A conversation with the Trusted Web podcast

How do we create a more trustworthy internet? In the year’s first episode of the Trusted Web podcast, we joined host and founder, Sebastiaan van der Lans, to discuss the Content Authenticity Initiative’s mission, our open-source tools, how to balance permanence and flexibility in technology and much more.

Andy Parsons, CAI Sr. Director, and Sebastiaan in conversation about:

• A coming wave of content created with generative artificial intelligence and the importance of authentic storytelling enabled by digital content provenance technology to identify synthetic media and display attribution

• How consumers, creators and industry may rebuild transparency online by engaging with provenance tools to advance verifiable media and digital literacy

• The critical role of social media and search companies in adopting open-source tools and a standard for verifiable certificates and credentials  

• A bold outlook, predicting the state of trust in the years ahead and more 

Listen to the podcast or watch it below. Share and tag @ContentAuth on Twitter. 

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The CAI’s 2022 Year in Review

by Coleen Jose, Sr. Marketing & Engagement Manager, Content Authenticity Initiative  

As we close out this third year at the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), we want to spotlight the fast-growing CAI community that is leading responsible innovation and implementing the technical standard for restoring trust and transparency through digital content provenance. The urgency to address mis- and disinformation, facilitate transparency and creator attribution online has become even more critical with the speed of developments in generative artificial intelligence.  

Into 2023, we’re furthering our commitment by incorporating CAI technology into Adobe creative tools and collaborating closely with the CAI members deploying offerings in generative AI. More to come on this. 

Launching a standard and ecosystem for transparency online 

We started 2022 with the launch of technical standards and supporting guidance from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an alliance that Adobe leads alongside Arm, Intel, BBC, Microsoft, Sony and Truepic. These standards are the foundation for certifying and displaying the provenance or source and history of media content. 

In June, the CAI team released a suite of open-source tools, enabling a broad developer community to integrate the C2PA technical standards across web, desktop, hardware, mobile projects and more—regardless of their level of technical depth. We’re so thrilled to see community adoption, experimentation and feedback that’s critical to progress and wide adoption. 

Since the release, the content provenance ecosystem has seen new and exciting implementation like that of Pixelstream, a provenance-based platform and system for sharing and delivery of authentic media. At Adobe MAX, we announced partnerships with Leica and Nikon. The industry leading camera manufacturers showcased exhibiting cameras—Leica's iconic M11 Rangefinder and Nikon’s industry-leading mirrorless Z9—with provenance technology. The milestone brings authenticity to digital images at the point of capture, equipping photographers and creators alike with attribution tools. 

We also announced improvements to Content Credentials in Adobe Photoshop, which we launched in 2021 to allow users to add their attribution details to their exported images. Enhanced support for a range of actions including working with smart objects and new global settings to keep content credentials on by default or at the document level brings flexibility to any creative workflow.   

At Adobe MAX this year, Scott Belsky, CPO and EVP for Creative Cloud, announced CAI milestones with Leica and Nikon.

Content provenance for audiences everywhere 

When false narratives or misleading information go viral, we often “Google” to compare coverage and cross-check available information. This common behavior and digital provenance history drive Verify, the CAI website where anyone can upload an image to trace the history and edits made to a piece of digital content. This year, we updated Verify to support matching and recovery of provenance and attribution history in files exported with content credentials, ensuring CAI metadata is permanently associated to your content. 

We welcomed many new CAI members this year—leading publishers and visual content providers including the Associated Press, Agencia EFE, El Tiempo, EPA Images, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal to name a few. Our growing global community of more than 860 members includes creative professionals, civil society, academics, media and technology companies implementing and promoting adoption of content authenticity standards online. Consider joining us. 

Meeting online consumers and digital creators where they are is fundamental to the CAI’s mission—realized through open-source tools and cross-industry collaboration. 

A commitment to provenance and the C2PA standard   

This year also included significant policy collaboration and developments in Europe and the United States.

In June, we achieved a milestone of collaborating with the European Commission’s 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation, the first international code to specifically include commitments on provenance and the C2PA standard. The code aims to encourage adoption by signatories which include Adobe, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and others. 

An Adobe sponsored bill in the State of California will establish a Deepfake Working Group to study the risks and impact of digitally altered media while exploring the adoption of content provenance as a solution to identify deepfakes. 

The CAI team also spoke at a number of policy events internationally, including a policy workshop at the Royal Society in London in September. This event was a deep dive into the recommendation from its report on disinformation on provenance technology (pp.16) where Andy Parsons, Sr. Director at the CAI, addressed an audience of ~50 stakeholders from academia, technology and policy alongside CAI and C2PA member, the BBC. We’ll share the learnings from this workshop when it’s published in early 2023.  

"Addressing the issue of content authenticity at scale is a long-term, interdisciplinary, collaborative mission," Andy said. "And it is more essential than ever before with the arrival of mainstream generative AI. This coming year is set to bring deeper collaboration, wider adoption and new innovation in the provenance community. 2022 was a year of critical foundation-building for us and I see 2023 as the year of utility and adoption, built upon that foundation." 

We’re so excited for the year ahead, continuing to co-create an ecosystem built on trust and grounded in open technologies that enable creator attribution and digital transparency. 

Sign up for our newsletter and consider joining the CAI community.   

Community story: Pixelstream

This month, we spoke to the founders at Pixelstream, a platform to help make verifying and sharing authentic media easier and more accessible. Learn about their journey in provenance implementation and how other developers may get started and contribute. Read more.

Adobe MAX 2022: Launching provenance-powered cameras with Leica and Nikon, updates to Content Credentials in Photoshop, and open-source developments

By Andy Parsons, Sr. Director, Content Authenticity Initiative

Every year around this time after Adobe MAX, the Content Authenticity Initiative team takes a moment to reflect on MAX milestones and the work ahead. This year I’m incredibly proud of the steps we’ve taken with strong partnerships and in the growing CAI community which now boasts over 800 members. With the announcement of partnerships with Leica and Nikon to implement provenance into cameras, we celebrate adoption of provenance throughout the content lifecycle, with a focus on photojournalists using these iconic devices to tell authentic stories. We’ve also released significant updates to Content Credentials in Photoshop, Verify, and upgrades to our open-source tools for provenance, all based on your feedback. Keep it coming, please.  

