Content Authenticity with Santiago Lyon

Pat Miller: 00:00

I'm Pat Miller, and this is The Professional Photographer Podcast. You pull up social media, you take a look at an image, and you say to yourself, is that real? How often does that happen to you? About every single day. You have to really question if what you see is a real thing. Or you take an amazing image and you wonder, hey, is generative AI gonna scrape that and put it into its model? Or you take a great image and you upload it and you think, wow, can I defend my rights? Will everyone know that I made this picture? These are contemporary issues around provenance and ownership, credibility and misinformation, and how in the heck is this gonna get solved? Aha! Enter Adobe and the Content Authenticity Initiative. On today's show, I'm gonna sit down with Santiago Lyon, and we're gonna talk about how can this problem be solved. This isn't a matter of just putting a chip in a camera. This isn't a matter of just putting a little gizmo inside Adobe Photoshop. This is a matter that affects every screen with every person everywhere. So, you know, no big deal. Santiago's gonna walk us through what they're doing about it, how close they are to a digital nutrition label, and what you can do right now to get involved in the Content Authenticity Initiative. If you're a photographer, this is a must-listen episode because this is a movement that we will look back and say, how in the heck didn't we have this years ago? Santiago Lyon, welcome to the Professional Photographer Podcast. How are you today?

Santiago Lyon: 01:51

I'm very well, Pat. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

Pat Miller: 01:54

I'm excited that you're here because you have this amazing backstory and an amazingly cool mission that you're on right now. So if someone doesn't know about you, tell us about who you are, what you do, and then we're gonna get into what you're doing now to help guide authenticity into the future.

Santiago Lyon: 02:09

So my background is in photojournalism. I'm a lifelong journalist. I'm the son of a journalist. I grew up in the world of journalism. And at an early age, after I got out of high school, I started to work in the field of photography. Initially, photographing news events in Spain and Portugal for United Press International, and then for Reuters news agency and then ultimately for the AP. I worked for twenty years in the field as a photographer, the first half covering news and sports events around the world, and the second half as essentially a war photographer. I spent ten years photographing war and conflict around the world. I photographed nine wars on four continents. I was wounded in Bosnia. I was taken prisoner in Iraq. I lost over a dozen friends to violent deaths doing that line of work. And then, of course, not surprisingly, that left me a little exhausted. So I paused. I did a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, and then I was asked to become the director of photography at the Associated Press, a job that I did for almost fifteen years overseeing about a thousand photographers around the world when you add up staff and freelance photographers. And after fifteen years, that was sort of tiring. So I took pause again, and Adobe called me. And I've spent the last four years working on the Content Authenticity Initiative, trying to establish technical protocols to understand the origins of digital files, where they come from, etc. So the work I'm doing now, in many ways, is an extension of my life's work in journalism, just viewed through a slightly different prism.

Pat Miller: 03:49

With that perspective, that's different than a photographer that's worried that AI may scrape their images. Having transparent and authentic images has really been your life's work with everything you've done.

Santiago Lyon: 04:02

Yep. That's right. And it's really a pleasure to be working on this initiative now because I think we live in a time where it's more important than ever. If the digital media landscape was confusing, and it certainly was, it's even more confusing now with the advent of generative AI and all sorts of other stuff out there.

Pat Miller: 04:19

How big is this issue moving forward in the photography industry, in journalism, to make sure that we can agree on a standard that everyone can trust again. Because to your point, we have reached a point where you look at an image, especially online, and think, I'm not sure if that's real. So how important is this entire initiative?

Santiago Lyon: 04:37

I think it's very important, and not just for photography. I mean, when you think about it, here we are starting 2025 and there's pretty much zero empirical evidence about the origins of anything that we consume online. And so we make a lot of assumptions based on trust, habit, hearsay, rumor, gossip, etc. And sometimes those assumptions serve us well. But of course, the great disruptor over the last couple of years has been the advent of generative AI where it's possible to create images and video with a few clicks of the keyboard, and that produces what some people refer to as the liar's dividend. In other words, the dividend for misleading somebody is that it calls everything into question. And so broadly speaking, we think that it's really unimportant to understand the origins of what we're looking at, to understand how things might have been manipulated, and with that information, make a better informed decision about whether to trust things or not.

