Adobe launches AI-generated content identification: A new watermark and copyright protection method

Adobe and other companies have developed a symbol that can be attached to content and metadata to indicate the source of the content, including whether it was created by AI tools.

This symbol, called the "Transparency Icon" by Adobe, can be added through Adobe's photo and video editing platforms such as Photoshop or Premiere, as well as the final Microsoft Bing Image Generator. It will be added to the metadata of images, videos, and PDFs to declare who owns and created the data. When viewers are viewing the photos online, they can hover over the icon, which will open a dropdown menu containing details about its ownership, the AI tools used to create it, and other details about the media production.

Adobe developed this symbol together with other companies as part of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), which is an organization aimed at creating technical standards to prove the source and origin of content. (It uses "CR" as an abbreviation, which stands for Content Credentials to avoid confusion with the Creative Commons icon.) Other members of CAI include Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic. CAI owns the trademark for this symbol.

Andy Parsons, Senior Director of Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative, said that this symbol is like a "nutrition label" that tells people the source of the media. The existence of this symbol is to encourage the labeling of AI-generated data, as Parsons said it increases transparency about how the content was created.

"Previously, there wasn't a single widely recognized mark that everyone could use, and a large part of our efforts over the past year and more has been to bring people from different organizations together to test a symbol," Parsons said.

While this small symbol is visible in the image, the information and symbol are also embedded in the metadata, so it will not be removed by Photoshop.

Adobe said that other companies in CAI will start implementing the new symbol in the coming months. For example, Microsoft has been using custom digital watermarks to label content created with its Bing Image Generator, but will soon adopt this new icon. Companies and users are not required to adopt this symbol.

Adobe first announced its Content Credentials feature in 2021 and made it available in the Photoshop beta last year. Content Credentials also apply to Firefly, which is the company's generative AI art model and is automatically added to works created with Firefly.

The rise of AI-generated content has brought renewed attention to standard methods of demonstrating authenticity. Concerns, particularly about deepfake images and videos, have prompted politicians and regulatory bodies to draft proposals to prevent misleading AI-generated content from being used in campaign advertisements. Several tech companies, including Adobe, have signed a non-binding agreement with the White House to develop watermark systems to identify AI-generated data.

Google has introduced its own content labeling called SynthID, which can identify in the metadata whether something was generated by AI. Digimarc has also released a digital watermark that includes copyright information to track the use of data in AI training sets."