The CAI team spent the week at MAX interacting with partners, creators, and CAI members across several venues. We had a demo station in the main Adobe booth in the convention center, hosted a session in the Photoshop graphic design track which included a demo of provenance from  camera to Photoshop editing, to export, to Verify display. And we hosted a lively happy hour where it was fantastic to meet many community members face-to-face. These connections are the energy on which the CAI runs, be they in-person or virtual. 

Here’s a recap of our news and everything that launched at MAX 2022: 

• Adobe blog post on all product updates and the Leica and Nikon integrations of provenance into cameras, which will be consumer ready as early as 2023.  

• Enable Content Credentials in Photoshop, now available for all Creative Cloud subscribers. Content Credentials now supports increased flexibility and collaboration, turn the feature xon in your global preferences and choose to attach with each document. Also new: publish to Content Credentials cloud to save space in your files and create more robust creator attribution. 

• Adobe commits to preserving creator attribution with CAI technology integration across tools as they explore Generative AI capabilities. Content Authenticity will be a key factor in creator attribution as we move forward with more research and experimentation of Generative AI technology. 

• The Verify site has been updated to include search and recovery of data when work is exported to the Content Credentials cloud, making Content Credentials permanently associated with your content, no matter where it travels.  

• Our three open-source tools for digital content provenance now include updated documentation and quicker file processing time, and support select audio and video file formats, plus mobile development.  

• Content Authenticity’s Chain of Trust Reaches Cameras–more on our Leica and Nikon partnerships, both implementing attribution and provenance to the point of image creation in cameras.   

We have much more ahead and hope you’ll join us in this work. If you’re not yet a member, you can join the 800+ large and small companies, researchers, technologists, NGOs, and more working on creating a more trustworthy and transparent digital ecosystem with our free membership.

Implementing Adobe’s CAI Open-Source Tools for Digital Content Provenance: Workshop Recap

By Noga Hurwitz, CAI Advocacy & Product Intern

On June 16, we hosted an in-depth workshop exploring our newly launched open-source toolkit for content provenance. Read more about what this launch means for our work in our Senior Director Andy Parsons’ blog post here. Attendees from around the world joined us as we dove into technical details—with a good number of you joining from many time zones beyond our team. Releasing these open-source tools marks the next phase of our work, and a milestone along the way to broad adoption through community engagement with you, CAI members concerned about preserving trust in media.  

Last Thursday’s event featured Adobe CAI team members sharing insights into UI/UX guidelines for provenance implementations, as well as overviews of our Rust Toolkit, Command Line Utility, and JavaScript Software Developer Kit. Below are some highlights from the presentations by my CAI product and engineering colleagues, as well as a replay of the full event, including demos.  

Pia Blumenthal, CAI Lead Product Designer and C2PA UX Task Force Co-Chair unpacked some of the UX guidance documentation that accompanies the C2PA specification.  

“We believe that exposing provenance and attribution data about digital content will empower viewers to better understand where it came from and what happened along the way, thereby engendering a greater sense of trust in the content seen online.” 

Highlights from Pia’s presentation: 

• Capturing provenance data: At the moment of creation, users are empowered to choose what information to attach to content through cryptographic asset hashing to provide verifiable, tamper-evident signatures. During the editing process, existing metadata will be preserved and extended with the recorded history of any alterations. Then, at the point of publishing or sharing, provenance information is preserved and displayed, allowing consumers to view a summary of historical information about what happened, where, when, and by whom. Presenting all this data might be overwhelming, so we’ve opted to provide you with the ability to indicate different levels of disclosure. 

• Trust signals: We have carefully identified certain trust signals, pieces of provenance data that are tantamount to people trusting the system. These include (at minimum) the signer, the entity responsible for verifying manifest data, the timestamp when the data was signed, and, when possible, a thumbnail representation of the content at the time of signing. 

• Verify: Provenance history can be thought of as an ancestry tree. Verify gives users a bird’s eye view of how ingredients came together to form the content in its current state, as well as a way to perform visual inspections of images and videos. 

• Next Steps: We’ve started with image provenance, which our open-source products all readily support. Now we’re working on video and audio experiences, which will present a different set of UX challenges–there may be a larger amount of provenance data generated for temporal media, and non-visual media like audio will require different methods to explore and compare. 

Eric Scouten, Adobe Sr. Engineering Manager for CAI Libraries and Services, presented the Rust toolkit. 

“We're attempting to build an ecosystem of content provenance that extends well beyond Adobe's products, services, and customers. We're excited to see what you build with these tools. We expect that many of you have similar license requirements, and we want to enable your creativity with C2PA as much as possible.” 

About the Rust SDK: 

• Licensing: Our products are MIT licensed, a permissive license that should enable users to incorporate our tools into most products and services. Additionally, some of our tools are also available under the Apache 2.0 license (see more in the video below). 

• C2PA Rust SDK (Rust Software Developer Kit): Our newly published APIs that supports the development of custom applications across desktop, mobile, and services that create, verify, and display content credentials. Learn more about Rust: rust-lang.org. 

Adobe Principal Scientist Gavin Peacock, who worked previously on GridPad, Apple Newton, Palm Pilot and MobiTV before joining the company 14 years ago, spoke about the CLI tool. 

“I’ve learned that the products we make have an impact on people’s lives, for good and sometimes not so good. I feel that those of us creating technology should be part of the solution to the problems that arise from that technology. So, I was one of the first [here at Adobe] involved in the Content Authenticity Initiative.” 

About the C2PA tool: 

• C2PA tool (Command Line Interface): A utility to create, verify, and explore content credentials on the command line. Can also be wrapped to equip existing processes with the ability to interact with content provenance. 

• Validation: The tool doesn’t just show the content, it also validates it, and will include a detailed validation report on any errors it finds; it can also add signed manifests to files.  

