Emerging Standards in Disclosure
In the early days of AI there were a number of proposed industry standards for provenance. Today, most media/tech companies are coalescing around the standard created by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) , a joint project led by 11 leading media/tech companies backed by more than 150 other corporate stakeholders. Those C2PA leaders include Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, Meta, Intel, BBC, Sony, and Truepic—some of the world’s largest AI developers and image distributors.
C2PA addresses the prevalence of misleading information online through the development of technical standards for certifying the source and history of media content.
C2PA is a Joint Development Foundation project, formed through an alliance between Adobe, Arm, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic. The effort, which came together in 2022, unified the early work of the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) which focused on systems to provide context and history for digital media, and Project Origin, a Microsoft- and BBC-led initiative that tackled disinformation in the digital news ecosystem.
C2PA Specification can be found here. That site offers a “Downloads” menu where PDF versions of each of the documents can be obtained.
content credentials: c2pa in action
Adobe and a handful of other companies are using the C2PA protocols within Content Credentials, a provenance tool that embeds tamper-resistant metadata in digital assets.
Content Credentials attach additional information to content at export or download, stored in a dedicated, tamper-evident set of metadata called a Content Credential. The Content Credential accompanies its corresponding content wherever it goes, enabling individuals to enjoy content and context together.
Over time, if a piece of content undergoes different stages of editing or processing, it can also accumulate multiple Content Credentials. This creates a version history that people can explore and use to make more informed trust decisions about that content.
The Content Credential pin appears as a small “cr” in the corner of an image, like this:
A Content Credential pin appears in the upper right corner of this Adobe-created AI image.
When selected, the pin opens a file of information about the history of the image, including any use of AI in its creation or revision, like this:
