What is Content provenance?
Content provenance is the documented history of a piece of content: who created it, how, when, and what changed along the way. It answers authenticity questions with records instead of after-the-fact analysis.
Provenance reframes the authenticity problem. Instead of inspecting a finished artifact and guessing at its origin, provenance systems capture evidence at creation time and bind it to the content — the same shift the art world made from connoisseurship to documented chain of custody.
For images and video, provenance standards like C2PA attach signed metadata at capture time. For writing, the equivalent evidence is the composition process itself: the typing, pausing, and revising that no generator performs.
Regulation is moving toward provenance. The EU AI Act's transparency provisions and platform labeling policies all assume content will carry verifiable origin information.
C2PA / Content Credentials
C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) is an open standard for cryptographically signed metadata that records how an image, video, or audio file was created and edited. Content Credentials is its consumer-facing label.
Proof of authorship
Proof of authorship is evidence that a specific party created a work. For writing in the AI era, the strongest proof documents the composition process itself, since finished text no longer carries reliable origin signals.