• Example: Adobe Stock adds manifests to every exported image using the C2PA Tool. 

Dave Kozma, Mgr. Software Development, demoed the JS SDK. 

“We wanted to create a set of libraries that made it as easy as possible to combine some of the capabilities of our comprehensive and well-tested Rust SDK with the user experience best practices Pia mentioned for use in a browser environment.” 

About the JavaScript SDK: 

• JS SDK (JavaScript Software Developer Kit): Provides what you need to develop rich, browser-based experiences with content credentials, including the ability to display or link to Verify. 

• Styling: We've added customization options to easily style the components to match the look and feel of your site or to add views for your own custom assertions. 

• Application: Internally, we use our JavaScript SDK to power all the core logic of our Verify site. Our library is fully compatible with TypeScript, which helps developers to accelerate their workflow by getting handy code completion and API documentation in their editor. 

Thanks to all who attended, submitted questions in advance, and who participated in the open Q&A period at the end of this workshop. We’re so grateful for your participation and look to you for feedback as well, which is not only welcome but critical to our development process. As you begin to use these tools, we invite you to get in touch via Discord or GitHub and share your experiences with us. If you are not yet a member of the CAI member community, we invite you to join here. 

Where to start for implementers: 

Adobe’s CAI Open-Source Tools for Digital Content Provenance 

JS SDK  

C2PA Tool (command line interface) 

Rust SDK 

Welcoming Reuters to the Content Authenticity Initiative

By Santiago Lyon, Head of Advocacy & Education, CAI

Today the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) marks a notable milestone as we welcome Reuters, the world’s leading provider of trusted news, insight, and analysis, to our community. The addition of Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, furthers our momentum as we continue to advance our mission to address misinformation and disinformation through open industry standards for content authenticity and provenance globally.

“The key to broadening adoption and awareness of CAI is by onboarding trusted and reputable news organizations like Reuters who have a massive global reach to consumers everywhere and understand our mission of helping restore trust in online content,” said Andy Parsons, Director of CAI. “We couldn’t be more excited to officially call Reuters a CAI member, and we look forward to working together to combat misinformation and disinformation.”

Reuters has long been committed to fighting the rise in inauthentic content and involved in various initiatives to restore trust in online content, including:

• Partnering with the CAI in 2021 for Project Starling, a project jointly developed by the USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering, they utilized  CAI specifications to attach cryptographically secure metadata to Reuters photographs that documented the 78 days in the 2021 presidential transition. The project provided an important use case on how CAI technology can be applied so consumers can make better, more informed decisions about online content.

• Collaborating with CAI co-founder Twitter to help expand the company’s push to identify and elevate credible information on its platform by giving people additional context from reliable sources.

• Partnering with major technology platforms on initiatives to combat misinformation, including fact-checking of social media content in countries on 3 continents and in 5 languages.

• Creating the Reuters Digital Journalism Course in partnership with the Meta Journalism Project that provides free online training for journalists to improve their digital newsgathering, verification and publishing skills, as well as access to wellness and resilience resources. Reuters also developed a course on identifying and tackling manipulated media, sponsored by the Meta Journalism Project.

“Trust and accuracy are at the heart of what Reuters does every day, providing our customers and readers with intelligence that helps them make smart decisions,” said Alphonse Hardel, Vice President Business Development & Strategy, Reuters. “We’re thrilled to join the CAI in their efforts to increase trust and transparency online, and we look forward to being part of a solution the helps to tackle the spread of misinformation and disinformation.”

We are always excited to add more strength and diversity to our growing CAI community, which has now grown to more than 750 members across the media, digital content, and technology industries. I encourage anyone interested in joining to reach out to our team here. 

CAI Releases Suite of Open-Source Tools to Advance Digital Content Provenance

By Andy Parsons, CAI Senior Director

Since our inception, the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) has been committed to bringing digital content provenance to audiences everywhere. Today, we are excited to announce that we have released a suite of open-source developer tools – implementing the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) specification released earlier this year – that will further this commitment and enable a broad developer community to integrate content provenance across web, desktop, or mobile projects, regardless of their location or level of technical depth with the comprehensive C2PA technical specification. 

The three tools that will be made available today are: 

• JavaScript SDK – This UI toolkit includes everything developers need to create rich, browser-based experiences displaying content credentials. 

• C2PA Tool – Developers can install this utility to create, verify, and explore content credentials on their command line, or wrap it into a service to quickly equip their processes to interact with content provenance.  

• Rust SDK – Developers can build custom applications across desktop, mobile, and services that create, verify, and display content credentials directly via our powerful Rust library. 

This is a huge milestone for the CAI that builds upon decades of open standards experience at Adobe. Adobe is a longstanding pioneer of open standards and platform-agnostic software products and technology such as XMP, PDF, XDM, and Magento Open Source. Open standards are core to the company’s mission and vision, and a value shared by CAI members. Being active in open-source communities enables CAI to empower developers around the world to create interoperable solutions, native to their applications, that will help advance the adoption of content provenance across a wide array of use cases. We can’t wait to see what the community builds with these raw materials. 

Learn More: Attend the Workshop   

We are hosting an in-depth virtual workshop on Thursday, June 16, 12PM ET to kick off an ongoing dialogue with the developer community on their needs, areas where we can improve the tooling, and how we can encourage widespread adoption, together. We’ll be exploring these new products in more detail, including a walkthrough of the UX guidelines, use cases, and trust signals these tools enable. If you’re a developer, product leader, designer, or business leader interested in transparency and trust online, please register for the event here and join us on June 16. 

CAI Progress and What’s Next 

Today’s announcement is the latest step forward in our work to address the pervasive issue of misinformation and disinformation across the digital ecosystem, empowering creators to develop and share their stories with proper attribution and protection. In late 2021, we released Adobe’s Content Credentials feature – available to all Creative Cloud subscribers across key Adobe products and workflows, notably as an opt-in feature in Photoshop. These tools help establish authorship for creators, foster transparency within digital media and bolster trust in content (images, video, other digital formats) by adding robust, tamper-evident provenance data about how a piece of content was produced, edited, and published.  

