ITN partners with OpenOrigins to safeguard its historic archive from AI threats

ITN becomes the first UK news organisation to secure its archives against synthetic media via blockchain cryptography.

ITN has partnered with OpenOrigins taking a proactive move to preserve more than a million video clips of iconic news footage gathered by ITN since it was founded in 1955.

The partnership will use OpenOrigins technology to validate every item in ITN’s vast archive and secure it on an online database, called a blockchain. This ensures that every piece of ITN content, both future and past will have an immutable point of provenance, giving it a proof of originality.

As generative AI technology continues to evolve and become more accessible, experts have predicted that 99% to 99.9% of the internet’s content will be AI-generated by 2025 to 20301.

Both ITN and OpenOrigins recognise the threat that this technological expansion poses for archives.

“The ITN archive is a unique repository of Britain’s cultural history over 70 years and we are excited to be using new technology to protect this valuable asset. As the information ecosystem becomes increasingly polluted with synthetic material, news organisations will have to work hard to retain audience trust. Partnering with Open Origins allows ITN to reassure its viewers and clients by ringfencing the archive from future threats”, said ITN director of news distribution and commercial innovation, Tami Hoffman.

OpenOrigins’ technology creates a ‘fingerprint’ for each piece of content that is securely stored as a hash on the blockchain, a type of online secure database. This can be used to demonstrate that the content is original and authentic from the outset, rather than trying to retrospectively verify footage.

“We’re reaching a tipping point where content generated by humans is indistinguishable from AI-generated content,” said Dr. Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers, founder and CEO of OpenOrigins. “To prove content is authentic, OpenOrigins proves that it is human-made and copyright compliant. We’re a stamp of authenticity for the world’s trustworthy content.”

The unique partnership has thrown up a number of technological areas of exploration around authenticating provenance and standardising across a multi-format, multi-era archive.

Anchoring the archive is also an important step in ITN entering the AI licencing space and ITN will be a launch partner for Open Origin's licencing marketplace for video content.

This marketplace will give access to immense amounts of high-quality, compliant training data for AI apps, companies universities and research institutions allowing them to train more refined and specific models.