Restoring Trust in the Age of (Dis)Information: The CAI Year in Review 2020
Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) team this week hosted our final virtual event of the year: Restoring Trust in the Age of (Dis)Information. During the event, we announced a 2020 capstone achievement: the first-ever photos captured with the end-to-end system for image provenance developed with CAI standards. This is a critical step toward combatting disinformation and is the result of a close collaboration between Adobe, Qualcomm and Truepic.
The CAI is designing components and drafting industry standard specifications for a simple, extensible and trustworthy media provenance solution. This is being done in close partnership with an increasing number of collaborators, including Twitter and The New York Times. With inauthentic media shared online at an unmanageable pace, the CAI is working to create these standards at scale so that consumers and publishers can easily determine whether to trust visual content.
In just over a year since its inception, the CAI has achieved three critical goals:
First, we have set the groundwork for standards via a cross-industry specification effort, embracing diverse viewpoints and a broad set of stakeholders. In August, the CAI white paper was released with co-authors from Microsoft, BBC, The New York Times, Twitter, WITNESS and others. The paper lays out the foundation and guiding principles for a robust but simple architecture that provides strong trust assurances for expressing facts about any type of content, starting with images.
Second, we introduced CAI fundamentals into Photoshop, an Adobe Creative Cloud flagship product. Thanks to Adobe’s enormous reach to all manner of creative professionals who depend on and use Creative Cloud in their work daily, we have the ability to test and hone the CAI user experience to make it simple, impactful, and important to millions of photographers, video producers and visual artists. We’ve started with the CAI Photoshop Private Beta, announced at MAX this year, and 2021 will see further CAI expansion into additional apps and use cases.
Last, we have built strong partnerships for prototyping and interoperability. Our goal is to ensure easy and wide adoption of the CAI standards. In order to achieve this at scale, it is imperative that we invest in partnerships across hardware, software, publishing and social media platforms to further the reach and impact of the CAI through functional prototypes. It is this pursuit that has culminated in a major announcement this week.
Bringing key partners together for the Trust in the Age of (Dis)Information Event
Our December 8th event, Restoring Trust in the Age of (Dis)Information, marked the first pragmatic end-to-end implementation of the CAI standard from image capture, through Photoshop editing and publishing. This was possible through the work of CAI collaborators Qualcomm and Truepic. Together we achieved the first secure hardware implementation of the CAI standard, which will soon become available to consumers. This technology affixes photos taken in “secure mode” on smartphone devices with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 platform with key datafacts from the moment of capture. We gave Sara Naomi Lewkowicz, an award-winning photojournalist early access to a prototype with this technology enabled. You can see the resulting images — the first-ever photos taken with a CAI-enabled device — and read more in our first case study.
We took the opportunity to assemble a group of industry experts, Sara included, to reflect on the problem of inauthentic media and the role of the CAI in the ultimate restoration of trust.
Nina Schick, author of the book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse, moderated a conversation between panelists “either in or at the nexus of technology, journalism and society.” We shared new research released by Adobe around perception of disinformation in media by consumers and creative professionals and mentioned work to come in 2021, including expanding CAI standards to video content.
From a publisher perspective, Marc Lavallee (New York Times R&D) spoke about building systems to allow for information to be understood as accurate as it travels around the internet — this may complicate their work but is central to the mission of a news organization like the Times.
Sherif Hanna (Truepic VP of R&D) reminded us of what’s at play: society’s shared sense of visual reality, and how important it is that both public and private sectors work together to create open standards.
From a social media perspective, Fabiana Meira (Misleading Information Product Manager at Twitter) weighed in on the public trust and safety aspect of protecting information as it’s shared.
We’re just getting started
Looking ahead, we’re now welcoming applications for CAI membership which will allow early access to CAI specifications and source code, invitations to future events, and collaboration with the CAI team on prototypes. In the new year, we will continue developing standards and source code in the open. This project is only possible with transparency, open development and deep collaboration among a broad set of diverse stakeholders. We hope you’ll join us.