War Photog Supports ‘Digital Nutrition Label’ to Authenticate Images and Dissuade Fakes

Viewers rely on the honesty of a photographer and credibly of content distributors, like the BBC and The New York Times, to accurately capture and convey images.

Technologies such as artificial Intelligence introduce the inevitability of changes or manipulation that is invisible to the naked eye.

When it comes to images today, consumers are no longer quite sure where initial reality begins and ends, and what are we to believe.

Advocate and Educate

Enter Santiago Lyon, an award-winning war photographer and Head of Advocacy and Education for the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), an Adobe-lead group of 4,000 members founded in 2019 that endeavors to establish provenance for all images through standardized open-source system.

It allows creators or distributors to embed files in every image that can not be removed, and makes transparency about origination and changes readily available.

CAI members include Microsoft, BBA, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and thousands of businesses of all sizes and individuals. Membership is free.

CAI endeavors to establish provenance for images through a standardized open-source system available to all

On the current episode of Understanding IP Matters, which reached 10,000 downloads, last week, Lyon discusses the importance of provenance in copyrighted content as it exists in an AI-driven world, and how an open-source standard, C2PA, is facilitating that.

“It’s comparable to a digital nutrition label,” says Lyon, who was a journalism fellow at Columbia and Harvard, and served as an editor at the Associated Press.

“CAI is focused on accelerating implementation of C2PA as an underlying technical standard.”

Tracking Provenance

“C2PA is focused on understanding the provenance or the origins of digital content,” he says, “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.”