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| Simon Erskine Locke |
Rochelle Ford, CEO of the PAGE society, could not have made it clearer that trust in the communications industry is at risk from the flood of AI-generated synthetic and manipulated content.
“Trust is the currency of everything that we do in communications,” she shared with attendees at the recent Davis+Gilbert-hosted, PAGE, Content Authenticity Initiative and Tauth Labs-supported CCO roundtable, with LinkedIn and Virtual Human Economy.
Ford went on to highlight the importance of giving audiences a way to know that what they are seeing is authentic in a world where we are moving from the idea of “trust but verify” to “verify then trust.”
The October roundtable was one of the first opportunities for the communications industry to hear from technology leaders on the front line of building provenance into digital content ranging from documents to video. The goal – help companies and their audiences differentiate authentic content from a rising AI-generated tide of misinformation, disinformation, and fraud.
Adobe’s Santiago Lyon, head of advocacy and education at the Content Authenticity Initiative, shared the significant traction of a new industry standard for content authentication known as C2PA and the ongoing work to implement the technology for multiple use cases across industries.
The emergence of “shadow content” around earnings and M&A transactions – a term I am using that reflects how manipulated or fake content is being generated around corporate announcements and the dark corners of the web from where it originates – is just one more reason for the ongoing decline in trust in digital content and the growing need for the technology.
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| (L to R) Simon Locke, Tauth Labs; Adam Kahn, LinkedIn; Natalie Monbiot, Virtual Human Economy; Richard Eisert, Davis+Gilbert; Santiago Lyon, Content Authenticity Initiative; Rochelle Ford, PAGE; Bill Davies, Racepoint Global |
Authentication provides a way to re-build trust in content by making it clear what can and should not be trusted. LinkedIn’s Adam Kahn who is responsible for Trust at the platform, stated that at a minimum we need to “at least authenticate you are who you say you are” in a world where the velocity of fraud is increasing. He shared that his goal was for everyone in the room to become “evangelists of provenance.”
Virtual Human Economy’s CEO, Nathalie Monbiot, shared the story of building AI avatars for a language learning company, and a key question: “How do we create something that is commercially safe and trustworthy?” The solution was to embed content credentials in a way that make it transparent that the avatars were AI generated.
Authentication of content is the equivalent of incorporating security certificates into individual pieces of content. The analogy is the shift from “http” to “https” with websites – which led to some websites being prioritized in search and others being deprioritized. Digital authentication embedded into content can be used by search engines, LLMs and content aggregators to make it more searchable and valuable.
The legal context around content provenance authentication is rapidly evolving. Davis+Gilbert, partner and co-head of the advertising practice, Richard Eisert, shared that AI and provenance have emerged as a significant focus of state legislators across the country as well as the federal government. The new California AI Transparency Act requires technology platforms to enable users to be able to view provenance data incorporated into content. New York has a bill in the works that would require the authentication of political communications.
Racepoint Global CEO, Bill Davies, underscored initial skepticism of whether content authentication was a front-burner issue. At the roundtable, he noted that changed when a new client started a conversation with “How are you going to protect the brand?” This was compounded with the launch of open AI’s Sora 2, when he said, “everything changed.” His takeaway for attendees was that content authentication is “reputation management” the AI age.”
Communications leaders are at different stages of the adoption cycle. Early adopters, including some large agencies in our industry, are among the 6,000 members of the Content Authenticity Initiative who clearly recognize the challenge ahead.
At this stage, a critical step for corporate and agency communicators is to educate themselves about the new technology. A good starting point is the advance copy of Tauth Labs’ white paper shared at the breakfast: Communications and Content Provenance Authentication or re-visiting my July 2025 article in O’Dwyer’s - Six Things Communicators Need to Know About Content Provenance Authentication.
How long will it take before we see widespread adoption? The Content Authenticity Initiative’s Lyon stated, “Over the next few years we expect provenance to be foundational for every industry that has an interest in establishing the authenticity of what they are distributing.”
In the not-too-distant future we’ll be wondering how it was possible that we were posting press releases, sending client communications, issuing research reports, or sending emails that did not have a built-in way for our audiences to know they are authentic.
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Simon Erskine Locke is co-founder and CEO of Tauth Labs which works with communications, financial services and local government clients to implement content authentication.
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