As the engine that powers the world's digital artists, Adobe has a huge responsibility to help mitigate the rise of AI-powered deepfakes, misinformation, and content theft. In the first quarter of 2025, Adobe will release a beta version of the Content Authenticity web app. This allows creators to apply content credentials to their work to authenticate it as their own.
This is not as simple as changing the image's metadata. This type of protection is easily thwarted by screenshots. Content credentials take provenance one step further. Adobe's systems use digital fingerprints, invisible watermarks, and cryptographically signed metadata to better protect your artwork, including images, videos, and audio files.
Invisible watermarks make changes to pixels too small to be detected by the human eye. Digital fingerprinting works similarly, encoding an ID into a file to ensure that the file can be identified as belonging to its original creator even if the content's credentials are removed.
Andy Parsons, Adobe's senior director of content authenticity, told TechCrunch that by using this type of technology, Adobe can ” , the content credentials are always attached to it.
Such opt-in efforts are only as powerful as their implementation. But if there's one company that can reach a quorum of digital artists and creators, it's Adobe, which has 33 million software paying subscribers. Additionally, artists who are not Adobe users can apply content credentials using the web app.
Then there's the issue of making content credentials accessible over the Internet. Adobe has co-founded two industry organizations that work to maintain content authenticity and strengthen online trust and transparency. Its members include camera manufacturers with 90% of the market, content creation tools from Microsoft and OpenAI, and platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google. Instagram, Facebook. These companies' membership doesn't mean they'll integrate Adobe's content credentials into their products, but it does mean Adobe has their ears.
Still, not all social media platforms and websites display provenance information in a visible manner.
“In the meantime, to fill that gap, we plan to release the Content Authenticity browser extension for Chrome as part of this software package. We also plan to release something called the Inspect tool within the Adobe Content Authenticity website. '' Parsons said. “These help you find and view content credentials associated with content anywhere on the web, and once again show who created the content and who is taking credit for it. You can.”
Ironically, AI isn't very good at determining whether something is AI or not. As it becomes difficult to distinguish between real and synthetic images, these tools may provide a more specific way to determine the origin of an image (as long as you have credentials).
Adobe is not against the use of AI. Rather, the company is trying to clarify when AI is used in artwork and prevent artists' work from being used in training datasets without their consent. Adobe also has its own generative AI tool called Firefly, which is trained on Adobe Stock images.
“Firefly only trains on content that is commercially secure and that Adobe has explicitly given us permission to use. Of course, we never train on customer content,” Parsons said. I am.
Although artists have shown significant resistance to AI tools, Parsons says integrating Adobe's Firefly into apps like Photoshop and Lightroom has received positive feedback. Parsons said Photoshop's generative fill feature, which allows users to enhance images through prompts, has seen adoption rates 10 times higher than typical Photoshop features.
Adobe is also working with Spawning, another tool that gives artists control over how their work is used online. Spawning allows artists to search and see if their artwork is present in the most popular training datasets through a website called “Have I Been Training?” Artists can add to the Do Not Train registry, which tells AI companies that their work should not be included in training datasets. This only works if AI companies respect the list, but for now HuggingFace and Stability are on board.
On Tuesday, Adobe will release a beta version of its Content Authenticity Chrome extension. Creators can also sign up to be notified when the full web app beta launches next year.