Adobe Summit 2024: Expanding access for Content Credentials to enterprises, brands and consumers

The demand for quality content has never been higher. Today businesses in every industry, across media, technology, retail, leisure and even healthcare must meet this growing demand by creating compelling digital experiences fueled by content.

Millions of images and videos are produced and shared every day across platforms and everywhere we find ourselves sharing, scrolling or buying online. But as we’ve learned from recent viral deepfakes and manipulated images, maintaining the original context and providing transparency about where content came from can be challenging. Enterprises are also realizing that in order to uphold credibility and maintain consumer confidence in their brand, they need to establish a transparent chain of trust from creation to dissemination online by attaching provenance details like Content Credentials to their own content. Brands like IBM are already seeing the benefit of being able to attach Content Credentials when using Adobe Firefly to supercharge its marketing and advertising content development.

At Adobe Summit, we’re sharing details on new and expanded integration of Content Credentials into our Creative and Enterprise applications to address this need for businesses everywhere. Attaching valuable provenance information with Content Credentials will become crucial for businesses in the generative era and offer them a range of benefits, including:

• A reliable and transparent method for consumers and media outlets to help distinguish between authentic brand-owned content and duplicated, replicated or potentially falsified content;
• Ability to equip people with more information about content, giving them the opportunity to decide for themselves if it’s true. This type of transparency is especially important in the generative era to help build a more trustworthy digital ecosystem;
• Capabilities to document the provenance of a piece of content comprehensively so that anyone can see information not only about its origins but also edits and alterations made since its creation, establishing a clear chain of trust for digital assets in an online world with large amounts of content; and,
• A valuable tool to disclose editing or retouching of commercial photos with AI, especially as more countries enact laws mandating disclosure of generative AI tool use.

Adobe is at the forefront of driving responsible innovation, enabling brands to meet content demands without compromising transparency or trustworthiness. We’ve announced a number of new and expanded Content Credentials integrations that businesses and creatives around the world can leverage, including:

Structure Reference in Firefly

It’s been one year since we launched Adobe Firefly, which has generated over 6.5 billion images to-date and become the most popular AI image generation model designed for safe commercial use globally. Today, we announced an update to Firefly that will bring users a new level of creative control with the Structure Reference capability in our Text to Image model on the Firefly web application. The new feature enables our users to easily apply the structure of an existing image to newly generated images using Firefly. With the introduction of this new feature, we’re continuing to reaffirm our commitment to developing generative AI responsibly by automatically attaching Content Credentials to all Firefly-generated outputs, allowing people viewing digital content to see whether it was created or edited with AI.

Content Credentials across content supply chain

Today, we announced that Content Credentials will be supported in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets. This means that Content Credentials will be attached to Firefly generations or assets created or modified with Firefly-powered features in Express and are designed to follow the assets through the enterprise content supply chain, including as they’re added to AEM Assets.

As an example, imagine an enterprise company having a considerable brand-approved asset library that includes assets created with Firefly or within Express. When those assets are signed with Content Credentials to include important brand information or to denote that generative AI was used in the creative process, the metadata will follow the assets into AEM Assets and beyond as the company’s marketing team create additional content based on the original assets. This is vital step to ensure the asset’s metadata follows the content as it’s disseminated online downstream for consumers who may want to verify the credentials.

A year of Content Credentials adoption & new members

We're pleased to note the continued momentum that Content Credentials have amassed throughout the past year and into 2024, including:

• BBC News, recently announced its implementation of Content Credentials, which are now embedded to its images and to verify content provenance and authenticity, while also helping counter possible disinformation when the content is shared outside the BBC.
• OpenAI, announced support for Content Credentials for images generated by DALL·E 3, which is now available and future support in its new video offering Sora.
• Meta recently announced updates to its standard for labeling AI-generated images, including plans to build on the C2PA’s industry standard solution for adding provenance to digital content in Facebook, Instagram and Thread.
• Google joined the C2PA steering committee and is actively working to implement Content Credentials across its products and services.
• Nikon continued to discuss its commitment to bringing Content Credentials, based on the C2PA specifications, into upcoming camera models, plus its collaboration with international news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), to begin practical verification of this image provenance function — specifically to support authenticity and reliability in photojournalism and the fact-checking process.

We are excited, moreover, to introduce new Content Authenticity Initiative members, including PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), NBCUniversal News Group, WPP and Autodesk, which all share in our commitment to combatting the threat of misinformation for consumers, ensuring creators get credit for their work, and will plan to support Content Credentials. The CAI is now at over 2,500 members — all unified in driving widespread adoption and support of a provenance and transparency-based approach to digital content online with Content Credentials.

What’s next

We look forward to continuing to collaborate with technology companies, social platforms, news organizations and policymakers to empower adoption and increase transparency as we fight for a more transparent digital ecosystem. In the months ahead, we will continue our work with governments and policymakers to develop policies, guidance and tools to develop a global standard for provenance, and as we move forward through this critical year for global elections, we are enormously optimistic about the path forward with Content Credentials.