Jess Weatherbed

Yeah, I keep likening the situation to the Jurassic Park memo, whereas people thought so long about whether they could, they didn't actually stop to think about whether they should be doing this.

And now we're in the mess that we're in.

So this is a metadata standard, effectively, that was kickstarted by Adobe.

Interestingly enough, Twitter as well, back in the day.

You can see where the logic lies.

It was supposed to be that everywhere a little bit of content goes online, this embedded metadata would follow.

So what C2PA does is at the point that you take a picture on a camera, you upload that image into Photoshop.

All of these instances would be recorded in the metadata of that file to say exactly when it was taken, what has happened to it, what tools were used to manipulate it.

And then as a two part process, all of that information could then hypothetically be read by online platforms where you would see that information.

So as consumers, as Internet users, we wouldn't have to do anything.

We would be able to in this way.

imaginary reality, go on Instagram or X and look at a photo and there'd be a lovely little button there that just says this is AI generated or this is real or some sort of authentication.

That has obviously proven a lot more difficult in reality than on paper.

They argue that it's quite tamper-proof, but it's a little bit of an action to speak louder than words kind of situation, unfortunately, because while they say it's tamper-proof, this thing is supposed to be able to resist being screenshot, for example, by the way.

But then OpenAI, who is actually one of the steering community members behind this standard, openly says it's incredibly easy to strip to the point that online platforms might actually do that accidentally.

So the theory is there's plenty behind it to make it robust, to make it hard to remove, but in practice that just isn't the case.

It can be removed maliciously or not.

Well...

It's a little bit of a confusing landscape because I think one of the few kind of like tech says that I would say there shouldn't actively be competition.

And from what I've seen, from what I've spoken to with all these different providers, there isn't competition between them so much as they're all working towards the same goal.