Adobe has introduced a free Content Authenticity web app that allows content creators to apply attribution tags to their images, videos and audio, and prevent them from being used for AI training. The app serves as a centralized hub for the Adobe Content Credentials platform, which integrates protective metadata into digital content with information about the creator, owner, and whether AI tools were used to create the work.
Image source: Adobe
Content Authenticity will integrate with Adobe Firefly AI models, as well as Photoshop, Lightroom and other Creative Cloud apps that already support content credentials. Most importantly, credentials can be applied to any image, video, or audio file, not just those created using Adobe tools.
Adobe claims that credentials are extremely difficult to remove, even if you take a screenshot of protected content. All information can be recovered using a combination of digital fingerprints, invisible watermarks and cryptographic metadata. In any case, anyone who wants to bypass these protections will have to make significant efforts.
Adobe has made it easier to check for Content Credentials on websites that don’t provide this information to their users. The Content Authenticity web app includes a tool that recovers and displays this metadata and edit history, and the Content Authenticity Google Chrome extension, now available in beta, will be able to verify content directly on a web page.
Content Authenticity also allows users to protect their work from being used to train generative AI models. Adobe’s own models are trained only on licensed or publicly available content, but these protections are intended to be broadly applicable to models created by other companies—as long as those organizations support it. Adobe is “actively working to drive industry-wide adoption of this customization.”
Adobe says it has recruited 3,700 organizations to support its Content Authenticity initiative. The success of the initiative depends on how many technology and AI companies support it. At the moment, we know of only one startup that has committed to supporting this feature right now. Hopefully, global AI providers like OpenAI and Google will follow suit.
The Content Authenticity web app will launch in public beta in the first quarter of 2025. To use it, you only need a free Adobe account. The release of the app will be a major update to the Content Credentials system and will address many of the criticisms raised by content creators.