With the proliferation of increasingly more content with generative artificial intelligence, Google has announced that it will implement a way for users to know when an image was created or edited by AI. The feature will initially be available for Google Search, but the idea is that the company's other verticals will also have this capability.
To do this, Google uses the C2PA (Coalition for Content Pronouncement and Authenticity) certification, which acts as a technical standard for provenance. C2PA can understand the roots of the image and tell you where it was taken, whether it was taken with a smartphone or camera, manually edited via software, and whether it was entirely or partially created by AI.
Thus, images containing C2PA metadata will be tracked by users when clicking on the “About this image” option when selecting content through Google Search, Lens and Circle to Search. Currently, it is already possible to check some details about images with this option, but only scarce information, such as the publication period of the content.
Screenshot: Felipe Vidal/TecMundo 
YouTube should get a feature in the future
In its announcement, Google says it plans to expand the C2PA standard to advertising and integrate with YouTube in the future. For the video social network, it expects users to be able to identify when content was captured by a camera.
Even with good measures, the certification used by the giant is still not widely compatible and needs more acceptance in the market. Companies like Leica and Sony already use the standard in their products, and it is only a matter of time before other brands follow suit.
With the growing number of deepfakes involving the world of famous figures, pornography and the creation of AIs without moral filters, such as Grok, it will become increasingly complex to distinguish reality from fiction.