Adobe, a major player in the content authenticity movement and the founder of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CA) in 2019, announced Adobe Content Authenticity. This new, free web app enables creators to attach Content Credentials to their digital work easily.
“In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, creators are understandably concerned about safeguarding and gaining attribution for their work and having more control over how it’s used,” explains Andy Parson, Senior Director of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe. “That’s why we’re excited to introduce Adobe Content Authenticity, a new, free web app that allows creators to easily attach Content Credentials to their digital work — helping you protect your work, show attribution and better connect with your audiences online.”
Parsons describes Content Credentials as a “nutrition label” for people’s digital creations, likening Content Credentials for digital photos and artwork to a signature a painter might add to their painting. Once attached to a digital file, this information makes it easier for original content to be traced back to its creator and provides additional transparency to others.
“At Adobe, we believe that transparency in digital content is paramount to fostering a more trustworthy digital ecosystem,” Parsons explains. “We founded the Content Authenticity Initiative in 2019, which has since grown to 3,700 members — all committed to promoting widespread adoption of Content Credentials. Now, with the Content Authenticity web app, we’re thrilled to expand on this work and bring Content Credentials to creators everywhere.”
The free web app offers numerous features, including enabling photographers and other digital artists to batch-apply Content Credentials to their content. Using Content Credentials, creators can add information to their files, like a verified name or identity and links to their website and social media profiles.
From here, users can also set the generative AI training and usage preferences for their files. Although Adobe notes its generative AI platform, Firefly, is only trained using authorized content, some AI models don’t follow this approach and will use nearly anything from the web. With these preferences, users have some control over how their content may be used to train AI models, and can at least signal their demands.
Adobe says Spawning, an AI opt-out aggregator, recognizes the opt-out preferences, and it is working on driving industry-wide adoption of this feature. If users apply this opt-out preference, affected work won’t be eligible for submission to Adobe Stock and won’t work with all Firefly-powered features across Adobe’s ecosystem.
A limiting factor of Content Credentials thus far has been a lack of an easy way to view attached labels on work. Content Credentials are an industry standard, but Adobe continues to work on rolling them out to additional platforms and websites. To bridge the current gap, Adobe will release the Content Authenticity extension for Google Chrome. With this extension, users can interact with and view Content Credentials wherever they’re available online.
Adobe is also providing users a way to drop a file in the Adobe Content Authenticity web app to inspect its Content Credentials. When a user drops a file with Content Credentials, like an image captured on the C2PA-equipped Leica M11-P camera, the Content Credentials will be available on the web app. This is also true for any files edited in Adobe software that include Content Credentials. Once signed with Content Credentials, the data is durable and persistent, like a digital fingerprint.
“The idea to build the Content Authenticity web app was sparked through many conversations with our creative community. For example, our team had many conversations with photographers who shared frustration about their work being reposted without permission, with illustrators who’ve had generative AI models train on their unique style and others,” Parsons explains.
The features and experience you’ll find within Content Authenticity reflect what we’ve heard from the creators we’ve talked to, and we plan to continue these conversations as we further develop the web app.”
The Adobe Content Authenticity web app will be available as a free public beta starting early next year. Content Authenticity will be further integrated into all Adobe Creative Cloud apps that support Content Credentials, including Photoshop, Lightroom, and more. Adobe will share additional information at Adobe MAX later this month, and interested users can sign up to join the beta waitlist now.
Much more work is needed concerning content authenticity and Content Credentials, but Adobe’s new web app is a significant step forward. Creating a centralized hub for digitally signing work and checking the credentials of files is a big deal.
Image credits: Adobe