Welcome Andy Parsons

A warm welcome to Andy Parsons — Adobe's new Director of the Content Authenticity Initiative.

I’m thrilled to share that I have joined Adobe as Head of Engineering for the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). The CAI is an ambitious project that unites my passions for helping creators expand their potential and empowering them to reach audiences through technology, publishing and community.

Enabling professionals to reach their audiences with credibility and authenticity is the challenge the CAI is taking on. Providing transparency about the provenance of media will be the most impactful result of our work. It’s not the only one; the technology is also about giving creators provable credit for their work no matter where it appears, be it original, derived or mashed-up.

The CAI was announced to the world at Adobe MAX in November, and we’ve just posted an update about the inspiring kickoff event held at Adobe HQ last month. But the initiative’s foundational ideas have been incubating in the halls of Adobe for years. The challenge of building reliable, trustworthy attribution pathways for artists and journalists working across media types is now truly universal. And the time for an industry-wide effort to address it is upon us. Social platforms, publishers, software makers and media literacy institutions must come together to restore trust in the images, video and audio with which we interact every day. Founding partners Twitter and The New York Times join us in our commitment to develop a solution for standardization and wide adoption.

Why now? The amount of new digital content we have available to us at any moment has increased precipitously, and mechanisms for understanding the origins of what we see have not kept pace. Rapid advances in synthetic media and deepfakes are making detection of bad intent into an escalating arms race. Simple deception through disinformation and misattribution is on the rise. I believe strongly, however, that intent matters and so does Adobe. Editing photographs is good. Modifying video for creative purposes should not be discouraged. Satire is important. So, providing consumers the information they need to understand the chain of modifications from creation to consumption, then draw conclusions about intent, is essential.

But, of course it’s not the entirety of a solution. We believe in three pillars of online trust: education, detection and attribution. While we will focus on attribution primarily, we will work in concert with other thought leaders on the remaining pillars.

I’m beyond excited to lead the team taking on the ambitions of the CAI at Adobe. We are already working with a host of industry partners comprising the CAI Working Group and together we’ll be building and standardizing toward an open ecosystem. As Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky noted in his announcement of the CAI at Adobe MAX, “it will be a long journey but we’re getting started now.” I’m among incredible talent in an historic place, humbled to be a part of it.