Publications

To Authenticity, and Beyond! Building Safe and Fair Generative AI upon the Three Pillars of Provenance

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (IEEE CG&A)

Publication date: June 30, 2024

Andy Parsons, John Collomosse

Provenance facts, such as who made an image and how, can provide valuable context for users to make trust decisions about visual content. Against a backdrop of inexorable progress in Generative AI for Computer Graphics, over two billion people will vote in public elections this year. Emerging standards and provenance enhancing tools promise to play an important role in fighting fake news and the spread of misinformation. In this paper we contrast three provenance enhancing technologies: metadata, fingerprinting and watermarking, and discuss how we can build upon the complementary strengths of these three pillars to provide robust trust signals to support stories told by real and generative images. Beyond authenticity, we describe how provenance can also underpin new models for value creation in the age of Generative AI. In doing so we address other risks arising with generative AI such as ensuring training consent, and the proper attribution of credit to creatives who contribute their work to train generative models. We show that provenance may be combined with distributed ledger technology (DLT) to develop novel solutions for recognizing and rewarding creative endeavour in the age of generative AI.

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