Adobe Inc. debuted a software tool to help media creators prove their images are real, the latest move by the maker of Photoshop to combat the spread of deepfake technology.
An attribution tool for Photoshop and Behance, a social-media service owned by Adobe, will be available for testing in the coming weeks and generally released in 2021, the San Jose, California-based company said Tuesday in a statement. The software feature will let creators tag pictures with their names as well as the history and location of edits, to provide more transparency to a public growing increasingly skeptical of digital images.
Adobe is undertaking this project as part of the Content Authenticity Initiative, a coalition of technology and media companies including Microsoft Corp., Twitter Inc., the British Broadcasting Corp. and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. These partners hope to build a new, open-source digital standard to help consumers online distinguish between genuine images and misinformation. Microsoft last month released a tool to help analyze videos and photos and provide a score indicating the chance that those images have been manipulated.
The coalition’s effort is meant to build trust for images that feature transparent data and be more distrustful of pictures of unknown provenance. Adobe doesn’t generally weigh in on political matters, but Dana Rao, the company’s executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, said he feared Americans would “disengage” from the political process due to online disinformation.