Ex-War Photographer Helps Remove the Source Mystery from Images and Content

Transparency of source or “provenance” of digital content like images is becoming essential for credibility and, to some extent, the future of artificial intelligence (AI). On the current episode of Understanding IP Matters (UIPM), Santiago Lyon discusses the importance of provenance in copyrighted content as it exists in an AI-driven world.

As the role of AI has grown in the handling, manipulation and distribution of digital media, Lyon talks about how consumers will know when digital media they view is generated wholly by human creators, wholly by AI, or if there is a blend of creation.

Lyon is the Head of Advocacy and Education for the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), an Adobe-led coalition that fights content disinformation and abuse. Lyon began at Adobe in 2017 as their first Director of editorial content. From 1984 to 2016, Lyon’s career cut a broad swath, from beginning as a war photographer to being the Vice President and Director of Photography of the Associated Press and stints as an educator at Harvard and Columbia.

In this episode, Lyon and host Bruce Berman discuss:

• Why you should join the CAI, and that Lyon wants “to make this community as broad and diverse and inclusive as possible.” And why “that requires membership from all over the world, from all different walks of life and roles and positions.” He believes CAI needs to be viewed as a way of injecting more transparency into the world we live in.
• Lyon’s work with the CAI to accelerate implementation of a provenance standard called the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity (C2PA) standard in two different ways: Building “open-source tools to make it easier to implement the standard on the one hand. And on the other hand, we’re focused on growing the community to share best practices grow awareness, etc.”
• Since AI has fueled interest in transparency and governance, companies like Adobe, and their product Firefly have attached what is called content credentials, which is the provenance information to files that are generated by Firefly when you download them. “If you create something with Firefly based on a text prompt and generate an image, say Lyon, “when you go to download that image, it gets a content credential automatically attached to it.”
• The knowledge of where digital media has come from, and in what ways it has been altered, has always been important to know, but AI is radically increasing the volume of digital media and the ability to modify it.
• To be better consumers, we need to understand what we are viewing and hearing. Lyon agrees, stating that “this notion of provenance will become foundational for just about everything digital. Because of the lack of that information currently and the role that AI is playing in all of this.”

Key Responses

The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) has grown rapidly since its introduction in 2019 by Adobe, New York Times and Twitter. What’s the purpose of the CAI?

Santiago Lyon: The CAI “has really taken off from those three initial members in late 2019. We’re now approaching 4000 members around the world.”  The CAI is “focused on accelerating implementation of an underlying technical standard”, the standard “was created by an organization that Adobe helped to found together with Microsoft called the C2PA or the Coalition for Content Providence and Authenticity.”  The C2PA technical standard “is really focused on understanding the provenance or the origins of digital files, where they come from, how they might’ve been manipulated, and then sharing some or all of that information with the consumer or the viewer of those files. So everything is predicated on the C2PA standard.”

What would the consumer see with the C2PA standard; what would it contain?

Santiago Lyon:  You can think of it as a “digital nutrition label”.  “In the same way you go to the supermarket and every food product that you buy, there has an easily accessible nutrition label on it that tells you what’s in that food product and allows you to make an informed decision about whether that’s something you want to put in your body. This is very similar.  For digital content, this notion that everybody can see very quickly where something came from, how it might’ve been manipulated, and then based on that information, To decide whether or not they want to trust it or to what degree?”

Going forward, how are transactions of digital media going to be affected? Will ownership be tracked or recorded?

Santiago Lyon: “I think what we’re probably going to see over the next few years is the notion of provenance as a service in the same way you have software as a service for other stuff, whether it’s cloud storage or things like that.  So this notion that if I’m a corporation and I’m interested in implementing provenance technology, maybe I contract with an existent vendor.

“I think as provenance grows in importance and value, there’s going to be a desire to implement it, and that desire is likely going to create opportunities for people to help others do that.”

More Highlights

Lyon says experimentation and knowledge about AI tools should be encouraged and is “really surprised by the number of people who I would expect to have [experimented] and who haven’t because either they’re fearful or they don’t know how to get started.”

Listen to the entire episode to learn:

• The need for a wide range of people to embrace AI tools, or at least understand them.
• That everyone is welcome to join the CAI
• That CAI will be an impactful organization “by including education and policy in the conversation.” Lyon believes it elevates the conversation to the one of societal importance that it deserves. It also creates more entry points for people to get engaged.
• That provenance is a good thing.
• “What we’re offering here through content credentials, and the work of the C2PA is this layer of transparency so that you can look at something and say, Oh, look, that started off as a real photo and was altered in AI or vice versa. So, it offers, I think some degree of hope and optimism in a world that some people find a little bit overwhelming.”