For years, websites included information about what kind of crawlers were not allowed on their site with a robots.txt file. Adobe, which wants to create a similar standard for images, has added a tool to content credentials with an intention to give them a bit more control over what is used to train AI models.
Convincing AI companies to actually adhere to Adobe’s standard may be the primary challenge, especially considering AI crawlers are already known to ignore requests in the robots.txt. file.
Content credentials are information in a media file’s metadata used to identify authenticity and ownership. It’s a type of implementation of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a standard for content authenticity.
Adobe is releasing a new web tool to let creators attach content credentials to all image files, even if they are not created or edited through its own tools. Plus, it’s providing a way for creators to signal to AI companies that they shouldn’t use that particular image for training models.
Adobe’s new web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity App, lets users attach their credentials, including name and social media accounts, to a file. Users can attach these credentials to up to 50 JPG or PNG files in one go.
Adobe is partnering with LinkedIn to make use of the Microsoft-owned platform’s verification program. This helps in proving that the person attaching the credentials to an image has a verified name on LinkedIn.
Users can also attach their Instagram or X profiles to an image, but there is no integration with verification of these platforms.
The same app lets users tick a box to signal their images shouldn’t be used for model training.
While the field is present on the app and subsequently on an image’s metadata with content credentials, Adobe hasn’t signed an agreement with any of the AI model creators to adopt this standard. The company said it’s in talks with all top AI model developers to convince them to use and respect this standard.
Adobe’s intentions are in the right place to provide an indicator to model makers for AI training data, but the initiative won’t work if the companies don’t agree to the standard or don’t respect the indicator.
Last year, Meta’s implementation of labels to auto-tag images on its platform caused an uproar as photographers complained about their edited images being tagged with a “Made with AI” label. Meta later changed the label to “AI info.”
This development highlighted that while Meta and Adobe both are part of the C2PA steering committee, there is a difference in implementation across different platforms.