Pat Miller: 05:35

Once that trust is gone, it almost bankrupts everything that might come from that platform, that news organization, that reporter. And to you, with your life's work, I would imagine that's one of the things you hold most sacred is this is what I shot, and it's real. If that ever went away, I can't imagine how that would hit someone like you.

Santiago Lyon: 05:53

Indeed. I mean, when you think about the tremendous sacrifice that people have made over the years to bring truth and transparency to the world, journalists around the world, whether they're photographers or videographers or print reporters, their work is really dependent on this notion of trust. When you distill journalism down to one word, the word that I get to is trust. Trust between the journalist and the person they're talking to, trust between the reader or the viewer and the journalist or the journalistic institution. And so if the trust is eroded because of uncertainty around what's real or what's AI or whatever the case might be? then we start to get into dangerous territory if we can't agree about the basic facts. You know, the sun rises in the East. If we can't agree about things like that, we're in trouble.

Pat Miller: 06:43

We all agree that this is something that needs to exist. You're fighting the good fight, but you're not alone. Tell us about the Content Authenticity Initiative, who's involved, and where does it sit today?

Santiago Lyon: 06:53

So the Content Authenticity Initiative was kicked off in late 2019 by Adobe and was announced together with the New York Times Company and Twitter at that time, really focused on the provenance of digital files. And so the initiative started off as an effort by those three companies to establish a movement, if you like, that could address this area of digital provenance, the origins of digital files, and what changes might have been made to them. So that was late 2019. In early 2020, we had our first gathering of probably 150 people from various fields, technology, human rights, academia, etc., looking at the problems of digital manipulation as it relates to miss and disinformation and other areas. And the first area we looked at was the area of detection. Could we rely on detection tools to analyze suspect files? And while detection is certainly useful on an ad hoc basis, what we realized was that it's not really scalable. And it's also not particularly accurate at least in its current form. And additionally, it invariably becomes an arms race with bad actors trying to stay one step ahead of the latest detection software. So for those reasons, the focus shifted to this notion of provenance. And that led to the publication of a white paper. That led to the foundation of a nonprofit organization that sits within the Linux Foundation called the C2PA or the Coalition for Content, Provenance, and Authenticity. And that led to the start of work to establish a global technical standard and, very importantly, an open technical standard. Because the C2PA sits within the Linux Foundation, all of that work that they're doing around the technical standard is unencumbered by IP. It doesn't belong to anybody. It's available for anybody and everybody to use. And so that work has been going steadily since that time. And so what the Content Authenticity Initiative really is a movement of now almost 4,500 members seeking to accelerate implementation of that C2PA standard around provenance, and we do that in a couple of different ways. We build open source tools to make it easier for people to implement the C2PA standard. We also do a lot of community and advocacy and outreach events to raise awareness about the C2PA standard and to help people implement it. And then, of course, we productize it. Adobe puts it into products like Photoshop and Lightroom, and other members of the Content Authenticity Initiative are doing the same. So really, what we're seeing here is based on an open technical standard out of the C2PA organization, we're seeing implementation around the world on a variety of fields for a variety of different purposes.

Pat Miller: 09:46

I've heard someone else describe the endpoint as a digital nutrition label. Is that the type of thing that we'll see in the future?

Santiago Lyon: 09:54

Yes! So in the same way that you would go into a supermarket and quickly if you wanted to be able to inspect, I don't know, a can of beans or a bottle of juice and figure out how much sugar or salt or calories or whatever are in it. Here, you'll be able to do the same thing. In fact, you already can do that with some digital files. And it tells you perhaps what device was used to generate the file, what edit changes were made to it, perhaps who took the image or who distributed the image. And all of that is attached to the file in a secure way that then ultimately pops up in front of the viewer through an interactive icon that the viewer can click on and open up that "digital nutrition label" and see, oh look! This image came from such and such a place, such and such a date, time, etc. Now I can make a better informed decision about whether to trust that or what to think about that particular file.

