Detection Has a Power Problem. Meet Reality Defender’s Ethics Committee

Most ethics committees are theater. A logo-board of professors and ex-regulators who get a quarterly Zoom and a thank-you email. The announcement is the product. The work isn’t.

This is not one of those.

Today we’re announcing the Reality Defender Ethics Committee. The founding members are Keith Enright, Luciano Floridi, and Yoel Roth.

Keith was Google’s chief privacy officer for over a decade and now leads strategy at Harvey. Luciano runs Yale’s Digital Ethics Center and helped architect the EU AI Act’s ethical framework. Yoel led trust and safety at Twitter and now runs trust and safety at Match Group. Three careers, all spent asking harder questions about technology, privacy, and accountability.

All three have said no to companies before. That’s why I wanted them on this board.

Detection companies are accumulating something most people don’t see yet. Luciano has a name for it: the “verifier’s power.” As detection becomes infrastructure, the organizations that certify what’s real acquire enormous epistemic authority. We’re deciding, in contested cases, what counts as likely authentic. That’s a lot of power which needs oversight. If we don’t build that oversight ourselves, regulators will eventually build it for us, and they’ll build it badly.

The committee’s job isn’t to bless what we ship, but to push back on it. This pushback includes (but is not limited to) operational questions, how we communicate uncertainty in a verdict, how we handle false positives at scale, and who has access to flagged content (and for how long).

It also includes harder questions. What duty do we owe a worker authenticated through RealMeeting who didn’t choose to be authenticated? What happens when a regulator asks for our verdicts as evidence in a proceeding? How do we draw the line when a customer wants to use detection in a way we don’t think is appropriate?

Most of these don’t have clean answers. Some of them never will. The point of the committee isn’t to produce cleaner answers, but to make sure the answers we ship were actually wrestled with.

These aren’t problems Reality Defender can solve alone. They aren’t even problems we can articulate alone. We need people in the room who’ve spent careers thinking about exactly these tradeoffs at scale. People who’ve earned the standing to make us listen when they say no.

Keith, Luciano, and Yoel said yes to this because the problem is real. Synthetic media is an ever-present risk with real, tangible costs. The companies building detection have a responsibility to take that seriously, and a responsibility to be held accountable for how seriously we take it.

That work starts today.