How Adobe And Others Defend Credibility Amidst Misinformation

San Jose, California, United States - August 12, 2018: Adobe skyscraper top of Adobe HQ. Adobe is ... [+] leader software developer for graphic, photography, video making and a main microstock agency

Leadership has always been about credibility.

Whether it's your employees, investors, or clients, trust in you and your vision is what draws them to follow you on your path. Being a credible voice and an authority that others find worthy of trusting is a skill most leaders spend decades cultivating.

However, drawing clear lines between reality and fabrication is becoming more difficult by the day, making credibility more important than ever.

Leaders are no longer simply tasked with managing their teams and delivering results; they must now also safeguard the integrity of their organizations in an environment where truth is increasingly questioned.

Accomplishing this begins with understanding that credibility operates on three distinct levels: the product, the personality and the organization.

The best way to build trust at all levels is to have credibility built in instead of introducing it after-market, which is something Adobe and the Content Authenticity Initiative have much to teach as about.

If the internet were to have one rule, it would be to never trust a piece of media that you haven’t manipulated yourself.

We’ve grown so accustomed to filters and deepfakes that AI covers is now a legitimate subgenre on Spotify. Few, if any, throw fits about photoshopped ads or images for the sake of the manipulation of pixels themselves. Rather, we get upset if someone photoshops an image poorly or in order to obfuscate or hide something that has meaning well beyond the image alone. Authenticity is more important than ever, but as a concept it has outgrown the concept of unedited or raw a long time since.

Given how far we’ve gone, should we even be talking about credibility anymore?

Adobe, the very firm that endowed us with the term “photoshopping” certainly believes so.

"We make Photoshop, which some see synonymous with making things up, which is why we believe that it's more important than ever to discern what’s authentic and what isn’t, " Andy Parsons, Senior Director at Adobe, noted.

To tackle this challenge, Adobe, NYT and Twitter launched the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), a coalition of over 3,700 organizations that now include TikTok, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

What drove Adobe to invest in creating this initiative is the need for a signal of credibility that works at scale, Andy noted before explaining that “we realized that we needed something that works at the scale of social media as well as an individual image, which meant we had to think big and apply a wide range of methods.”

The CAI is building a framework that enables consumers to verify the authenticity of the content they see online by embedding Content Credentials—metadata that shows the origin and edits made to digital content—right into the images themselves.

Ideally, this system allows consumers to make informed judgments about what’s real and what isn’t, providing a much-needed layer of trust in an era of misinformation that is built into the products we consume.

As Andy highlights, "This isn’t a truth detector, it’s a contextual trust signal—like the nutritional labels on food. You have the right to know what this content is made of, but we can’t tell you whether what you are seeing is true, what it means or what to think of it."

There’s a potent lesson to be learned from Adobe’s approach: credibility must be embedded into the very fabric of your organization and offerings. Moreover, you can’t force the perception of credibility upon anyone. Instead, you have to empower them to make these decisions themselves.

Credibility may have once been centered around personal leadership and decision-making, but today it extends to the products we create and the ecosystems we build, encompassing the entirety of our organizations.

This is why leaders must focus on embedding trust at every level if they wish to effectively safeguard credibility. One way to accomplish this is to level up your blue team with the necessary technologies that match the threat we’re up against.

Oliver Tavakoli, Chief Technology Officer at Vectra AI, echoes this sentiment from the cybersecurity and identity authenticity perspective. Tavakoli points out that what we’re seeing with deepfakes, misinformation and the technologies we invent to combat them leads to a constant arms race that keeps leaders on their toes.

As a growing number of attackers are using generative AI to amplify their powers, it becomes essential for organizations to integrate defensive AI systems to stay ahead of threats. “It’s not tech versus humans, but rather tech used by attackers to amplify their ability of targeting the weaknesses of humans” Oliver stated, emphasizing the need for leadership to understand how to leverage technology to counter this increased threat.

Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity which delivers AI-powered security and data management services, shared similar sentiments about the need for deploying technologies that defend credibility.

“In the past, clients would have just asked about storing data. Now it’s a question of both security and authenticity. Where you store data, how it’s accessed, and the underlying credibility of the systems you use—it’s all about getting credible results others can trust, ” Sanjay reflected.

Rahul Sood, Chief Product Officer at Pindrop, shares similar views on trust from the perspective of voice-based interactions which are under a growing threat of deepfaking.

“When we started, we were seeing one deepfake a month; now it’s once a day,” Rahul said.

“Safeguarding the credibility of our clients’ systems, such as those that make the banking sector work, is critical not just to their organizations but to our entire economy, which is why we urge leaders take action today, not tomorrow,” Rahul added before noting that in the arms race between red team and blue, it’s the attackers who often hold the first-move advantage.

The arms race will take place whether you participate in it or not, and companies that fail to act on all levels of credibility are likely to face a grim future, particularly with advances in AI making hacking at scale as easy as prompting a poem on ChatGPT.

The future belongs to leaders who understand that trust isn’t just earned through good decisions but through building systems and organizations that actively protect credibility.

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