Adobe has a vision for an internet filled with photos and videos packaged with additional data that clarifies their provenance. The company's primary goal is to mitigate the spread of visual misinformation, but the system could also be a boon for content creators who want to keep their names associated with their work.
First announced in 2019, Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) project has since published a brief report on its plan to build the technology. It has now built the system into its software and partnered with newsrooms and hardware manufacturers that can help universalize its vision.
Now, the company is announcing the release of a three-part open source toolkit to quickly get the technology into the hands of developers. Adobe’s new open source tools include a JavaScript SDK for building ways to display content credentials in browsers, a command-line tool, and a Rust SDK for building desktop apps, mobile apps, and other experiences to create, view, and verify embedded content credentials.
While EXIF data stores details about aperture and shutter speed, the new standard also records information about the creation of a file, including how it was taken and edited. And if the company's shared vision comes to fruition, that metadata, which Adobe refers to as "content credentials," will then be widely seen across social media platforms, image editors, and news sites.
“Discovery [of misinformation] is going to be an arms race, and you know, frankly, the good guys are going to lose in that race,” Andy Parsons, senior director of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), told TechCrunch. “We tried instead to double down on content authenticity, which is this idea of proving what’s true, how something was done, in cases where it makes sense, who did it.”
The underlying standard, C2PA, is the result of a collaboration between Adobe's CAI and partners including Microsoft, Sony, Intel, Twitter, and the BBC. The Wall Street Journal, Nikon, and the Associated Press have also recently joined Adobe's commitment to widely deploying content authentication.
With the new tools, a social media platform can embed JavaScript provided by Adobe and quickly have all of its images and videos display content credentials, which appear as a mouse icon in the upper-right corner. This implementation could take a few developers a few weeks instead of requiring a dedicated team and a larger software build.
CAI’s primary goal is to detect visual disinformation online — think old re-circulated images that distort the war in Ukraine or the infamous Nancy Pelosi “fakefake.” But a digital chain of custody could also benefit content creators whose work is stolen or put up for sale, a phenomenon that has hurt visual artists for years and is now causing headaches in the NFT markets.
Parsons noted that CAI is also receiving a surprising amount of inbound interest from companies that produce synthetic images and video. By embedding provenance metadata into the kind of AI creations we're seeing from models like DALL-E, companies can be sure that those generated images aren't easily mistaken for the real thing.
(the full article is available at techcrunch.com)