A Realistic AI Image Still Needs an Honest Production Record

Create an asset record before publication: creator or model and service, date, prompt or brief reference, source files, license or usage basis, releases, material edits, reviewer, article, and retention rule. Do not embed personal prompts, secrets, or unnecessary source material in public metadata.

Keep the unedited original and the approved derivative when agreements permit. Hash or version them so the team can establish which file was published. A compressed WebP without a source record becomes difficult to audit as soon as the person who made it leaves.

A technically polished image can still fabricate a customer, office, product interface, research event, or campaign result. Avoid presenting generated people as employees or clients and generated dashboards as evidence. When a scene is illustrative, the surrounding page must not imply documentary proof.

Inspect hands, screens, signage, private information, medical or financial context, cultural representation, and accidental trademarks. Remove or replace visible synthetic text that makes the asset feel careless. Redact supplied screenshots without obscuring the evidence the caption asks a reader to inspect.

C2PA Content Credentials can bind assertions about origin and edits to an asset and make tampering evident. They do not establish that the depicted claim is true, that consent was obtained, or that the publisher’s interpretation is fair. Those remain editorial responsibilities.

Preserve credentials through supported editing and export tools. Verify them before upload and after delivery. When a CMS or optimization pipeline strips them, retain the manifest or validation result in the internal asset record and document the limitation.

A decorative abstract texture may need only an internal record. A photorealistic scene attached to a case study, public event, named person, or contested claim needs an explicit label or should not be used. Write a policy that accounts for realism, subject, consequence, and the chance of mistaken documentary interpretation.

Generate accessible alt text from what the final image contributes, then have a person check it against the rendered asset. Do not expose the generation prompt as alt text. Track uniqueness, compression, visual defects, missing provenance, and disclosures during the same publication gate as copy and links.