Pat Miller: 10:44

Are there any guideposts that we can look to other places on the Internet or in contemporary technology where something like this has been done? Because as you said, we need to stay one step ahead of the bad actors because they're gonna try and figure out a way to manipulate whatever we come up with. And the only comparable thing I could think of was how Internet domains are registered. That ICANN exists and everyone has agreed this is the standard of how we get a website domain name. I can't think of many others. Is that kind of this international standard that we will all agree on and how to validate pictures? Is that also the end goal?

Santiago Lyon: 11:18

I think so. I mean, another equivalent is the little padlock that you get in the upper left of your browser if you're on a secure server. So if you're doing a financial transaction and you want to be sure that you're actually logged on to a secure server, that little padlock has become ubiquitous. A lot of people don't even notice it. They don't even think about it. But, you know, that HTTPS part of it, the secure part of it represented by that little padlock, is a great example of something that's similar to this in the sense that it's ubiquitous, it gives you guarantees, and for people who are interested in it, it's there. And in the same way that, you know, you probably don't look at every nutrition label in the supermarket. You look at the ones where there's an interest, where there's a health concern, or where there's some other concern that makes you wanna look at it. And I think this is the same here. You know, if there's an image or a piece of digital content online that you question or you're not sure about or you would like to be certain about, this is the kind of technology that will give you that certainty that will help make a better decision for you as to whether to trust it or not.

Pat Miller: 12:25

This is the type of thing that everyone with a camera, everyone with an Internet connection says, yes, this needs to exist. But you've got different areas that there's work to do. Even a company as big as Adobe can't wave a magic wand and everybody's on board. Talk us through the technology side. Just the idea of setting a standard like this and baking it into photo editing and camera capture. I can't imagine the hornet's nest of stuff that has to get organized for something like this to happen just on the technology side.

Santiago Lyon: 12:53

Yeah. It's very complicated because what we're seeking to do is have this sort of continuum of verifiable information through the digital supply chain. It means that we've had to divide the work up into a number of areas. So broadly speaking, we start at the moment of capture or creation. So we're working with all of the camera and smartphone manufacturers to get this technology embedded into their devices at production, which means that when you buy one of these devices, it comes out of the box with this C2PA technology in it. You can choose to activate it or deactivate it depending on what the default setting is. But that really establishes the point of origin of the file, whether it's generated by a camera or a smart phone, or in the case of AI, which AI model was used to generate it. So that's phase one. Phase two, we move on to editing. So we're incorporating this in editing software, not just Adobe tools. We're working with some Adobe competitors to get this in there. And what that allows is for the viewer to understand what changes were made to the file. So in the case of a photograph, I crop it, I tone it, I darken it, I lighten it. I can go back then and see what those changes were, the edit history, if you like. And then the third area is around distribution and publishing. So you have the whole content distribution network, the Cloudflares, the Akamais, the Fastlys who are tasked with getting the content as close to the physical server of the viewer as possible. So we're working with those companies to maintain the integrity of these content credentials, as we call them, these digital nutrition labels. And then the last area is the content management system, ecosystem. So that's the companies that actually are tasked with getting this stuff up on websites. And so we're working with them to maintain the integrity of the content credential, ultimately, allowing for this interactive experience where a little icon pops up with the letter CR on it, for credential. I can click on that, and it opens it up. So, as you can imagine, with all of the myriad players involved in each one of those phases, capture, edit, and publish, it's complicated, and it really requires a joint effort. The good news is that if everybody uses the C2PA standard, which really has emerged as best in class for provenance technology because it's now 500 technology companies working in lockstep under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, By all using the same standard, what we get there is interoperability. That I can use this standard on a website in X country, and I know that it will be interoperable with other technology elsewhere in the world. So that's really the philosophical or flow of the technology. But then when we get into the actual sort of nitty gritty of security, we're using or recommending a combination of methods here to ensure the integrity of the content credential, as we call it. So we're using cryptographically secure metadata. This is, you know, what's known as PKI, public key infrastructure technology not dissimilar to what you use for online banking. So that involves asset hashes, unique alphanumeric codes that bind the information to the file. We're also using invisible watermarking as an extra layer of security. And then we're using what's called cloud-based fingerprinting where we store some information about the file on the cloud, and then we're able to compare that information with the information in the file that we have at hand. And so the combination of those three things is very resilient and durable, as we say. Each of those things in isolation has vulnerabilities. We know metadata gets stripped off with, at the moment, with some frequency. We know that watermarks can be compromised by a determined adversary. But when we combine all of those things, it's much stronger than the sum of their parts and really very resilient and very secure. So that's a great thing to be able to point to. And then the last part of it is actually the display of the credential online. We can do that through browser plug-ins that detect the presence of the invisible watermark, or we can do it through the interactive CR icon if the CMS is adapted to support that. And yeah, we're moving forward.

