Provenance in a Generative World

The Rise of Fakes

The rising tide of AI-generated content poses an existential threat to the integrity and authenticity of digital information. As AI becomes more sophisticated and accessible, the ability to mass-produce convincing yet entirely artificial content has the potential to erode public trust and disrupt industries reliant on genuine content creation.

Establishing provenance - the record or documentation of where something originated and how it has been handled or modified over time - is crucial to combating this threat.

Organizations

Organizations like the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) are at the vanguard of combating this crisis.

• Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA): C2PA is a joint project involving media and tech companies working on open standards to certify the source and history of online content.

• Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI): The CAI is an Adobe-led project developing technology to provide provenance for digital media.

Google, Meta, OpenAI have all pledged to implemented C2PA. Yet, in their most recent creator credentials call, the C2PA core contributors confirmed that detecting generated content is a losing battle. Essentially, the cutting edge thinkers in the space have accepted that there is no good way to determine an image's provenance from the image data alone. Instead, there is a consensus that the war will be won by adding provenance data in a secure way.

This is where Auto ID comes into play…