WTF are content credentials?

This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →

For all you know, this sentence could be written by artificial intelligence technology. The same can increasingly be said of any image, video or even audio file uploaded online.

In an attempt to help people distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content, Adobe and the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity have proposed a system for disclosing how a piece of content was created.

Called content credentials, the system would embed information, such as who created a piece of content and whether it was made using generative AI tools, in the content’s metadata and append a watermark indicating such information was attached. Beyond disclosing AI’s involvement, the content credential system can also be used to credit artists for their work and verify its authenticity, as covered in the video skit below.

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