The Content Authenticity Initiative unveils content attribution tool within Photoshop and Behance

Adobe believes in the power of creativity — for all — to make our world a more beautiful, interesting place. We also believe that creativity is even more powerful when combined with transparency and trust. One year ago at Adobe MAX, we launched the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) to address the challenges of deepfakes and other deceptively manipulated content. Adobe’s heritage is built on trustworthy creative solutions, and the CAI’s mission is to increase trust and transparency online with an industry-wide attribution framework that empowers creatives and consumers alike.

Today, we are unveiling a preview of our attribution tool in Adobe Creative Cloud. This feature will be available to select customers in pre-release within Photoshop and Behance in the coming weeks. The tool is built using an early version of the open standard that will provide a secure layer of tamper-evident attribution data to photos, including the author’s name, location and edit history. This will help consumers better understand the content they view online and give them greater confidence to evaluate its authenticity.

This is a significant milestone for the Content Authenticity Initiative that follows countless hours of technical development and information sharing with our collaborators including The New York Times Company, Twitter, Inc., Microsoft, BBC, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Truepic, WITNESS, CBC and many others. You can read more about our approach in the technical white paper we released in August. Collaborating with leaders across a variety of industries will help to create an industry-wide attribution framework, making it easier on consumers and creatives alike to use the tool.

In addition to helping us understand what to trust online, attribution matters for another critical reason: Providing credit to creators for their work. Think of it as a simple equation: Exposure (for your creative work) plus attribution (so people know who created it) equals opportunity (for more collaborations or jobs). Now, with a tamper-evident way to seamlessly attach your name to your creative work, you can go viral and you’ll still get credit.

We believe attribution will create a virtuous cycle. The more creators distribute content with proper attribution, the more consumers will expect and use that information to make judgement calls, thus minimizing the influence of bad actors and deceptive content.

Ultimately, a holistic solution that includes attribution, detection and education to provide a common and shared understanding of objective facts is essential to help us make more thoughtful decisions when consuming media. Today is a huge leap forward for the CAI, but this is just the beginning.

For more information, visit https://contentauthenticity.org. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please let us know by emailing contentauthenticity@adobe.com.