Photoshop can now tell if your photos are fake

At last year’s Adobe Max, Adobe announced the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). It was created to detect deepfake and manipulated content, and now it’s finally coming to Photoshop and Behance.

Will Allen of Adobe writes that the mission of this initiative is “to increase trust and transparency online with an industry-wide attribution framework, that empowers creatives and consumers alike.” The new attribution tool is now live and it should be rolled out over the next few weeks. For now, it will only be available only to select customers in a beta release of Photoshop and Behance.

“The tool is built using an early version of the open standard that will provide a secure layer of tamper-evident attribution data to photos,” Allen writes. In other words, you’ll be able to include the name of the author, the location of the photo, and its edit history. This way, when your photo travels across this vast digital world, it will retain the information of authenticity. Or if it was manipulated, that will be clear as well. Here’s a short preview so you can see the feature in action:

When photos are uploaded to Behance, there will be an Info button included with each of them. When you click on it, you’ll be able to see the information about the image and how (and if) it was manipulated. Interestingly, and maybe ironically enough, Adobe recently launched a manipulation tool that lets you replace the sky in your photos.

But the CAI attribution tool is useful for more than just combating misinformation and image manipulation. If you switch it on in photoshop, your photos will retain all information about the creator, thus giving you credit whenever your work is shared.

“In addition to helping us understand what to trust online, attribution matters for another critical reason: Providing credit to creators for their work. Think of it as a simple equation: Exposure (for your creative work) plus attribution (so people know who created it) equals opportunity (for more collaborations or jobs). Now, with a tamper-evident way to seamlessly attach your name to your creative work, you can go viral and you’ll still get credit.”

If you’d like to learn more about CAI, visit Adobe’s blog and Content Authenticity Initiative’s website.