A European Perspective early implementers of new standard to track media content provenance

The EBU’s News Pilot, a real-time news-gathering platform that aggregates, translates, and indexes content from participating EBU Members, has begun integrating the C2PA standard for tracking media content provenance. It means that journalists – and, in the future, news consumers too – can access clear verifiable information about the origin of images on the platform.

C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, is tackling the problem of misinformation and media content tampering, a growing challenge with the spread of AI-powered tools. C2PA provides a standardized way to attach verifiable metadata, or ‘content credentials’, to photos, videos, and other media. This allows anyone to trace who created the content and how it has been edited, and to confirm its authenticity. Essentially, it’s about helping people trust what they see online.

Image credentials

The EBU News Pilot puts the news output of public media organizations from across Europe at the fingertips of news editors and journalists at the participating organizations. It combines a vast pool of the latest news content with AI-enabled tools for translation, context-driven monitoring, and search. The News Pilot has now implemented C2PA to provide transparency for images aggregated on the platform. A European Perspective

An electronically signed C2PA manifest – a tamper-proof set of metadata about the content – is now attached to new images published on the News Pilot platform. Content provenance information provided by the source is securely attached and signed using CAI (Content Authenticity Initiative) tools. The manifest also includes an explicit opt-out to prevent images being used to train AI models.

Members will be encouraged to provide enriched provenance information when contributing their media content to the EBU News Pilot going forward. Further development of C2PA implementation on the platform will include support for audio and video content.

Based on ongoing research on how and what information should be made available to end users, the EBU will work with its Members to assess how the C2PA information will be exposed on Member websites, for example in the context of stories shared between EBU members who are a part of "A European Perspective", the digital news exchange innovation project.

Also EuroVOX

EuroVOX, the EBU-developed translation and transcription tool that is integrated in the News Pilot, is also taking steps towards C2PA implementation. In this context, the goal is to provide clarity on how AI has been used in the creation of translated content. For example, with C2PA metadata, users could verify which translation engine was used and whether synthetic voices have been used for audio dubbing.

Development is in progress to ensure that actions performed by EuroVOX on source audio and video are signed with C2PA credentials. This will allow the extension of the chain of provenance for audio and video content on the News Pilot.