SPONSORED COLUMN — Today’s information environment poses great challenges to our nation’s unity and security. Advances in wireless communication, content monetization, and artificial intelligence have dramatically increased the speed and scale of information. Our adversaries are taking advantage of these advances rapidly while the US public and private sector are struggling to keep up. This creates a vulnerability that any of our adversaries can easily exploit without safeguards that guarantee the provision of transparent, quality information.
Although commercially available information would be useful in informing policymakers to make better decisions, the IC has been moving cautiously in its adoption and regulation, due to concerns over operational security, privacy, and civil liberties. If it is not the IC or US government, who is doing this for the American people? Who or what is ensuring that all people can easily discern fact from fiction and news from opinion without impacting our most sacred right to free speech?
The Truth in Media Cooperative (TIM) is a network of diverse organizations that share the mission of enhancing the reliability, safety, resiliency, transparency, privacy, and demand across our information ecosystem. No one succeeds alone especially in an environment where any organization that attempts to preserve information quality are often judged as being too politicized or where the revenue model simply does not exist to ensure the necessary scale to affect real change.
Typically, the U.S. government is tasked with protecting a critical infrastructures like water and food, however when it comes to data, any attempt by government to protect are met with concerns related to freedom of speech and privacy. Just last week we were very heartened by the voluntary safeguards that seven AI companies agreed to during a meeting with President Biden. We, however, remain skeptical that these promises will be incorporated into law in a timely fashion given the current environment.
TIM’s mission is to enable a world where people not only have access to transparent, quality information, but demand it, and work together to achieve it. And there really is no better time than today. The proliferation of generative AI is exacerbating our ability to establish information attribution, which we believe is the key goal in preserving information quality. And the TIM principles for information quality, like accountability, transparency, safety, apply to all tools that create content to include trusted generative AI.
A Word from The Cipher Brief and our Partners
Today’s constant barrage of information makes it easy for countries to wage disinformation campaigns and your emotions are the weapon of choice. Learn how disinformation works and how we can fight it in this short video. This is one link you can feel good about sharing.
TIM is tackling the problem of weaponized information from a collaborative and practical standpoint. We combine the expertise of the most seasoned intelligence and media professionals, exceedingly accomplished technologists, cognitive scientists, and the most critical force of our nation: the next generation youth. By merging these perspectives, we are both building and enabling innovative and modern solutions to solve the problem of eroding trust in the information environment, as well as inhibiting external players from taking advantage of the US.
Our initial focus is on harmonizing a standard language for information integrity and generative AI. This data dictionary will serve as the basis for the development and mass adoption of information quality standards. We are also building an Information Quality Data Platform – a resource list and data sharing platform for collaboration, education, and advocacy. And finally, we are creating a users group of 15-25 year-olds from across the country who will evaluate TIM products, recruit members, and empower the youth population to be educated and aware of the dynamics at play in today and tomorrow’s information environment.
But this is only the beginning. TIM intends to provide this to all Americans, not only the intelligence community, with the goal of giving both the American public and private sectors decision advantage through the use of quality, transparent data. We believe that the path to that future can be achieved by increasing the amount of quality information, to include quality AI, by as little as ten percent, and increasing demand for that information by ten percent, will go very far in inoculating our poisoned media ecosystem and bring Americans together towards a healthier debate.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
