Published 17 April 2024 at 15.23
Media. Changing the color tones in pixelated images of, for example, criminals will be more difficult for the media to do surreptitiously in the future. This is because the leading camera manufacturers are currently introducing a technique for checking the authenticity of photographs afterwards.
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It is the software giant Adobe that led the development of the Content Authenticity Initiative ( CAI), where professional cameras will be equipped with a signature function that reveals how an image has changed before it reaches, for example, a newspaper reader.
All changes will be stored in a publicly available and signed log file – a so-called blockchain – which popular image processing programs such as Lightroom and Photoshop will write their changes to.
Anyone who suspects that an image that appears in, for example, Aftonbladet has been subjected to manipulation will therefore be able to search for the image on a website and see what changes have been made. According to the specification, the changes must be described in understandable language, for example “Pixelated parts of the image” and “Made the pixels brighter” and so on.
According to Adobe, the new technology is a way to maintain trust in photographic images in a time when AI technology has made manipulations that were previously very time-consuming relatively easy to achieve, raising the demands on transparency.
The dominant companies in professional newsphotography, Canon, Sony and Nikon, are affiliated with the initiative and also the Reuters news agency, according to a press release.