At one point in our doom scrolling, we’ve all asked the same question: Is this Photoshopped or nah? We’ve wondered about it while staring at someone’s IG feed or glaring at a post from our government (hey, we actually wrote about that, too!). So, here’s a solution from the Adobe gods: a feature that’ll finally detect edited photos.
With deepfakes and sketchy shots everywhere comes Adobe’s new attribution tool. As part of its open source Content Authenticity Initiative, Adobe’s prototype feature will let creators add their name, location and edit history to photos—among other settings. This creates a “tamper evident” paper trail for photos, which will make it easier to identify the real deal versus deepfakes, even looking further into how they were created.
As an example, Adobe used a photo of a man superimposed over a stock photo of Bohol’s Chocolate Hills. With the attribution tool, Photoshop automatically tagged the stock photo’s original photographer, the person who created the edit and all the tools they used to make the fake selfie. Still, there’s a downside: Adobe notes that the feature can be turned off, so it’ll only work if the original creators want it to.
The beta test only works for images, with plans for video expansion. For the feature to work in the long run, publishers and creators would need to adopt it. The attribution tool will soon be available to certain customers of Photoshop and Behance in the coming weeks—so at least we can start somewhere.
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Screenshot from Adobe