Tech Giants Adopt New cr Symbol to Label AI-Generated Images

Microsoft, Adobe, and others pledged to add metadata to AI images to label them as machine-made using a new "cr" symbol. This would allow compatible apps to flag AI content.

The symbol was created by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). It provides cryptographically signed metadata about an image's source and edits.

For the system to work, apps need to support reading the metadata and displaying the "cr" icon. Without compatible apps, AI images won't be labeled.

Adobe has a cloud system to try recovering stripped metadata by matching images, but awareness and adoption of the icon will be challenging.

While a step toward authenticating AI content, the icon requires broad adoption to be an effective catch-all solution. So far, support is limited.