Almost a decade ago I was sitting in a cafe in Berlin when a flyer for a local music festival caught my eye. It wasn’t the lineup that had drawn my attention, but rather a picture of a bell tent decorated in fairy lights selling people on the pricey glamping offering.
I knew immediately that it was false advertising. How? Because the picture was mine.
I’d taken the photo at a campsite not in Germany, not at a festival, but at a small family-owned campsite on the northeast coast of England. I’d published the photo on a travel blog I ran at the time, and it made its way to Pinterest and from there to the cafe in Berlin.
In the here and now, any creative work we put online is more at risk than ever – not just from straightforward theft, but from being used to train the AI that increasingly dominates our world. This is why Adobe, which is used by creatives who work across many artistic mediums, has invested so heavily in providing people with ways to retain ownership of their work even when it’s been published online for the whole world to access.
At the Adobe Max Creativity Conference in London on Thursday, the company announced that it had released its Content Authenticity app, first announced back in October, for anyone to download. The app allows you to attach a digital watermark to your creative work that links it to your name and public profiles, and, crucially, allows you to say if you don’t want your content to be used to train AI.
A free tool to protect your work
It’s clear that as much as Adobe wants to protect the work of its customers, it’s thinking much bigger than that. Adobe’s content authenticity standards are already attached to work made using its platforms, so this standalone app isn’t about boosting its own business. Crucially, and unlike almost all other Adobe tools, you don’t need a Creative Cloud account to download the app, and it’s free.
“It truly is for anybody,” said Andy Parsons, senior director of Adobe’s content authenticity initiative, in an interview. “Everyone should have that sort of last-mile ability to have attribution for their work.”
Parsons showed me how, via a browser plug-in, you can see the content authenticity signature of photos posted to Instagram. Previously this was something that only professionals might be able to do to their images, but now the option is open for anyone to take advantage of. And I firmly believe they should. I know I will.
An Adobe app can help anyone create and use content credentials, as seen on Instagram.
I don’t consider myself to be a content creator, but I do publish photos I take on CNET and I post regularly on my public Instagram. I’ve already had my photos taken and used for commercial purposes – if it can happen to me, it could happen to anyone. The idea that my photos or videos would be used to train AI is something I like even less.
Talking with creators at Adobe Max, I found genuine excitement about the Content Authenticity app.
“Discoverability is how people like me get work,” said photographer, writer and content creator Jon Devo. He’s more comfortable sharing his best work on the internet when he’s able to ensure it can be linked back to him even if it’s picked up by aggregator accounts.
“There’s stuff that I’ve created over the last five, six years that I was hesitant to share, because I was like, if this picks up, and if people like it and people share it, it’s never going to be connected back to me,” he said. “I already have a bank of content that I can start sharing once these things become ubiquitous – so that’s what, for me, makes it game-changing.”
Devo feels encouraged by the fact Adobe had partnered with other major tech companies to create its content credential standards. The open standard is key for widespread adoption, says Parsons. Increasingly it’s being baked directly into our tech, such as the Samsung Galaxy S25. But for the rest of us who don’t have content credentials ready to go on our phones, there’s the new app.
Even though to me, and to content creators like Devo, the stakes feel higher than ever, not everyone will be convinced they need the protection offered by content attribution. I asked Parsons what he would say to persuade someone to download the app.
“The world is changing very quickly,” he said. “It’s incontrovertibly true that you’re going to want to have certain expressions attached to your content.”
“Instead of saying, why do it? My question back would be, why not?”
