You Ask, I Answer: How to Demonstrate Lineage with Generative AI?

In today's episode, Steven asks, how is it practical for a creator to demonstrate lineage and provenance of content, human-generated content, outside of academia? So this is in response to a post that I put up about AI detectors. And I said, if creators, human creators, want to uh prove the value of their work as being human-led, prove that it is human-led, they need to demonstrate lineage and provenance. And Steven's asking, well, how do you do that? Lineage and provenance are just fancy terms for show your work.

Visual artists, my friend Judy Beltran does this all the time. Uh, visual artists have been doing this for a while. They just live stream their painting and their drawing and stuff like that. People live stream riffing music and you know, sitting in the studio working stuff out. Uh, we saw a lot of this during the pandemic when uh in those early months of lockdown, we had musicians, you know, musicians we all know, uh just turning on their Instagram accounts and live streaming.

And I remember seeing Amy Lee of Evanescence just sort of riffing and saying, Oh, here's something I'm working on and trying this stuff out. That is how you prove that a work is human-led. This is something that all creators should be doing for any work where you want to prove that it's human-led, which is especially important if copyright is vital to the work's value. If you want to be able to demonstrate that a work is uh copyrighted, it has to be human-led. You can use AI for parts of the process, but the fundamental original work has to be made by a human.

And in the age of generative AI, proof of humanity is more important than ever. For example, there's one client that we do content creation for. And the way I do this, now granted, I am not a lawyer, I cannot give legal advice. In fact, I've got a disclaimer right here. Um I've talked to my lawyers and asked them this question.

I said, if I create an original work that is purely me, and then I use AI to manipulate it, as long as I have a chain of evidence that the original work is mine. Do I retain the copyright? And their general consensus was yes. As long as I can prove that I did the original work, me the human, then all of the derivative works that AI makes of it retain the original work's copyright. Now consult your lawyer for the same advice.

But that's an example where I will take my voice memos app and I'll take the assignment, the content assignment from the client, and I will foam at the mouth for 30 minutes and then give that to AI and say, clean this up. Put some put some grammar in play, etc. etc. So what is lineage in provenance? It's an audit trail.

It is an audit trail for content. And it doesn't have to be fancy. You can literally just take out your phone, right? And you set it up on a tripod and say, here's me working on my latest thing, my newest song, my latest piece of content that I'm writing, whatever it is, and you video it. Depending on the service and the terms of service, you may or may not want to live stream it.

Um if you're concerned about your works being used to train AI, don't stream it on platforms that have a license that says they're going to use your content. Um, but you you video it. You've got to have the videos, obviously time-stamped. Ideally, a little clock in the background would be great. Um with the date and time on it.

Um and it should stand up to scrutiny. Uh it should be thorough, it should be frequent, it should be detailed. If you're if you're working on a painting, live stream a little bit or video a little bit of it every day. Uh again, having some sort of some uh device that that shows when you're doing it. But make video, archive those videos someplace safe so that if your work is ever in question, you can bust out the receipts and say, here is a time-lapse of me working on this painting or this drawing or this essay or this song, if you're composing music, you know, you just stream or screencast your uh your work in logic or Adobe Audition or whatever the tool of your choice is.

If you're doing video editing, you know, record your screen record your use of DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere or whatever. But proof of origin is one of the three pillars of authenticity, along with intent and experience. The more you can demonstrate proof of origin with video, the stronger your claims are on the authenticity of your content. You, the human made it, and this is proof of you making it. If you do that, if you are thorough and meticulous, detailed, you can prove that your content is human-led.

That's gonna do it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.