Earlier this year, we also saw the culmination of our collaboration with the outstanding partners of the C2PA in the public release of the open technical specification for digital provenance, which provides apps and platforms with a blueprint defining a core trust model and its application to various types of content (e.g., images, videos, audio, or documents). The C2PA also provides deep guidance on how that information is presented and stored, and how verification is accomplished. The work to hone experiences, preserve privacy and counter misuse scenarios is ongoing and developing guidance will be reflected in the evolution of the CAI open-source tools. 

As we move forward, we will continue to add to our growing community of over 750 members, which now includes The Associated Press, Nikon, and The Wall Street Journal. We will continue to pursue wide-scale adoption of CAI ideals through creator and consumer education. And today we’re forming a new developer-focused facet of the CAI community, building on our collective effort to increase trust and transparency online, now through open-source code.  

We welcome feedback and contributions. Grab the code and let’s get started. 

The Wall Street Journal Joins the Content Authenticity Initiative

By Santiago Lyon, CAI Head of Advocacy & Education

Today, the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is thrilled to welcome The Wall Street Journal into our CAI community, which now boasts more than 750 members across the media, digital content, and technology industries, including The Associated Press, The New York Times, AFP, Nikon, BBC, Getty Images, The Washington Post, Gannett, DPA, Stern, DFINITY, Reface, McClatchy, Wacom, and many others.

The Wall Street Journal, established in 1889 and published by Dow Jones, is one of the most respected and trusted publications around the world. With 38 Pulitzer Prizes for outstanding journalism, the Journal is a critical resource for many of today’s leaders and tomorrow’s rising stars, producing unparalleled analysis and uniquely trusted reporting that drive the world forward.

The Journal is also among those outlets who recognize the immense power of visual storytelling. Relying on a talented pool of its own award-winning photojournalists, as well as partnerships with newswires like AFP and Reuters, the Journal supplements written articles with some of the most compelling images from around the world. As a result of its comprehensive coverage, the Journal’s readership continues to grow, currently reaching more than 3 million digital subscribers.

This massive audience is a testament to the Journal’s influence and trusted reputation and will serve as a valuable addition to the CAI’s work to increase trust and transparency online, especially among media companies. The CAI aims to empower creators and photojournalists to get credit for their work while equipping consumers with the tools to decide for themselves what digital content to trust. Given the rise of misinformation, disinformation and consumer consumption of media content, the Journal’s efforts with the CAI will further strengthen the publication’s reputation as being a trusted source for news and information.

As the Journal continues to build out its digital offerings globally, it will explore implementing the CAI’s Content Credentials throughout its photo coverage to provide readers with more information about the content they’re seeing and help them become more discerning consumers of media.

As the CAI advances and tests new digital media formats this year, including video and audio, and delivers open-source offerings for developers, we’re excited to collaborate with more publishers, platforms, tool providers and governments to accelerate digital content provenance for society at large.

We look forward to adding more members to our growing community, as adoption across industries is key to strengthening the mission and collective success. As always, if you’re interested in becoming a member of the CAI, please reach out to the team here. 

The Associated Press Joins the Content Authenticity Initiative

By Santiago Lyon, CAI Head of Advocacy and Education

We are proud and excited to welcome The Associated Press (AP) to our growing Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) community of more than 700 members across the media, digital content, and technology industries, including AFP, BBC, Getty Images, The Washington Post, Gannett, DPA, Stern, DFINITY, Reface, McClatchy, Nikon, Wacom and many others.   

Founded in 1846, AP is one of the most-trusted sources of news, dedicated to advancing the power of facts – a mission the CAI shares as we work to increase trust and transparency online by combatting misinformation and disinformation. As a global news agency, information from the AP reaches 4 billion people every day across multiple formats. With reporting from 250 locations around the world, AP is a key addition to the CAI’s mission to help consumers everywhere better understand the provenance and attribution of images and video. 

AP has won 56 Pulitzer Prizes, including 34 for photography, capturing history-making moments around the globe. With the addition of AP, the CAI will continue our work of bolstering trust in digital content.

“We are pleased to join the CAI in its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation around photojournalism,” said AP Director of Photography David Ake. “AP has worked to advance factual reporting for over 175 years. Teaming up to help ensure the authenticity of images aligns with that mission.”  

The success of the CAI depends on the size, strength and diversity of our members and their invaluable perspectives and insights. We look forward to adding more members to our growing community. If interested, please reach out to our team here.      

Sourcing truth in conflict

By the CAI Team

In the past several weeks, the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread destruction, a growing refugee crisis, and the tragic loss of innocent life. At the Content Authenticity Initiative, we, like many around the world, have witnessed and been shocked by the horrific images of violence stemming from this unjustified attack.

While citizen journalists have shared many important photos and videos helping us understand what is really happening, we have also seen misinformation being used to create false perceptions from fake realities. At the conflict’s onset, a widely circulated video purportedly showing a Ukrainian girl confronting Russian soldiers was later identified as a 2012 video from the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Recently, hackers placed a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appearing to tell his soldiers to lay down their arms on a Ukrainian news site, before it was debunked and removed; And a deepfake video in which Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to declare peace has resurfaced on social media.

Our goal with the Content Authenticity (CAI) is to give people a place to go to find content they can trust. Whether citizen journalists capturing content on mobile phones or professional photojournalists documenting the war, anyone could use the CAI technology to show the world the provenance of their images. Then the public could view those images with confidence, knowing that transparency is at their fingertips to check where an image came from and what edits were made to it along the way. With technology like CAI incorporated across our digital content ecosystem, any images or videos without a CAI tag would be viewed with skepticism, as they could be fake. In just three years, we have seen tremendous momentum and clear alignment around this approach, with over 600 members joining the CAI, and standards body C2PA publishing a first open technical standard on content authenticity.

While we wish the CAI technology was already widely available to help prevent the spread of dangerous mistruths, ongoing misinformation around this conflict has underscored the present need for media skepticism. It’s important that each of us does our part to be careful and thoughtful about what we see and hear, and what we choose to share. Otherwise, misinformation can not only cause people to believe lies, but it can also stop people from believing the truth.

