Adobe's Content Authenticity Web App To Help Creators Thwart AI Scrapers

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the training of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models, as AI companies have been known to just willy-nilly scrape data from websites without anyone stopping them.

This doesn’t just apply to text bodies on websites but also spans to images, videos and more, to power GenAI tools that can generate images and videos with simple prompts.

While publishers and news outlets have updated their robots.txt files to attempt to stop the web crawlers of artificial intelligence (AI) companies from scraping data, they’ve faced difficulties since scraping isn’t technically illegal.

At the same time, publishing and media platforms are introducing new tools to support just like how Adobe has just done.

On October 8, Adobe introduced the Adobe Content Authenticity Web App to help content creators apply Content Credentials to their work using a simple, free and easy tool.

The company's new web app is designed to help creators protect and receive attribution for their work using Content Credentials, which serve as a carrier of information for digital content, including metadata.

This data enables creators to share information about themselves and how their content was created and edited.

The move comes as Adobe finds that over half (56%) of creators are concerned about their content being used to train generative AI models without their consent.

Overall, the web app enables creators to easily apply Content Credentials to protect their work and receive attribution, set GenAI training and usage preferences, view and inspect available Content Credentials and ensure durable credentials that remain verifiable throughout the content lifecycle.

Scott Belsky, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President, Design & Emerging Products at Adobe, said, “Adobe Content Authenticity is a powerful new web application that helps creators protect and get recognition for their work.”

So, let’s explore what features Adobe’s new initiative brings for content creators in more detail.

What Are Adobe Content Authenticity’s Key Features?

 

• Adobe’s Content Authenticity web app was developed in close collaboration with creators and is already supported in Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Lightroom and Firefly.

• The web app allows creators to easily apply Content Credentials in batch to sign digital work such as images, audio and video files.

• Content Credentials allows users to customize information such as name, website and social media accounts, which ensures attribution and protection against unauthorized use or web scraping bots.

• This is done by offering creators Generative AI Training and Usage Preference for them to signal if they don't want their content used to train AI models.

• Presently, Adobe’s GenAI model Firefly is trained only on licensed content and not customer content.

• Adobe is even promoting industry-wide adoption of this preference to protect creators' work from being used by generative AI models.

• Some platforms don’t retain visible provenance information, limiting transparency for consumers. Here Adobe is helping out with a Content Authenticity extension for Chrome and an Inspect tool to recover and display Content Credentials.

• Content Credentials applied by Adobe’s web app remain connected to a creator’s work and can be recovered even if the provenance information is removed or if someone takes a screenshot.

• Here, the web app uses digital fingerprinting, invisible watermarking and cryptographically signed metadata to enable durable, verifiable tracking throughout the content lifecycle.

What Do People From The Creative Community Think About Adobe Content Authenticity?

 

• Alexsey Reyes, a Houston-based photographer, said, "There’s a blanket of security I didn’t know I needed as an artist sharing online until looking into the benefits of adding Content Credentials to my art. Using Adobe Content Authenticity is like one of those ‘things I wish I knew when I started’ moments."

• Cheriss May, an editorial, documentary and portrait photographer, said, “I’m excited about Adobe Content Authenticity because it will maintain my digital ‘signature’ wherever my files travel while helping us make informed decisions on the stories we encounter online.”

Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) began in 2019 and is now supported by 3,700 members.

Do you think this initiative by Adobe will help content creators protect their work? Do you think it will inspire other creative platforms to follow suit?

Let us know in the comments below!