Pat Miller: 17:08

As amazing as that sounds, that sounds like the simplest part. Meaning, the people that you are talking to, the 500 technology companies that are working together, they understand this is an issue that needs to be solved. But then you have to go upstream and say, okay, we're solving this problem. But now we have to go to 190 or whatever governments in the world and say like, the policy side. Okay, we've got this technology issue. How is this going to live inside the countries of the world? How is that going, and what are those conversations like?

Santiago Lyon: 17:39

Yeah. So the C2PA standard will likely become an ISO standard, the International Standards Organization, later this year in the spring, I believe. Once that happens, it sends a signal to regulatory bodies around the world that this is a serious technical standard that's been vetted by the ISO. And then, generally in the world of standards, you have global standards, and then you have different national standards or regional standards, you know, whether it's broadcast, whether it's publishing, whatever it might be. But the fact that the C2PA standard is so resilient and will soon be an ISO standard is fantastic. That said, legislation that we're seeing in light of AI developments making its way through legislative bodies around the world requires that legislators, lawmakers, policymakers, etc, be well informed about all of this. And so, as part of my work, I spend a fair amount of time talking to those people and explaining the nuances of all of this. I'm not a technologist by training, but I am a storyteller by training. And so my task, if you like, is to take this very complex technical detail and interpret it or translate it into a more accessible language, into a vernacular, if you like, that is understandable by the people who are making legal decisions so that the decisions that they are making are accurate and make sense in the technology field. So the area of policy is increasingly important because what we're seeing around the world is legislation coming in that will likely mandate some level of transparency, particularly around the use of AI, which is a logical starting point for all of this transparency. But then, over time, we can see a world where the transparency is ubiquitous. So if we go back to the supermarket analogy, right now, some players are using it to label AI, which in supermarket terms could be the equivalent of labeling genetically modified food, for example. Over time, as the technology becomes more ubiquitous, you can imagine where everything gets labeled. So that's what's happening on the policy side. But there's another area that's also really important, and that's the area of education. Because people need to understand what's happening, whether it's media literacy in the classroom, which is a very irregular field. In a few countries, media literacy is taught well and consistently to young children and onwards through their education. But in most countries, it's not. And children are left to their own devices. And sure, they pick up things fast, but there's a lot that they could learn to help them navigate this increasingly complicated and in some cases perilous digital landscape. But then beyond classroom education, we've got societal education. When the moment is right, when we feel that we have enough ubiquity, this notion of public awareness campaigns to educate society at large about the concept of provenance and digital nutrition labels and content credentials. And then lastly, we have the sort of consumer education side of things. Dear reader of the Daily Bugle, you will have noticed a little icon on our website. Here's what it means, etc. So really, we think that these areas of provenance, the technology, education in its various forms, and policy in its various forms are indivisible. We have to look at them holistically. And when we do that, a couple of things happen. We elevate the conversation to one of societal importance that I think it deserves. But additionally, we create more entry points for people to engage with this because not everybody is enamored of technology. Sometimes it's a generational thing. Sometimes it's because people have had bad experiences with technology. But by combining the technology with the education and policy aspects of it, we create more entry points for people to engage and to help move all of this forward.

