Photoshop developer Adobe, Microsoft, Intel and Twitter are part of the effort, as are Japanese camera makers Sony and Nikon, the BBC and SoftBank Group-owned chip designer Arm.
Known as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), the group is developing an open standard intended to work with any software, showing evidence of tampering.
“You’ll see many of these (features) emerging in the market this year,” Andy Parsons, senior director for Adobe’s content authenticity initiative, told Nikkei. “And I think in the next two years, we will see many sorts of end-to-end ecosystems.”
The need for ways to ensure photos and videos can be trusted has grown with the rise of deepfakes, an advanced form of manipulation done using artificial intelligence. A recent fake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on troops to surrender circulated on social media before being debunked.
The coalition will reach out to more social media platforms, such as YouTube, to bring as many as possible under the standard.
“A key to the success of digital provenance, in general, is broad adoption across all of these platforms so that users can be assured that when media is uploaded with content authenticity, it is maintained throughout the entire chain of sharing (and) publishing creation, back and forth,” Parsons said.
Under the technical standard, the coalition is developing data regarding the origin — or “provenance” — of an image or video is “cryptographically bound” to the content in a way that shows when someone has tampered with the information. Any change can be detected.
Older methods of spotting fakes required painstaking comparisons with authentic images. Though editing histories and other metadata can be saved, tampering is possible using special software in ways that sometimes are impossible to detect.
Facebook parent Meta and other social media companies have sought to remove fakes from their platforms but have struggled to keep ahead of those who manipulate content.
Adobe has been a leader in the field of content authentication. The American company has adopted technology in its own editing software that tracks provenance data while protecting users’ privacy.
“We’ve only been at this for about two and a half years,” Parsons said. “So it’s relatively early in the life cycle. And we have a long way further to go to make sure that all platforms can adopt this.”