The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is an association founded in November 2019 by

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for '' mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of ...

, the

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

. The CAI promotes an industry standard for provenance metadata defined by the C2PA. The CAI cites curbing

disinformation Disinformation is false information deliberately spread to deceive people. It is sometimes confused with misinformation, which is false information but is not deliberate. The English word ''disinformation'' comes from the application of the ...

as one motivation for its activities.

Cooperation with the C2PA

Together with

arm In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between t ...

BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

and Truepic, Adobe founded the "Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity" (C2PA) in February 2021. The C2PA is tasked with the formulation of an open, royalty-free technical standard that serves as a basis for the C2PA member's efforts against disinformation. While the C2PA's work applies to the technical aspects of implementing a provenance metadata standard, the CAI sees its task in the dissemination and promotion of the standard.

Provenance of information

The procedures proposed by CAI and C2PA address the widespread occurrence of disinformation with a set of additional data (metadata) containing details about the provenance of information displayed on a digital device. Such information can be, for example, a photo, video, sound or text file. The C2PA metadata for this information can include, among other things, the publisher of the information, the device used to record the information, the location and time of the recording or editing steps that altered the information. To make sure that the C2PA metadata can not be changed unnoticed, it is secured with hashcodes and

certified Certification is the provision by an independent body of written assurance (a certificate) that the product, service or system in question meets specific requirements. It is the formal attestation or confirmation of certain characteristics of a ...

digital signatures A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...

. The same applies to main content of the information, such as a picture or a text. A hash code of that data is stored in the C2PA metadata section and then, as part of that metadata, secured with the digital signature. Securing metadata and the main content with certified signatures enables users to reliably identify the provenance of a file they are currently viewing. If the C2PA metadata names, for example, a certain TV station as the publisher of a file, it is very unlikely that the file originated from another source. Files with C2PA-compliant metadata that are copied from a publisher's website and then published unaltered on social media (or elsewhere) still retain the full set of tamper-proof provenance information. Users seeing that content on social media can examine such a file with an online tool offered by the CAI or, if present, with C2PA-compliant inspection tools offered by the social media site. Standard-compliant tools will detect whether there were any unauthorized modifications to the file or the metadata. If there were no such modifications, the user can trust the metadata as well as the main content to be exactly as they were published. The methods proposed by CAI and C2PA do not allow for statements whether a content is "true", i.e., contains authentic information that faithfully reflects reality. Instead, C2PA-compliant metadata only offers reliable information about the origin of a piece of information. Whether users wants to trust this information depends solely on their trust in its sources.

Members of the CAI

As of August 2022, the list of CAI members includes more than 200 entries. In addition to the three founding members Adobe, the New York Times and Twitter, these include

Nikon (, ; ), also known just as Nikon, is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging products. The companies held by Nikon form the Nikon Group. Nikon's products include cameras, camera ...

, Qualcomm and the

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...

References

{{reflist Disinformation Organizations established in 2019