Pat Miller: 21:37

Adobe has been the way we've manipulated and edited images for decades. I mean, Adobe has been the place where this all started really for the general public and for photographers. Its leadership on this mission seems to be something it had to take on, especially with generative AI coming. Because the AI tools are in Photoshop, and they're great. We love them. But you also kinda needed to go on this mission. So what's coming next with Adobe's involvement in the initiative?

Santiago Lyon: 22:05

So, Adobe has been at the forefront of this. You know, the Adobe Research Lab folks sort of anticipated this issue as they were looking around the corner as research labs do and saw what was coming. We've seen AI in various forms over the last decade or so gradually improving and becoming more accessible and more exciting. And so as we saw that, we recognized that there was a need to have a layer of transparency there so that these tools could be amazing and creative as they are. And one of Adobe's missions is creativity for all. And so this notion of using these tools to facilitate creativity, but then with the potential dangers of these tools, the need for safeguards, and the need for safeguards for everybody. So Adobe's involvement here has really been for the greater good. And some people say, well, wait a minute. You're making the tools, AI tools like Firefly and, you know, text to image and soon text to video. And now you're providing the remedy. Like, how is that? Reconcile that. And I think that's a perfectly explainable dialectic, if you like, where both things can be true at the same time. Both things can be valid at the same time. You can continue to develop the exciting tools that Adobe has been working on. This year, for example, Photoshop celebrates its 35th anniversary. And so for the last three and a half decades, Adobe has been at the forefront of digital creativity. And now for the last five years, we've been working on some safeguards there to help people clearly understand what it is they're looking at? and then they themselves can make the decisions as to whether they want to trust something or not. We're not the arbiters of truth here. We're not saying this is true; this is fake. We're saying this is how this was made, make your own mind up, and that's where it links back to the education and to some degree the policy areas.

Pat Miller: 24:01

Let's talk for a second about how people can get involved because you have a Discord channel where people can learn more. Who is that right for, and how do they plug in?

Santiago Lyon: 24:09

Yeah. So there's lots of ways to get involved. The Content Authenticity Initiative at contentauthenticity.org. That's easy to join, it's free. It's a web form on the site. We welcome everybody, whether it's individuals or companies or businesses or organizations. Become part of the community when you join that. So you get access to community events and newsletters, and you really sort of become part of that community that is aware and interested and working together. And that's a really important thing to underscore is in the Content Authenticity Initiative, you have companies and even individuals who normally would be fierce business competitors. Yet we're all pulling together towards this goal of transparency, which is really, if you wanted to simplify, it's a safety issue. We're trying to make the Internet a safer place by having a guaranteed level of transparency baked in. So that's the easiest lift. Join the Content Authenticity Initiative. If you're a developer or involved in the implementation aspect of this, we have on GitHub a number of open source tools there of different kinds. And as you mentioned, we run a pretty vibrant Discord channel to answer developers' questions. And then lastly, on the product side of things, we have this in Photoshop. It's available. We have it in Lightroom. It's available. We're about to roll something out in the spring called Adobe Content Authenticity, which will be a free web-based app that will allow creators to attach content credentials to their assets after the fact. And the creative community is very interested in this, for example, in the area of attribution. So for somebody to be able to say, I created this amazing thing. And then, additionally, there's been a lot of concern lately about the nature of training data for generative AI engines or models. And some of these companies have been very cavalier about sort of scraping the entire Internet without the knowledge or permission of the IP owners. So as a result, you're seeing court cases move forward. Adobe, to its credit, has been very responsible about its training data for its suite of Firefly products only using material for which we have permission or which is in the public domain. But one of the things that a content credential allows for is what we're calling a do not train label. So the ability to clearly flag in your content that you don't want it to be used for training purposes. Of course, that's dependent on the data scrapers respecting that. But it's a continuum, and I think we'll get there. So there are many different ways to to get involved, whether it's just using the tools and the products where you come across them, whether it's becoming a member of the community just to enhance your understanding and knowledge of what's going on, or whether it's actually taking these tools and implementing them in whatever technical stack you happen to be working on.

