint- as a C2PA content credential for the Digital Replica Identity, in a multi-party workflow

• Document and measure the security and applicability of the licensed digital Replica Talent ID in a business use case (eg: deal memos, contracts, licensing, verification, tracking of rights, residuals, performance analytics, etc)

The POC Results / Deliverables:

• Created a consent-based digital replica of key Hollywood talent Evan Shafran (known actor, rapper, DJ, Writer, Comedian, Activist, SAG Member) and a video of the replica

• Registered both Evan Shafran and his digital replica with HAND Talent IDs (which is a resolvable, unique, and interoperable public identifier)

• Generated C2PA Content Credentials (CR) hash for the video of Evan's replica with both Content (EIDR ID) and the Talent ID (HAND) as cryptographic source metadata using EZDRM technology

• Created a "Asset and Metadata" workflow - tracking a digital replica from Project Greenlight, to Capture, Creation, and Distribution Outputs (multiple potential use-cases in theatrical, television, gaming, advertising, etc. examples)

• Mapped connectors in the proposed workflow to key stakeholders in Accounting & Finance teams

• Demonstrated detection of C2PA Content Credentials metadata in the digital replica media object at distribution end-points

• Demonstrated deepfake detection technology utilizing Videntifier's forensic media file analysis tools.