Cloudinary unveils new AI tools to ensure image authenticity at scale

Cloudinary has introduced a suite of new capabilities aimed at enabling brands to optimise AI-edited images for production use, ensure content provenance, and scale visual assets to drive revenue.

Ensuring image authenticity

The company's latest offerings enable brands to handle the challenges associated with integrating generative AI (GenAI) into image management workflows. With the support of C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity), every image now includes a verifiable record of its transformations. This is intended to guarantee both authenticity and trust alongside performance, which has become a growing concern for businesses using AI-generated content.

The C2PA support allows brands to certify authenticity, track edits, and combat misinformation across all digital images, including those created or modified using AI. Brands now have the ability to generate C2PA data on the fly during edits, preserve provenance across image transformations, and control what information is visible to end users.

Automating AI image editing

Cloudinary's Refiners touch-up tools now allow AI-edited images to be more seamlessly integrated into production workflows. These tools automate activities such as background removal, background replacement, outpainting, and guiding cropping focus areas. With these features, developers can process hundreds of images at once, while content and creative teams retain the ability to review and edit outputs before they go live, ensuring adherence to brand standards.

The difficulty of producing consistent, high-quality AI-modified images at scale is substantial, particularly as collaboration between developers and creative teams becomes increasingly necessary. With Refiners closing the gap between AI-generation and production, brands can more effectively deliver brand-quality outputs without "AI slop", a term for undesirable artefacts and inconsistencies that can occur in AI-generated media.

Streamlined workflows for teams

The new Editor experience is designed to simplify the prototyping and experimentation with complex transformation chains for both developers and creative professionals. Developers are provided with real-time code updates, and non-developers can leverage intuitive menus to compare transformation results during campaign planning. This collaborative environment is intended to accelerate iteration and campaign preparation, reducing time to market.

Cloudinary's Auto Enhance feature analyses images and automatically applies a combination of transformations-such as upscaling, restoration, and sharpening-to deliver consistently high-quality results. The feature addresses the need for both beginners and experienced professionals to deliver optimal visual assets without spending excessive time on manual adjustments.

Additionally, the underlying GenAI Model has been updated with broad domain-specific datasets to better support use cases such as background replacement, commonly required for eCommerce product imagery. The improved model now defaults to using simpler, plainer backgrounds, thereby making the production workflow more efficient.

Scaling to meet business demands

Cloudinary states that these capabilities are intended to help brands meet the increasing demand for authentic and high-quality visual assets at business speed and at a global scale. The company notes that authenticating AI-generated and edited visuals is now a major part of safeguarding brand integrity and maintaining consumer trust, especially as generative technologies become more widespread in marketing and commerce.

"Our mission has always been to make visual media work harder for brands by ensuring authenticity, consistency, quality and performance. With these new capabilities, we're reinforcing Cloudinary's leadership in image management while helping brands use GenAI more easily in production. We're focused on making GenAI a practical part of the workflow, helping teams collaboratively create, refine, and deliver trusted, brand-ready visuals at the speed of business," said Tal Lev-Ami, Co-founder and CTO of Cloudinary. 

The new Cloudinary image management features are now available to all account types, including the free plan, providing immediate access for businesses and developers aiming to improve or expand their visual content pipelines.