Statement from Digimarc CPO Ken Sickles from the California Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Assembly Bill 3211—California Provenance, Authenticity, and Watermarking Standards

Chair and Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Thank you for having me here today to speak on the important matters addressed by Assembly Bill 3211. I’m Ken Sickles, the Chief Product Officer at Digimarc. Digimarc is the pioneer and global leader in digital watermarking technology, deploying authentication and identification technology on a global scale to protect everything from global currencies to motion pictures and over 90% of broadcast television.  

I’m honored to be here today, as we are standing at the precipice of incredible change to our information ecosystem—a change fueled by the advent of artificial intelligence and its ability to create digital content at an astronomical scale and with unprecedented speed. 

Assembly Bill 3211 (AB-3211) allows for the innovative potential of AI while creating much needed safeguards for its use. This includes mandating the use of digital watermarks on all AI-generated content and advocating for the use of digital watermarks on all authentic, or human-made, digital content. 

I want to be sure to call out the bill’s provisions to make digital watermarks embeddable and decodable at a device level because this is both thoughtful and essential. We believe that offering the option to both embed and decode digital watermarks on-device is crucial to creating a more transparent and trustworthy digital ecosystem. This is because all content is created and consumed on a device.

Therefore, to ensure digital consumers have clarity about the digital content they watch, read, or listen to, all content—AI and human created—should be digitally watermarked and decodable at the point of creation and consumption, which is on-device. If this isn’t done, digital misinformation and disinformation stand to increase by an order of magnitude. 

The actions taken by this body in the coming months will define the future of our digital economy and, by extension, our world. Digimarc believes that AB-3211 takes important steps towards safeguarding the biggest modern revolution since the advent of the Internet and provides safeguards that will allow innovation to flourish. On behalf of Digimarc, I’d like to thank the Committee for having me here today, and I look forward to answering your questions.