AI provenance tags — standard EXIF/XMP fields for AI-generated content

[HMAKT99]

Context

ExifTool is the gold standard for file metadata. As AI generates more content (images, documents, video), there's no standard set of EXIF/XMP tags for AI provenance:

• Was this file AI-generated?
• Which model?
• What was the confidence/trust level?
• What sources were used?

Possible Approach

A new tag group or namespace for AI provenance:

exiftool -AIGenerated=true -AIModel="gpt-4" -AIConfidence=0.85 image.jpg

Or using an existing namespace like XMP with a custom schema:

exiftool -XMP-akf:TrustScore=0.85 -XMP-akf:Agent="dall-e-3" image.jpg

Why

• EU AI Act Article 50 (August 2, 2026) — AI-generated content must carry transparency metadata, deepfake disclosure mandatory
• C2PA exists but requires PKI/Certificate Authority infrastructure
• A lightweight EXIF/XMP approach would be more universally adopted

Reference

AKF (Agent Knowledge Format) is an open standard working on this — ~15 tokens of JSON provenance that can map to EXIF/XMP fields. ExifTool supporting these tags would make the format universally readable.

Would love to hear Phil's thoughts on whether AI provenance tags belong in ExifTool.

[HMAKT99]

Created a working example: exiftool_provenance.sh — shows reading/writing AI provenance alongside ExifTool.

[StarGeekSpaceNerd]

Adding tags to exiftool where there isn't an already existing standard is unlikely to happen.

Instead, Exiftool already provides a mechanism for you to create your own tags. See the example.config file.

New tags are best created in XMP, as that is the most flexible group to create new tags in, as well as being the easiest.

[HMAKT99]

Thanks — that makes sense. A custom XMP namespace via the config file is the right approach. I'll put together an example config that defines the AI provenance tags (model, trust score, generated timestamp) as a custom XMP group and share it here. Appreciate the pointer.

[HMAKT99]

Built the custom XMP config: exiftool-akf.config

Defines an XMP-akf namespace with these tags:

AIGenerated, Agent, Model, TrustScore, SourceTier,
Source, Evidence, GeneratedAt, Classification, IntegrityHash

Usage:

cp exiftool-akf.config ~/.ExifTool_config
exiftool -XMP-akf:AIGenerated=true -XMP-akf:Agent="dall-e-3" -XMP-akf:TrustScore=0.70 image.jpg
exiftool -G1 -XMP-akf:all image.jpg

Thanks for the guidance on the config approach — works cleanly.

[StarGeekSpaceNerd]

The config looks good. The only tweak I would make would be to change
AIGenerated => { },
into
AIGenerated => { Writable => 'boolean' },
unless you want that tag to accept other values beside true/false.

Is Classification meant to be open to any value or is there supposed to be a limited set of values allowed? If the latter, that can also be changed.

Here's an example of a limited set of values for a tag. You could copy/paste the PrintConv section and change the values.

[HMAKT99]

Good catches — updated the config:

• AIGenerated now uses Writable => 'boolean'
• Classification now constrained to public/internal/confidential via PrintConv

Updated config: exiftool-akf.config

Thanks for the review — much cleaner now.

[boardhead]

Note that ExifTool 13.56 adds support for the new tags of Exif 3.1, two of which (DevelopmentType and DevelopmentTypeDescription) may be used to denote an AI-generated image.

• Phil