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.
This story is from the November 2021 edition of Fast Company.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the November 2021 edition of Fast Company.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies - CAMPUS
FOR CREATING A NATIONAL ONLINE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies - SOL DE JANEIRO
FOR DROPPING NEW FRAGRANCES AT AN INTOXICATING PACE
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies - VANTA
FOR OFFER ING STARTUPS TOOLS TO TRUST BUT VERIFYIN THE AGE OF AI
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies - PERPLEXITY
FOR LOCATING THE ANSWER TO THE PERENNIAL PROBLEMS OF WEB SEARCH
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies - THE POWER BROKER
ITS CHIPS SPARKED THE AI REVOLUTION. NOW NVIDIA IS PUTTING THE TECH TO WORK ACROSS INDUSTRIES.
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies - NATIONAL WOMEN'S SOCCER LEAGUE
FOR RESETTING THE VALUE OF WOMEN'S SPORTS
08 FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
WITH A NEW CEO BEHIND THE COUNTER. TACO BELL IS FOLLOWING A FRESH STRATEGY FOR GLOBAL CULTURAL DOMINATION. ONE TACO TUESDAY AT A TIME.
Reimagining the ways we work and meet
As business leaders rethink their real estate footprint, they're embracing smaller, high-quality, amenity-rich spaces that are more focused on human connection.” In other words, Convene.
10 Trend
From the Most Innovative Companies | Plus 606 Honorees From Advertising to Video
The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies
"The 1920s, water went into a generator, and DC Power came out. Now electrons go into a generator, and intelligence comes out."