Provenance Lens
Limitations
Absence of a provenance signal never proves human authorship. A plain explanation of every limitation, failure mode and misreading of a provenance report.
This page is not a disclaimer. It is part of the product. A provenance report that is read incorrectly is worse than no report.
The core misreading
NOT_DETECTED is not HUMAN WRITTEN. It means the specific signals we checked were absent. A file loses its C2PA manifest when it is screenshotted, re-encoded, uploaded to most social platforms, or edited by software that does not preserve credentials. Absence is weak evidence of almost nothing.
Also true
- A valid signature proves who signed a manifest, not that the manifest's claims are true.
- A signer we cannot place on a trust list is reported as INCONCLUSIVE, not as trusted.
- Metadata is trivially editable. Treat generator fields as an indication, never as proof.
- Hidden Unicode characters have many innocent causes, including ordinary copy-paste.