v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack AStablev2026.2

AI provenance

The chain of evidence — metadata, cryptographic signatures, watermarks, or attestations — that documents whether a piece of content was produced or modified by an AI system, by which system, when, and under what prompt or input.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Ask about AI provenance

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A C2PA-signed image with verifiable metadata showing it was generated by a named model on a given date

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A claim by an author that they did not use AI, absent any verifiable metadata, is a declaration but not provenance

Editorial commentary

Provenance is the systemic answer to the disclosure problem. Standards such as C2PA attach signed metadata to media at creation. For text, provenance is harder and currently relies on a combination of watermarking, author declaration, and detection tools, none of which is fully reliable in isolation.

References

C2PA Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity Specification (2023)
EU AI Act Transparency Provisions (2024)

Also known as

Content provenance · Generative provenance

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="AI provenance"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ai-provenance" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ai-provenance",
  "name": "AI provenance",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ai-provenance",
  "description": "The chain of evidence — metadata, cryptographic signatures, watermarks, or attestations — that documents whether a piece of content was produced or modified by an AI system, by which system, when, and under what prompt or input.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/genai-disclosure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/ai-provenance",
  "sameAs": [
    "Content provenance",
    "Generative provenance"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T01:55:26",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

View CASRAI adoption →