• Sony has revealed more information regarding its digital birth certificates project.
• It is partnering with “Associated Press and other industry leaders” to make digital birth certificates available on images shot on the company’s cameras.
• The project is intended to help validate the authenticity of images, as well as determine ownership.

Sony held its CES 2024 press conference in the early hours of this morning, with the Japanese company highlighting elements from across its various divisions, including gaming, electric vehicles, mixed reality headsets, and more.

One of the more interesting portions of the press conference was what Sony is working on for content creators, and in particular its digital birth certificates.

While we think the name needs a bit of work, the idea behind this project is rather simple – namely to give content creators who use Sony cameras the ability to tag images with a digital signature that assigns ownership and authenticity.

As such, it seems like an initiative borne out of the past few year’s divisive discourse around AI and what it means for content creation in general.

“Helping creators navigate opportunities while protecting the authenticity of their work is a priority. We’re collaborating with the Associated Press and other industry leaders to create a digital birth certificate for images shot on our cameras. This will validate the origin of their content and help safeguard facts and combat misinformation,” explained Neal Manowitz, president and COO at Sony Electronics, regarding the project per TechCrunch.

“While the rapid evolution of generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) brings new possibilities for creative expression, it has also led to growing concern about the impact of altered or manipulated imagery in journalism. The dissemination of false information and images has real-world social impact that brings harm not only to our photojournalist and news agency partners but to society as a whole,” he continued.

This is not the first time that mention of this project has been made, with it surfacing last year too.

Speaking of its collaborative efforts with the Associated Press on digital birth certificates, Sony confirmed the in-camera signature is assigned at the “moment of capture”.

As for when this technology will be available to content creators, Sony confirmed that it will arrive as a firmware update on a handful of flagship cameras later this year – the Alpha 9 III, Alpha 1, and Alpha 7S III.

While this technology is indeed intriguing, having it only on selected Sony cameras may not have the desired impact, but hopefully there are plans to extend it to other devices outside of the Japanese company’s stable. It could also prove handy for use in smartphones, which are more commonplace, as Android Authority has posited.

To see the highlights from Sony’s CES 2024 press conference, hit play on the video below.

[Image – Photo by James Feaver on Unsplash]