The average person in the UK spends over three hours and 40 minutes online each day, with much of that time being spent consciously or passively consuming vast amounts of content. This content, whether it’s personal photos from our friends and family, viral videos or news articles, is shared with us in a variety of formats and across an increasing range of platforms.
As sources of information have decentralised to now encompass the likes of Tiktok and Facebook alongside traditional news sources and outlets, we’re spending more time questioning what we can and can’t trust to be true.
Maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism around online content is essential; we should consider where a piece of content came from, who made it, when, where and how. In many cases, the consequences of making the wrong call on what to trust online is minimal, but when it comes to issues such as health advice, financial investments or exercising our democratic will, the answers to those questions become critical because of the impact these decisions can have on our personal lives and on society.
Part of the solution to this challenge is greater transparency through giving more control to creators and more context to people viewing the content. When you or I look at something, we should also be empowered to understand how it has been created and use that information to decide whether to trust it or not.
One way to achieve this is through Content Credentials – a digital ‘nutrition label’ that displays information about digital content such as its creator’s name, its creation date, the tools used to create it and any edits made along the way.
What’s more, a unique combination of digital fingerprinting, invisible watermarking and cryptographic metadata helps ensure that this information remains intact and verifiable wherever the content travels online.
Whilst the concept of ‘what you see is what you get’ can no longer be relied upon, the information contained in Content Credentials at least helps us to ‘get’ what we’re seeing.
In the tech and creative communities this idea has been around for a while and has been a core element of UK policy discussions around online safety. Indeed, Content Credentials are readily available in the market today, and companies (including Adobe, the BBC, Microsoft, Leica, Nikon, WPP and Universal Music Group) have already started to adopt this technology.
As AI becomes more powerful and prevalent and as we continue to spend increasing amounts of our lives online, we need to coalesce around a global technological standard to help restore trust online. Governments have an important role to play in driving adoption of this standard by requiring companies across the content chain – from manufacturers of cameras and smartphones to social media platforms and news websites – to attach and carry content provenance data.
All signs are pointing towards digital provenance becoming a lot more prominent. More companies are implementing Content Credentials into their products and platforms to offer greater transparency to consumers and audiences. More creators are attaching these ‘nutrition labels’ to their work, with new tools like Adobe Content Authenticity making it even easier for creators to build trust in their digital content by empowering them to get their work attributed to themselves. And the winds of regulation are also moving in this direction, with the EU AI Act requiring companies that develop AI models to clearly label AI-generated content and enable users to also label AI-manipulated content.
Companies across the content supply chain all need to start preparing for a fast-approaching future in which these signals of trust are seen as crucial for brands because it’s increasingly important to anyone who spends time online.