White Paper

Communications and Content Provenance Authentication

Simon Erskine Locke, M. Danish Bilal

A new Tauth Labs white paper details communications use cases for content provenance authentication.

Communications and Content Provenance Authentication

Summary

Communicators have always had to be concerned about protecting their companies from the impact of fake content, misinformation and disinformation. In a world in which these issues were the exception rather than the rule, media monitoring and social media listening tools were mostly sufficient to identify and address occasional efforts to mislead, manipulate markets and damage reputations.

We are not in Kansas anymore. Generative AI is changing the communications and cybersecurity landscape. The ubiquity of access to sophisticated LLM-based tools that can create, manipulate and post AI-generated content in seconds, and at scale, has reset the risk table. At the same time this new generation of tools provides communicators with ways to create content – whether documents, images, audio or video – more quickly and efficiently, they are also driving a surge in imposter content, deepfakes and sophisticated fraud.

In this paper we detail the role content provenance authentication will play in helping communicators protect brands, reduce misinformation, disinformation and fraud, and how authentication can be used as a means to differentiate and add value to content.

Download the White Paper here.

Content Authentication Adoption Worldwide

U.S. Government Executive Order on AI Content Authentication

In October 2024, President Biden issued an executive order emphasizing watermarking and content authentication to identify AI-generated content. The Department of Commerce is tasked with creating standards and guidelines for detecting synthetic media and authenticating official government content. Federal agencies are expected to lead by example, using these tools to build trust and transparency in communication while encouraging private sector adoption.

The Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI)

The CAI, launched in 2019, has grown to include hundreds of members dedicated to setting standards for digital content authentication. In collaboration with Microsoft and BBC’s Project Origin, CAI has co-developed the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), which offers robust systems to verify the source and history of digital media, countering misinformation and enhancing content trust worldwide