Adobe is giving creators a way to prove their art isn’t AI slop

By Andrew Tarantola Published October 31, 2024

With AI slop taking over the web, being able to confirm a piece of content’s provenance is more important than ever. Adobe announced on Tuesday that it will begin rolling out a beta of its Content Authenticity web app in the first quarter of 2025, enabling creators to digitally certify their works as human-made, and is immediately launching a Content Authenticity browser extension for Chrome to help protect content creators until the web app arrives.

Adobe’s digital watermarking relies on a combination of digital fingerprinting, watermarking, and cryptographic metadata to certify the authenticity of images, video, and audio files. Unlike traditional metadata that is easily circumvented with screenshots, Adobe’s system can still identify the creator of a registered file even when the credentials have been scrubbed. This enables to company to “truly say that wherever an image, or a video, or an audio file goes, on anywhere on the web or on a mobile device, the content credential will always be attached to it,” Adobe Senior Director of Content Authenticity Andy Parsons told TechCrunch.

Both the Chrome extension and the forthcoming web app will be available to the public, whether you’re one of Adobe’s 33 million paying subscribers and Firefly users. “We’re going to release the Content Authenticity browser extension for Chrome as part of this software package, and also something we call the Inspect tool within the Adobe Content Authenticity website,” Parsons said. “These will help you discover and display content credentials wherever they are associated with content anywhere on the web, and that can show you again who made the content, who gets credit for it.”

This announcement comes amid Adobe’s larger push for building trust through transparency in digital content. The company has founded a pair of industry groups — the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the foundational open standards consortium the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) — to spur adoption of its Content Authenticity initiative. To date, the groups have attracted more than 2,000 signatories, including nearly every major camera manufacturer, along with AI front runners Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as social media platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.