As we work towards widespread implementation and public awareness of the CAI technology, our members are standing up their own efforts to diligently fact-check misinformation regarding the invasion in Ukraine: 

• First Draft has compiled top tips and tools on how to be an informed consumer of media, which is being promoted by Twitter 

• AFP is fact-checking 

• Truepic’s VP of Public Affairs & Impact wrote an op-ed on social media content in times of war 

• BBC has reported on Russian misinformation and false imagery represented on social media 

• WITNESS shared a guide for capturing video of human rights violations (translated in English here).   

We all hope for a quick resolution to the violence and bloodshed that is happening every day. Our thoughts go out to the victims and families affected by this unnecessary war.

CAI presents to All-Party Parliamentary Media Group (APPG) in the UK

By Kate Brightwell, Adobe’s Head of Government Relations for UK & Europe

Through our work fighting mis- and disinformation with the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), we’ve been able to contribute our perspectives and expertise related to anti-disinformation policy as it is being shaped. We regularly brief policymakers around the world on the urgency of implementing provenance and attribution solutions within digital content.  

On February 1, we presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Media Group (APPG) in the UK Parliament on the CAI and the C2PA standards organization. The APPG is a cross-party group of Members of Parliament (MPs) and Peers from the House of Lords interested in media and journalism, chaired by Andy Carter MP. Representing the CAI community and the C2PA standards development organization were myself, Head of Government Relations for UK & Europe at Adobe, Santiago Lyon, Head of Advocacy & Education for the CAI, and Laura Ellis, Head of Technology Forecasting at the BBC on the C2PA side. You can watch the full event recording on the Media Group’s YouTube channel.

We introduced the work of the CAI and how it relates to the draft Online Safety Bill legislation soon to be debated in the UK Parliament, including reference to misinformation and media literacy. Santiago shared how his deep background in journalism inspired him to work with the CAI, and how passionate he is about bringing content provenance to journalists in the pursuit of truth — for their own safety and to improve public trust of journalism in general. Laura outlined how the BBC is involved in the CAI and C2PA, their work addressing newsroom provenance solutions with Project Origin, and their future plans to integrate CAI technology. 

Through the draft Online Safety Bill, there is a real opportunity for policymakers in the UK to take the lead on provenance standards to help address the challenges of disinformation, misinformation, and inauthentic content, while empowering consumers to interrogate the content they view online.  

The recent release of the C2PA specification shows significant momentum in this area, and with open systems available to all moving towards a widely adopted standard, we can make sure organizations and products across the internet are working together to make the digital world more open, safe, and trustworthy.  

The Online Safety Bill will set the regulatory direction of the UK digital media landscape for many years to come, and we believe this is an opportunity that should not be missed to firmly embed the importance of provenance standards in tackling disinformation and empowering digital consumers. 

We are grateful for the opportunity to present to Parliamentarians interested in these issues in order to share our progress and highlight the significance of the CAI and C2PA work, as well as our ambitions for the future in content provenance. If your organization or policy group is interested in our work, please reach out and consider joining the CAI as a member to receive updates and event invitations.  

Milestones in digital content provenance: v.1.0 specification and open-source projects

By Andy Parsons

In our year-end wrap up, I wrote about the strides the CAI community has made in our work to address misinformation and empower creatives to use powerful tools responsibly. Today, we are announcing what is perhaps the most important milestone to date: the launch of the technical specification, and supporting guidance documents from our sister organization, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). And we’re announcing Adobe’s plans to provide open-source developer tools that will help foster a vibrant ecosystem of C2PA implementations, for creators and consumers. 

The C2PA is the independent, non-profit standards development organization Adobe co-founded under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. It is led by a group of industry leaders including Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, Truepic, and Twitter, and boasts a broad membership of organizations interested in the creation of the content provenance technical standard. Representatives from human rights, publishing, hardware, software, cloud infrastructure, and many other industries have collaborated to write the specification and study its use cases. During a period of public comment, the C2PA honed the draft and produced the full 1.0 version being released today. As the C2PA moves forward, public review and feedback will continue to be an essential part of how this work gets done. 

Notably, the C2PA has done an unprecedented amount of work in less than a year. While we began with a head start, utilizing the ideas shared in the 2020 CAI white paper, the drafting of the specification moved at a remarkable pace without compromising careful considerations of security or user experience. This is the result of the urgency motivating C2PA members to create technology to restore trust and transparency. I could not be more proud of the tremendous effort the specification represents. 

The C2PA is hosting an event today, January 26, marking the release. There will be a set of discussions on the path forward and a comprehensive demonstration of what is available now. The event is open to all with registration. 

Along with the technical specification, you’ll find guidance documents which provide critical recommendations and best practices in these early days of implementation.   

• The Implementation Guidance documentation outlines the architecture of content provenance, trust models, and specifics on usage of content bindings;  

• The User Experience Guidance for Implementers includes specific examples and visuals for photos and videos, as well as notations of communication and language usage;  

• Harms Modeling and Security Considerations take into account potential misuse, human rights perspectives, and countermeasures. 

Specifications like C2PA 1.0 do not see broad adoption without the critical work of advocates and implementers, who build inspired products from the document. And this is best catalyzed through open source, where code can be shared and evolved without licensing or intellectual property concerns. On the heels of the C2PA release today, any interested individual, organization, or company will be able to access three open-source offerings from the CAI team.  

The three products will allow those interested in provenance to utilize our code across a range of applications — likely including ones we have not even considered. We plan to release these through Adobe’s Open Source libraries in the coming months. First, we’ll release a JavaScript UI kit that will power verification and display of content credentials-enabled assets in the browser. Then, we will release a utility (CLI) that will allow creation, verification, and viewing of content credentials on the command line with no coding necessary. Finally, we’ll release a full Rust-based developer SDK that will allow creation of custom applications and services that create, verify, and display content credentials.  