Pat Miller: 27:13

I'm glad you brought up attribution, and I feel selfish even asking you about it. But I know photographers are concerned about owning their image and getting credit for their work. Will this attribution workflow and tagging end up replacing copyright or at least showing another reason to anyone else that this is my image and you can't use it?

Santiago Lyon: 27:31

Yeah. There's almost certainly a digital rights management component to all of this. We're not directly involved in that line of work right now at Adobe, but others are. Some of our partners out there, whether it's Imatag or Digimarc or those folks where watermarking and secure provenance information is useful as an anti-piracy tool. Definitely. And there's a lot of debate right now as to what's copyrightable. Can you actually copyright something that comes out of an AI engine, etc.? So, the technology is moving at warp speed, and it remains to be seen how it all plays out. But I think having reliable empirical information about where things come from is certainly going to be useful going forward, however things ultimately shake out.

Pat Miller: 28:24

Where are we on the development? How soon until we see a consistent nutrition label across the web?

Santiago Lyon: 28:31

It's a great question. I mean, we're making progress. When I look back at all those areas that I mentioned before, so at CAPTURE for example, know, Leica, we're the first camera company out there, a little over a year ago, to implement this into a production camera, their flagship rangefinder camera. They have a M11P that had contact credentials baked into it now for 14-15 months. They more recently incorporated into one of their mirror-less cameras. Nikon have been doing prototyping. Sony has made some announcements that we can expect products from them soon. The other manufacturers also. So, on the camera side of things, I suspect that later this year, we'll see some major product drops from the major Japanese manufacturers. On the smartphone front, Samsung recently incorporated content credentials into one of their flagship Galaxy phones, not in the camera per se, but as a way of determining whether AI was used in the production of the image. So that's a start. We're talking to other smartphone manufacturers. So on that hardware front, we're doing well. On the AI front, Firefly, which is Adobe's suite of generative AI tools, everything that gets created in Firefly gets a content credential attached to it upon download that says this was made in Firefly. OpenAI who make DALL·E 3 and more recently Sora, the text to video generator. Everything that comes out of that, those tools get a content credential upon download. Adobe Stock, all of those images get contact credentials upon download indicating where they were licensed from. So we're making good progress on the sort of production side of things. But, of course, it's a two-step play. Right? There are hundreds of millions of images out there already with contact credentials on them, but you wouldn't know it unless you manually drag the image into an inspection tool that we have called Verify, and that would show whether it had a credential or not. So the second step is getting this interactivity, the presence of that little CR icon that indicates to the viewer that there is underlying information about the provenance of that particular file, and then they can interact with it. So there we're starting to see it. LinkedIn are starting to use it, for images that have credentials. We've seen the folks at Meta start to use it on Instagram to detect the presence of AI. We're starting to see it at, the US Department of Defense has a digital image distribution channel called DVIDS where they take all of their official imagery from the various branches of service and distribute it to whoever's interested. Content credentials are now supported on that. So we're starting to see this gradual takeoff, if you like. YouTube is starting to experiment with them. And I think it's really a matter of time, and we'll see it more and more as people begin to understand that, as I mentioned at the beginning, here we are. It's 2025. And to some degree, we're driving in the fog with no lights on. Like, how do we understand where we're going? And we need that clarity because of generative AI, but also just generally. And what complicates it even further is that it's not a binary proposition where everything is either AI or it's not. Right? You can take a "real image" and do stuff with it in AI or all sorts of combinations here, so it becomes really important. And when you think about the other applications, you think about the legal system. I mean, how is a court of law supposed to understand that image from a CCTV camera or from a whatever showing somebody purporting to do something as digital evidence in legal proceedings, how is the court of law supposed to have guarantees about where that came from given how easy it is for me to create an image of you robbing a convenience store or whatever? How is an insurance company supposed to know that the imagery that accompanies an insurance claim is what it purports to be and not something downloaded from the Internet? You know, how is a medical and scientific paper supposed to provide guarantees that the imagery showing scientific experiments hasn't been created to make a case? So really, what we think is that provenance, this concept of understanding the origins of digital files, will become table stakes for everything digital, in the same way that you go into a supermarket and everything has a nutritional label on it. And if you came across a can of beans that didn't have a nutritional label on it, you might wonder what's in this and am I gonna really eat this? So I think it's something that is on one level basic, but on another level so important across so many things that I think that what we're going to see over the next, you know, three years, just a gradual uptick to the point where we have ubiquity and it becomes expected. And we'll look back and say, well, how did we ever live without these things?

