Stephen Downes

Provided by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), Content Credentials are "an open technical standard for publishers, creators and consumers to establish the origin and edits of digital content. provide deeper transparency into how content was created or edited." Most of the public-facing content is a bit vague on how they work, but you can get a full description of the specifications here. A Credential is composed of assertions ("statements that cover areas such as asset creation, edit actions, capture device details") wrapped into a claim, which is signed and packaged into a Manifest, which is embedded in the content itself. A C2PA validator "helps users to establish the trustworthiness of the asset by first validating the digital signature and its associated credential." Content credentials can be accessed by clicking on a Content Credential logo (which looks a lot like an Adobe product logo, unfortunately). There are implementations by companies such as Adobe, Nikon, Sony, Canon, and others. Google just adopted it for the Pixel, and there are rumblings Apple may also adopt it. Most important, there are implementations underway in generative AI providers such as Microsoft and OpenAI though implementation has been inconsistent. See also the Phoblographer, Bernard Grenat,