The “granddaddy of all that can be made visually astonishing fake” – i.e., the Photoshop developer and owner Adobe – has officially joined the battle against, no less, than images that convey “misinformation.”
But wouldn’t that be pretty much every image, ever edited with Photoshop – that sadly omnipresent proprietary photo editor? Yet things are not exactly, and are they ever, as clear-cut and reasonable as they may seem at first.
So – did Adobe – of all “people” have to jump on this particular bandwagon? Sure it did, because it’s not of the people – it’s of corporations.
Not one, not two, but three+ dinosaurs are coming together – there’s Adobe, there’s the BBC, and there’s Microsoft.
As if they were really ever, in the big picture of corporate and closed source things, working apart, they are now said to be working to combat “misinformation.”
There is an icon that will be planted on photos as, essentially, some sort of implicitly “trusted” mark of authenticity. Not actual authenticity, though – the photo could be real, or “AI”-generated. The “CR” – “credentials” red icon is just there to tell you if after it was made, whichever way it was made, the image happened to be altered. For any reason.
Now there’s a funny way to fight “misinformation.”
But a further look at who else is on board reveals the real purpose of all this: Nikon and Leica camera makers, Publicis Groupe (representing Nestlé, Walmart, and P&G), and there’s 2,000 more – in short, a mass-scale corporate effort to even further cement any loopholes that might see a single cent flow out of their outrageous revenues.
And why not add a dash of Orwell-inspired hubris to all this. Adobe’s senior exec Andy Parsons actually mentioned the Creative Commons of all things – while explaining the need for the “icon of transparency” (newspeak must be proud of that one).
“We think and hope it’ll become as ubiquitous as the copyright symbol, or the Creative Commons symbol,” said Parsons. What a dry sense of humor.
For all Microsoft lovers out there wondering how their favorite company is contributing to this – the new icon will soon show up in its Bing search results – but for “AI generated images.” Or so Microsoft says.
