Adobe will let creators digitally sign their art
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Adobe's Content Authenticity web app, seen here, allows creators to authenticate their digital work. Image: Adobe
Adobe is readying a web tool that aims to allow artists and other creators to easily authenticate digital works as their own.
Why it matters: The tool, which enters private beta today and will be made more broadly available next year, is part of Adobe's broader strategy to help authenticate digital content by showing how it was captured or created and indicating any changes made using AI.
Driving the news: The free public beta of the Adobe Content Authenticity web app is planned for the first quarter of next year, and will allow content creators to add credentials to their work.
- Creators will also be able to indicate whether or not they want their content to be used to train generative AI. Adobe is pledging to respect these decisions and said it is working to encourage other companies to do the same.
- Credentials applied using the app can persist even if the content is altered or a screenshot is made, Adobe says, thanks to digital watermarking and other techniques.
- Adobe is also releasing a Chrome browser plug-in that will allow consumers to see credentials related to any content they are viewing.
The big picture: It's part of Adobe's broader content authenticity initiative, which also aims to verify digital images from the moment of capture, in the case of photos and videos, or from the moment of creation, in the case of digital images.
- Adobe and others also use these credentials to note the role that generative AI played in the creation of an image or video.
- The broader effort, which began in 2019, now has 3.700 companies supporting it and includes publishers, platforms and hardware makers.
Yes, but: Apple has yet to publicly commit to Adobe's approach. Google has joined the Adobe effort, but has not yet built content credentialing into the Android camera process.
- And detecting AI-created images remains a big challenge.
- Adobe acknowledged there is more work to be done.
- "When we started this, we said, 'This is a 10-year journey,'" Adobe CTO Ely Greenfield told Axios.
