Seeing and Believing

Manipulated images are rampant, and problematic. Adobe, the photo-editing forebearer, has a solution.

- By Katharine Schwab

In the photo, Beyoncé looks beatific, with a closed-lip Mona Lisa smile. But it’s easy enough to give her a toothy grin. Just dial up her “Happiness” to the maximum level using Adobe Photoshop’s Smart Portrait tool, and her face gets a Cheshire cat–like smile, white teeth appearing out of thin air.

Smart Portrait, released in beta last year, is one of Adobe’s AI-powered “neural filters,” which can age faces, change expressions, and alter the background of a photo so it appears to have been taken at a different time of year. These tools may seem innocuous, but they provide increasingly powerful ways to manipulate photos in an era when altered media spreads across social media in dangerous ways.

For Adobe, this is both a big business and a big liability. The company, which brought in $12.9 billion in 2020, with more than $7.8 billion tied to Creative Cloud products aimed at helping creators design, edit, and customize images and video, is committed to offering users the latest technologies, which keeps Adobe ahead of its competition. This includes both neural filters and older AI-powered tools, such as 2015’s Face-Aware Liquify, which lets people manually alter someone’s face.

Adobe executives are aware of the perils of such products at a time when fake information spreads on Twitter six times faster than the truth. But instead of limiting the development of its tools, Adobe is focused on the other side of the equation: giving people the ability to verify where images were taken and see how they’ve been edited. Step one: a new Photoshop tool and website that offer unprecedented transparency into how images are manipulated.