With the 1.0 specification live, we’re entering the next phase in digital content provenance, that will see the growing CAI community advocate and push the ideas of trust and authenticity from theory to reality — by building. As this new chapter for Content Authenticity begins, it is the perfect time to get involved. You can sign up to receive updates on open-source products and other news. We have much more coming from the CAI team, including events and community engagement around the implementation of the C2PA 1.0 standard. Please join us!  

2021 update from CAI: full of milestones and just getting started

By Andy Parsons

This time last year, I wrote about putting the groundwork in place for critical progress in 2021. The Content Authenticity Initiative aspired to achieve new goals in establishing the standard for digital provenance, releasing products in the Adobe Creative Cloud, and pushing forward with new, meaningful collaborations. With this engaged community, we have done these things — and there is much more to accomplish over the coming years. Here’s a brief look back at 2021 and a look forward at what is to come. 

It was a busy second year for the CAI in our work to address misinformation and empower creators to use powerful tools responsibly, with proper attribution. As we witness the increasing perils of disinformation, I’m encouraged by the myriad efforts and alliances taking meaningful action, working across industries, governments, and open source communities to restore transparency and trust to media. 

Having started in late 2019 with just three founding partners (Adobe, the New York Times Company, and Twitter), we recently passed the 500-member mark, adding AFP, Getty Images, The Washington Post, Gannett, DPA, Stern, Nikon, DFINITY, Reface, McClatchy, Wacom, and many others. This is a testament to the urgency we all feel to build provenance standards now, and to do it in the open with the broadest possible set of contributors. 

In October, at Adobe MAX, we launched a publicly-available beta version of Content Credentials within Photoshop, allowing users to view and attach provenance to their work.  

In addition, all images downloaded from Adobe Stock (around 300,000 images per day) now come with Content Credentials attached. Behance now also supports Content Credentials in its single image view, where creators can display attribution and history of their work and explore the digital provenance of other projects. 

This year, we launched several case studies and proof of concept implementations, working with Reuters and the Starling Lab, the NYT R&D team, SmartFrame, and the VII photo agency. We used next generation secure capture devices from Truepic with Qualcomm hardware, showcasing digital provenance applications in photojournalism, photo verification, decentralized media preservation, and more.  

As part of our commitment to raising awareness of digital content provenance inside and outside of our community, we hosted four more quarterly events in 2021, covering: 

• Reuters/Starling Lab use of provenance technology while covering the 78-day period between the US Presidential Election and the inauguration;

• The world of deepfake videos and the impending prevalence of synthetic media of all kinds;

• Demystifying the work being done by the C2PA standards organization (which underpins everything that the CAI team does);

• Our proof-of-concept work with the VII Agency about the value and importance of the CAI to photojournalism. 

We also relaunched our website, with new sections, and introduced the new CAI logo, which aligns perfectly with our mission of bringing transparency to the Web.  

We end the year looking ahead to the upcoming launch of v.1.0 of the C2PA specification (now in draft form), which will allow anyone in the space to begin implementing future-proof, robust provenance technology. I believe we will see implementations in areas the CAI team has not yet imagined — this is the power of open community.  

In 2022, with your help, the CAI will push forward with new implementations, more events, and opportunities for collaboration with Adobe and the entire ecosystem. The C2PA will continue to develop the core specification and essential guidance documents including recommendations for user experience, bolstered by deep UX research and experimentation. And the CAI will, as always, be responsive to exciting, relevant developments in digital identity, decentralized ownership, synthetic content and, yes, even the metaverse. 

As we enter the end-of-year season, I ask all our readers to do a few things: 

• Save the date for January 26, when the C2PA will host a virtual summit event with demos, panels, and talks. This will be an historic moment you may want to be a part of! 

• Join the CAI if you aren’t already a member. It is the best way to keep abreast of developments from the latest provenance-enabled products to the progression of the standards and free tooling.  

• If you are interested in early access to the open source projects being developed by the Content Authenticity Initiative, please let us know here. 

See you in 2022! 

The New Trust Model in Photojournalism with the VII Agency: A Panel Event

VII and CAI partnered on a prototype with secure capture devices and three resulting case studies.

In our always-on digital age, we have an overload of information and inputs from myriad sources: some trusted, others unknown. This brings with it dueling outcomes, the possibility of more connectedness, understanding, and advancement, but also the threats of misinformation (unintended sharing of inaccurate content) and disinformation (intentional sharing of dishonest content). Images in particular are instantly communicative but can easily be manipulated and misrepresented.  

Photojournalists have long been the target of distrust from the public – but now our digital content provenance model can signal trust and communicate accuracy of image history. So we partnered with the esteemed VII photo agency on a prototype to showcase this. Three of their photographers were given secure capture devices (created by Truepic with Qualcomm chips) to use in the field, along with the CAI Content Credentials feature in Photoshop to securely attach provenance data. Our SDK was integrated into their web platform to display attribution on their resulting case studies. Read more here on their site. 

Photo by Ilvy Njiokiktjien shows Content Credentials. Click through to see more and inspect image details.

We brought together one of the photojournalists, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, VII founder Gary Knight, and our Head of Advocacy & Education, Santiago Lyon, for a panel discussion on December 8 about the project and the issues addressed by content provenance within photojournalism. NYU professor and Director of the Gallatin Photojournalism Lab, Lauren Walsh, moderated a candid look at how technology, provenance, trust, and photojournalism intertwine.  

We’re sharing the full recording of the conversation here, and welcome your thoughts on the topics covered. We’re @ContentAuth on Twitter if you’d like to engage there. And as we continue our work, we welcome you to join us as a member of the Content Authenticity Initiative to participate in future events, keep up with our progress, and to help shape the future of content provenance at scale. 

Introducing a new look for CAI

By Pia Blumenthal

The Content Authenticity Initiative has scaled significantly since its inception in 2019, and with its maturation comes the need for a thoughtful logo redesign that more clearly embodies our mission of bringing attribution and transparency to the digital world.  

Our new logo strives to represent content provenance by tying together layers of information and transparency in a unique and dynamic way.

The layers convey the accumulation of content credentials, exemplifying the content journey from creation to viewing, while the negative space in the middle represents the transparency of attribution data.

