EXECUTIVE PROGRAM
Just the facts: Adobe champions digital provenance to restore trust online
by Dana Rao, EVP, General Counsel, and Chief Trust Officer, Adobe
Today, one of the greatest threats facing society is the onslaught of deepfakes and disinformation we encounter online every day. Left without the tools or resources to navigate our digital world, people are at risk of believing lies and – what’s perhaps even more concerning – of no longer believing the truth. We need a way to restore trust online.
As the world’s leading creative company, Adobe has helped journalists, artists, designers, hobbyists, and creators of all kinds bring their imaginations to life for the past 40 years. With our tools, network, and deep understanding of the image editing space, we knew Adobe could be a leader in the fight against disinformation so in 2019, we founded the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).
The CAI is a cross-industry coalition working to restore trust online using provenance technology. The CAI solution allows people to attach information – like name, location and edit history – to their digital content, so that people can see where a piece of content came from and what happened to it along the way. With this new level of transparency enabled, we can provide attribution for creators and help people make more informed decisions about whether or not to trust content they see online. In just three years, the CAI has grown to over 800 members, including creators, technologists, journalists, activists and leaders among its members, all supporting the mission to add a layer of verifiable authenticity to all types of digital content through provenance.
The power of provenance
Core to this approach is that neither tech companies nor governments should be the arbiters of truth. Instead, provenance empowers people with simple, objective facts about how an image, video, or audio file came to be. Then, they can decide for themselves whether to trust it.
As media editing and creation capabilities become more advanced, the importance of provenance will only continue to grow. The recent emergence of generative AI tools, for example, means people can express their creativity in new ways. But it also means that now more than ever, it’s important to give creators a way to show their work and give people a way to identify how digital content was created.
Last year, we implemented the CAI technology in Photoshop, Adobe Stock, and Behance, so our millions of users can apply provenance to their images. Now, we are focused on enabling the CAI technology in more Adobe products for audio and video, and helping other CAI members implement it into their own tools and platforms so that wherever any type of digital content goes, provenance information goes with it.
Driving widespread implementation
To ensure broad adoption, Adobe did not focus on a proprietary solution, but instead founded an independent standards organization called the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) along with Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic to further define the technical requirements of a digital provenance solution that addresses images, video and audio. In January 2022, the C2PA released the first open technical specification for digital provenance that anyone can write to. And in June 2022, the CAI released a suite of open-source tools to make it even easier for developers to implement this technology.
Most recently at Adobe MAX, the world’s largest creative conference, we announced partnerships with industry-leading camera manufacturers, Leica and Nikon, to implement provenance technology in two of their cameras using the C2PA specification. This allows people to attach provenance data to digital images from the moment a photo is taken, enabling a chain of trust from capture to cloud. Rebuilding trust in the facts is essential for democracies to survive; it is only with a common and shared understanding of the truth that we can debate policies and develop solutions together.
Get involved
We all have a role to play in the fight against disinformation. The CAI is built on collaboration and will succeed only if everyone is involved. As we continue to advance the CAI mission to rebuild trust in digital content, we welcome the opportunity to add new businesses and organisations to our community to help promote the widescale adoption of provenance solutions and standards and implement this technology for themselves. To learn more, please reach out to our Executive Engagement Team.