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To keep deepfakes from infiltrating its site, Yahoo News enlists help from McAfee
The 2024 U.S. presidential campaign has featured some notable deepfakes — AI-powered impersonations of candidates that sought to mislead voters or demean the candidates being targeted. Thanks to Elon Musk’s retweet, one of those deepfakes has been viewed more than 143 million times.
The prospect of unscrupulous campaigns or foreign adversaries using artificial intelligence to influence voters has alarmed researchers and officials around the country, who say AI-generated and -manipulated media are already spreading fast online. For example, researchers at Clemson University found an influence campaign on the social platform X that’s using AI to generate comments from more than 680 bot-powered accounts supporting former President Trump and other Republican candidates; the network has posted more than 130,000 comments since March.
To boost its defenses against manipulated images, Yahoo News — one of the most popular online news sites, attracting more than 190 million visits per month, according to Similarweb.com — announced Wednesday that it is integrating deepfake image detection technology from cybersecurity company McAfee. The technology will review the images submitted by Yahoo news contributors and flag the ones that were probably generated or doctored by AI, helping the site’s editorial standards team decide whether to publish them.
Matt Sanchez, president and general manager of Yahoo Home Ecosystem, said the company is just trying to stay a step ahead of the tricksters.
“While deepfake images are not an issue on Yahoo News today, this tool from McAfee helps us to be proactive as we’re always working to ensure a quality experience,” Sanchez said in an email. “This partnership boosts our existing efforts, giving us greater accuracy, speed, and scale.”
Sanchez said outlets across the news industry are thinking about the threat of deepfakes — “not because it is a rampant problem today, but because the possibility for misuse is on the horizon.”
Thanks to easy-to-use AI tools, however, deepfakes have proliferated to the point that 40% of the high schoolers polled in August said they had heard about some kind of deepfake imagery being shared at their school. The online database of political deepfakes being compiled by three Purdue University academics includes almost 700 entries, more than 275 of them from this year alone.
Steve Grobman, McAfee’s chief technology officer and executive vice president, said the partnership with Yahoo News grew out of the McAfee’s work on products to help consumers detect deepfakes on their computers. The company realized that the tech it developed to flag potential AI-generated images could be useful to a news site, especially one like Yahoo that combines its own journalists’ work with content from other sources.
McAfee’s technology adds to the “rich set of capabilities” Yahoo already had to check the integrity of the material coming from its sources, Grobman said. The deepfake detection tool, which is itself powered by AI, examines images for the sorts of artifacts that AI-powered tools leave among the millions of data points within a digital picture.
“One of the really neat things about AI is, you don’t need to tell the model what to look for. The model figures out what to look for,” Grobman said.
“The quality of the fakes is growing rapidly, and part of our partnership is just trying to get in front of it,” he said. That means monitoring the state of the art in image generation and using new examples to improve McAfee’s detection technology.
Nicos Vekiarides, chief executive of the fraud-prevention company Attestiv, said it’s an arms race between companies like his and the ones making AI-powered image generators. “They’re getting better. The anomalies are getting smaller,” Vekiarides said. And although there is increasing support among major industry players for inserting watermarks in AI-generated material, the bad actors won’t play by those rules, he said.
In his view, deepfake political ads and other bogus material broadcast to a wide audience won’t have much effect because “they get debunked fairly quickly.” What’s more likely to be harmful, he said, are the deepfakes pushed by influencers to their followers or passed from individual to individual.
Daniel Kang, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an expert in deepfake detection, warned that no AI detection tools today are good enough to catch a highly motivated and well-resourced attacker, such as a state-sponsored deepfake creator. Because there are so many ways to manipulate an image, an attacker “can tune more knobs than there are stars in the universe to try to bypass the detection mechanisms,” he said.
But many deepfakes aren’t coming from highly sophisticated attackers, which is why Kang said he’s bullish on the current technologies for detecting AI-generated media even if they can’t identify everything. Adding AI-powered tools to sites now enables the tools to learn and get better over time, just as spam filters do, Kang said.
They’re not a silver bullet, he said; they need to be combined with other safeguards against manipulated content. Still, Kang said, “I think there’s good technology that we can use, and it will get better over time.”
Vekiarides said the public has set itself up for the wave of deepfakes by accepting the widespread use of image manipulation tools, such as the photo editors that virtually airbrush the imperfections from magazine-cover photos. It’s not so great a leap from a fake background in a Zoom call to a deepfaked image of the person you’re meeting with online, he said.
“We’ve let the cat out of the bag,” Vekiarides said, “and it’s hard to put it back in.”
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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