The logo can also be creatively repurposed as a framing device, which is a useful tool for a highlighting imagery.

We know the importance of having a strong and recognizable logo is crucial as we continue to grow and build awareness. That’s why we are welcoming our partners and members to download the new Content Authenticity Initiative brand guidelines and logo assets.

There is still a lot of work ahead to address misinformation through digital content provenance. If you’re not yet a member, join us here in our content authenticity work.

A New Chapter for Content Authenticity: Photoshop at Adobe MAX 2021

By Andy Parsons

When we started the CAI two years ago, it was clear the initiative would require broad, open collaboration and concerted efforts on three fronts: standardization, advocacy, and product implementation. At Adobe MAX 2021 we look proudly at strong progress on all three of these. 

In September, we marked a critical milestone for the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) the CAI’s sister organization, focused on writing the technical standard for digital provenance. The C2PA released its draft specification for public feedback a few weeks ago, and now moves quickly forward toward a 1.0 specification release in early 2022. The speed of the standards work is a testament to the urgency felt by all of the contributors to address the problem of misinformation with transparency and trust. 

In advocacy, we’ve seen the steady growth of membership and the CAI now counts over 400 members, collaborating with each other, participating in events, and exchanging ideas. We’re joined by major media organizations like The Washington Post, the Gannett newspaper chain, BBC, Agence France-Presse (AFP), Getty Images, VII Photo, and others. On the technology side, we have participation from Arm, CameraBits, Impressions, Metaphysic.ai, Microsoft, Nikon, Qualcomm, Reface, Smartframe, Synthesia, Truepic, and Wacom — among a host of others. In many cases, CAI members are preparing to implement digital provenance in their products. Soon, Adobe will launch a set of open source projects to make the code powering content authenticity in Creative Cloud available to anyone. (Sign up here to receive updates.) I am immensely proud of the CAI community and its continued expansion. As always, there is more work to do to ensure diverse, global points of view are embraced as broad adoption comes into focus. 

Today the first full product implementation of content authenticity, the idea first contemplated in the 2020 CAI white paper and now reaching maturity in the C2PA, launches in Adobe Photoshop and a suite of complementary products. The release of Content Credentials, available in beta for all Photoshop users, is the first time the CAI technology is being brought to a wide audience. We look forward to feedback from our beta product users so the team can make Content Credentials ever more accessible, streamlined and effective in providing transparency and safeguarding the work of creators everywhere with proper attribution. Here’s how to use Content Credentials in Photoshop on desktop.

To round out the Content Credentials experience, we’re also releasing support on Behance, in Adobe Stock, and via some significant updates to the CAI’s Verify web application, where digital provenance for any supported image can be viewed and explored. Finally, users will be able to bolster the identity attached to their work by linking social media profiles and crypto addresses to their Content Credentials via Photoshop. 

The CAI has always been characterized by bold ambition and a deep sense of purpose. Today’s progress toward a software ecosystem supporting digital provenance opens a new chapter in the journey. With much work to come in the years ahead for the CAI community, we pause for just a moment to celebrate this milestone—the next step toward a future of transparency, trust, understanding of the content we create and share. 

Exploring the Open Standard for Content Provenance: The C2PA Draft Specification and the Path to Adoption

By Chrysanthe Tenentes

Last month, CAI members gathered virtually to dive into the draft specification of the open standard being developed by the C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity). We explained for a general audience how C2PA contributors are working together to create the standard for content provenance, what it means for the CAI community, and how publishers, developers, content producers and others can implement this technology.

The panel featured moderator Santiago Lyon, Laura Ellis, Leonard Rosenthol, and Sam Gregory.

We discussed the work moving toward creating the open standard. The C2PA has grown beyond its founding members and current steering committee to a group of over 30 contributing members. Featured in the event were members from C2PA, CAI, and Project Origin (a BBC & Microsoft-led project working towards newsroom-specific implementation of the C2PA standard). 

Santiago Lyon, the CAI’s Head of Advocacy & Education moderated the panel, featuring Adobe’s Leonard Rosenthol (chair of the C2PA technical working group) Sam Gregory of the human rights group WITNESS  (and a member of the C2PA’s Threats and Harms working group) and Laura Ellis representing the BBC and Project Origin.  

Leonard kicked off with an introduction to the core of the C2PA specification — the C2PA manifest — and its three main elements:  

• Assertions (statements of facts or trust) 

• Credentials (information about who created and produced a piece of media) 

• Claims (combining the assertions with bindings which are then cryptographically signed as the claim signature) 

These three elements are used as signals to help assess how trustworthy an asset is, since trust is not a single value or an individual check box but a collection of signals to help determine if you can trust the asset you’re looking at. 

Leonard Rosenthol explains the C2PA specification.

Laura talked about the value of investing work in the C2PA now and how the work is delivering the realistic possibility we can actually implement the standard as a force for good. 

Sam, from WITNESS, explained that human rights defenders need to make very purposeful decisions about how they share data and their associated identities. In an era when many more people are filming and documenting human rights violations around the world, it is important to build an infrastructure with an open and privacy-protecting, non-exclusionary system. Those are core human rights values: linking global freedom of expression with global privacy. 

Both Leonard and Sam discussed the principles that have anchored the work of the C2PA (read the C2PA guiding principles in full), and the significant work being done by the Threats and Harms task force on how to mitigate misuse without favoring one set of users over another.  

The C2PA continues to welcome and encourage feedback of all kinds of the draft specification here.  

Audience questions sparked robust conversation among the panelists around media literacy, synthetic media, security of the standard, and much more. You can watch the full panel and Q&A in the event recording here.  

If you’re not yet a member of the CAI, please consider joining now to get our updates, news, and invites to our quarterly events. We are a community of over 375 members, focused on promoting and driving the open industry standard for content authenticity and provenance in three main pillars: 

• Education and advocacy around the CAI technology to fight misinformation and empower creators. 

• Collaboration between members to implement these technologies anywhere transparency matters 

• The open development of standards to help build a global ecosystem for provenance. 

