By Professor John Collomosse
Director, UKRI/EPSRC Centre for the Decentralized Digital Economy (DECaDE)

If 2024 was the year the world worried about AI misinformation — with over two billion people voting in major elections — then 2025 has been the year the spotlight turned to Copyright and  AI.

In the UK, creator activism and intense public debate around the government’s AI and Copyright consultation have brought long-standing tensions between creativity and AI use into sharper focus.

At DECaDE, we’ve been exploring these issues for several years through our research on media provenance: developing tools and standards to help understand where digital content comes from, who made it, and how it has been used or reused. 

Through our work with cross-industry groups like the Content Authenticity Initiative we have designed and driven adoption of provenance technologies like watermarking and visual fingerprinting, and studied their impact in supporting authentic news and storytelling. 

But provenance isn’t just about authenticity – it’s about tracing ownership and consent across the creative supply chain, including the data used to train GenAI models.  Ascontent is re-used at massive scale for Generative AI, we need automated ways to recognise and reward that reuse – and we believe provenance is the key.

“DECaDE’s longstanding mission has been to design decentralized platforms that support a peer-to-peer digital economy—one where anyone can be a producer or consumer of digital goods and services. It’s not just about protecting creativity and the creative industries, but enabling these to thrive in a world where human and machine imagination increasingly work hand in hand.”

DECaDE’s early research explored how provenance could underpin new economic models for creativity. Frameworks such as ORA (Ownership, Rights and Attribution) and the EKILA project investigated how open provenance standards —such as ODRL and C2PA, both of which our researchers have contributed to——could be extended to enable creators to attach ownership and usage rights to digital works. These ideas first surfaced during the short-lived NFT boom but today they have found new relevance in the age of Generative AI.

DECaDE researchers have also pioneered technologies for identifying the AI model and even the subset of training data responsible for Generative AI outputs. This breakthrough is a crucial step toward properly attributing credit to creators whose characters, brands, or artistic styles are reused by AI systems.

Complementing this technical work, studies such as ORAGen and cross-sector field labs have explored how artists, producers and developers  respond to these emerging technologies.  Our focus is on   trust and traceability—making it possible for everyone in the creative supply chain and even AI systems to understand who owns what, and under what terms content can be reused.. These technologies are the foundations of a more transparent creative economy, one where value and credit flow back to contributors automatically. 

Over the summer, DECaDE teamed up with the CoStar National Lab to run a series of workshops with creatives and AI developers, culminating in the Time to ACCCT report. The report has already had significant impact within UK policy circles and prominently cites DECaDE’s frameworks for creative content exchange using decentralized platforms linked by open standards.  At the Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP 2025) in London, we will demonstrate a working prototype [CJP(1] of this solution for Copyright and AI.

The UK government’s recent call for a Creative Content Exchange within its  Industrial Strategy signals growing recognition that these ideas are entering the policy mainstream. While the details of such a marketplace are still to come, it’s clear that provenance and attribution technologies will play a central role – connecting creators, AI developers, and audiences through shared trust in the digital content supply chain.

DECaDE’s longstanding mission has been to design decentralized platforms that support a peer-to-peer digital economy—one where anyone can be a producer or consumer of digital goods and services. Now more than ever, we need these platforms to help the creative sector generate value in new ways as its economic model evolves in the age of Generative AI.   It’s not just about protecting creativity and the creative industries, but enabling these to thrive in a world where human and machine imagination increasingly work hand in hand.