Meet the Orgs Dedicated to Tracking Your AI ‘Content Credentials’
The folks at Content Authenticity Initiative and Pixelstream shared this user-focused view of the technology in use.
When it comes to tracking and describing the origin and the edits made to photos, illustrations and the like, we’ve got several organizations working to ensure it’s done well.
The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) was founded February 2021 by Microsoft and Adobe and includes Arm, BBC, Intel, and Truepic. Their purpose is to “address the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history (or provenance) of media content.”
Then, basing their work on the specifications set by the C2PA, the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative is “a group working together to fight misinformation and add a layer of verifiable trust to all types of digital content, starting with photo and video, through provenance and attribution solutions.” They have created a secure system to ensure all the layers of data stay with the image, from the original creator, which type and who has edited the image, and if any AI was used in the process.
They promote transparency around the use of AI with tools that “make it easy to indicate when AI was used to generate or alter content. Information about specific AI models used and more can be conveyed to viewers, helping to prevent misinformation and increase transparency around the use of AI.”
While there are many applications and API tools in the works and currently working to protect the integrity of your image creations, few are as ubiquitous as those from Adobe. Photoshop is one of the leaders in that space with their Content Credentials function built right in (though Beta as of this writing).
And here is more background from the C2PA website on what is meant by provenance and why this is all so important:
What is content provenance?
Provenance refers to the basic, trustworthy facts about the origins of a piece of digital content (image, video, audio recording, document). It may include information such as who created it and how, when, and where it was created or edited. The content author always has control over whether provenance data is included as well as what data is included. Included information can be removed in later edits. Provenance also allows for anonymous content.
What makes content provenance a better solution to address misinformation?
Detecting whether or not digital content is fake is currently impossible at internet scale and speed because manipulation software is increasingly more sophisticated, metadata can easily be manipulated and provides no proof of its origins.