Get in touch, follow us on Twitter, and reach out if you’re interested in building things with us or other members (you can view the full list here). 

Welcoming Agence France-Presse (AFP) to the CAI

By Santiago Lyon

When one of the world’s largest and most respected news agencies decided to join the Content Authenticity Initiative, we were naturally very excited! We are delighted to welcome Agence France-Presse (AFP) as a member of the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), joining the more than 375 other major media and technology companies in the fight against misinformation. AFP brings a long history of fact-based and award-winning journalism to the CAI. Additionally, they have led numerous innovative and groundbreaking technology-based photojournalism projects in partnership with Nikon, their main camera provider. (Nikon has also joined the CAI.)

We are very much looking forward to working with AFP on prototyping and implementing CAI technology. This consists of secure, tamper-evident metadata that accompanies images and other file types along their journey from capture, through editing to publication, showing the viewer where an image came from and what might have been done to it along the way.  

Stéphane Arnaud, AFP’s Central Photo editor-in-chief said, “In a world where information is constantly questioned, providing a scientific solution that would make it possible for the public to indisputably see the origin of images is a valuable tool for our profession in the fight against fake news. The CAI’s work and its desire to involve all the players in the image creation process is very encouraging.”

AFP is one of the world’s leading news agencies, providing fast, comprehensive, and verified coverage of the events shaping our world and of the issues affecting our daily lives. Drawing from a large newsgathering network across 151 countries, AFP is also a world leader in monitoring online news content to investigate and disprove false information, focusing on items that can be harmful, impactful, and manipulative.  

With 2,400 staff representing 100 different nationalities, AFP covers the world in six languages with a unique range of quality storytelling spanning video, text, photos, and graphics. Their work underpins the media ecosystem by providing consumer-facing news outlets around the world with timely and accurate coverage. We look forward to collaborating, and, as always, welcome all to join the CAI in our work on digital provenance and attribution.

Nikon Joins the CAI

By Santiago Lyon

We are thrilled to welcome Nikon, one of the world’s leading camera manufacturers, as a member of the Content Authenticity Initiative alongside more than 375 members, including many media and tech companies in the fight against misinformation. 

Nikon brings a long history of innovative and ground-breaking photojournalism projects to the CAI and we are very much looking forward to working with them both on prototyping and implementing the technology we are developing.

Our technology provides secure tamper-evident metadata that accompanies images and other file types along their journey from capture through editing to publication, showing the viewer where an asset came from and any changes made to it along the way. 

A representative from Nikon shared “Nikon is excited to be joining the CAI and the C2PA and we look forward to testing and exploring implementation of the technology.” (The C2PA is the standards body developing the technical specifications underpinning the CAI’s work.)

Nikon is a leading global manufacturer of both professional and consumer cameras, and their equipment was and is used to capture many of the most iconic news and sports images of the last 100 years.

Nikon was also instrumental in pioneering digital photography and remains a forward-facing innovative powerhouse in digital imagery, medical optics, and semiconductor manufacture. Founded in 1917, the company's philosophy centers around trustworthiness and creativity and its values align perfectly with the CAI. 

We look forward to much collaboration ahead, and encourage diverse organizations and individuals to join the Content Authenticity Initiative to share in our work on digital provenance and attribution.

Announcing the C2PA Draft Specification

By Andy Parsons, Director, Content Authenticity Initiative  

When we announced the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) at Adobe MAX two years ago, we knew the undertaking would focus on three critical pillars: real-world implementation of digital provenance, education and advocacy, and the development of an open standard. This last piece, the bedrock for the entire concept, would have to be conducted transparently in public, with broad contributions and scrutiny from diverse stakeholders. 

Today I am proud to announce the publication of the C2PA draft specification, made available for public feedback. This marks another milestone on the journey toward ubiquity of digital provenance across devices, software, and the entire creator and publishing ecosystems. The solution described in the specification will play a key role in combating misinformation and disinformation. It will give consumers the transparency needed to make trust decisions about the content we experience. It will give creators proper attribution for their work. And it will help create a future of responsible use of synthetic media.  

The C2PA is an independent organization created under the Joint Development Foundation to create specifications that set the standard for digital content provenance. The C2PA technical working group, with contributors from steering committee members Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft, Truepic, and Twitter, along with many others, has achieved this milestone through the hard work of dozens of individuals focused on architecture, threat modeling, user experience, with deep understanding of the potential for misuse. The document has been developed with privacy, safety, security, and accessibility in mind. I encourage everyone to read the guiding principles before diving into the document for more detail. 

This announcement celebrates the work of the Coalition, which developed this draft in just eight months, one year following the release of the foundational CAI white paper in 2020. While it is a remarkable achievement, we know much work remains to be done. With broad community participation in spec review, the technical design and underlying trust model will be stronger, easier to implement, and most importantly, adopted by organizations and individuals globally.  

The CAI continues to grow and foster community efforts to create a future of verifiable content provenance. We have seen our cross-industry membership program grow to a group of hundreds, with quarterly events fostering discussion and critical discourse on topics spanning disinformation, deepfakes, photojournalism, and synthetic media. And again, underlying all of this is the open, free technology described in the C2PA specification. Atop this foundation, the CAI will continue to grow and accelerate, connecting members, creating open source resources and building products to move quickly from theory to practice. 

Now, the specifics. You can view the specification here or on GitHub and provide feedback here (anonymously or attributed) or via GitHub issues. Any and all feedback is encouraged! Read more from the Coalition here. We’ll soon send out an invite to CAI members for a special panel event in September focused on deconstructing the specification, ensuring the ideas are accessible to the broad CAI audience. Access this free event when you join the CAI. You’ll also get access to our occasional newsletter which will alert you to news and developments in our work on both the C2PA standard and the global advocacy and prototyping efforts.  

We encourage CAI members to take a look at the draft specification, and to join us at our upcoming event to discuss the work and help shape its future. A far-reaching, important specification such as this can only achieve success with the widest possible participation. Look for more from the growing CAI community, from which additional implementations will emerge in the coming months. As always, reach out to us to collaborate.