Pat Miller: 33:49

Right. If you think about it, this is the only global communications issue. We don't listen to the news. We don't read the news. We view the news. And I can't read Russian, and I can't listen to Chinese. But I can see a picture that comes from anywhere. And if the pictures are not authentic, it's very easy for a manipulated image to go around the world before anyone has a chance to question whether or not it is authentic because it's a universal language. What we see, that translates with everyone instantly. So this issue is existential, not only for the industry but for really news consumers and society everywhere. Unbelievable to think about. Let's do this to end the interview. Is there anything we haven't touched on? Either something the photographers that are watching this should do or something else we should be aware of with the Content Authenticity Initiative?

Santiago Lyon: 34:38

You know, if there's a call to action here, it's really join us. If you're not already part of it, become part of it. It's free. It's easy. It's interesting. It's relevant. It's topical. I think that's the main thing that I would say. And then the other thing I would say is, often when I go around the world talking about this stuff, I sometimes ask for a show of hands in the audience. You know, how many people are actually playing with AI tools? How many people are experimenting with AI tools? Whether it's text image generators like Firefly or DALL·E or Sora or Midjourney, etc. or whether it's large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or whatever. And I'm often surprised by how hesitant people can be in different areas about engaging with this. I think there is a definite fear factor where people are nervous. They want to avoid this technology. And I think it's fair to say that this technology is here to stay. It has many positive things that can be done with it. It also has some very scary things that we should be concerned about. But my suggestion to people is that they should, to the degree that it's relevant and they're interested, get out there and get your hands wet. Like, play with it. Understand what it is. And I think when people start to do that, they will then even more deeply understand and rationalize the value of the need for transparency and the need for things like content credentials.

Pat Miller: 36:06

Well, thank you for your work on this issue, and thanks for joining us on the show. I appreciate it.

Santiago Lyon: 36:10

My pleasure.

Pat Miller: 36:11

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of The Professional Photographer Podcast. PPA produces this show every week to help you build a better photography business. And if you enjoyed it, do us a favor. Hit subscribe or like and share it with a friend, you know, all that jazz. But what really helps us is when you leave a comment, so you can tell us what Santiago said that made you say, ooh, that's something I need to take action on. We look at all the comments and all the feedback to make sure we're producing the content that you want to see. The other thing that we'll say is if you're not a member of Professional Photographers of America, well, you're kinda missing out. PPA offers incredible resources like equipment insurance, top-notch education, and a supportive community of photographers ready to help you succeed. It's the perfect place for photographers who are serious about growing their business in a sustainable and, big word here, profitable way. At PPA, you belong here. Discover more about membership at ppa.com. I'm Pat Miller, Founder of the Small Business Owners Community. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you right here next time.