TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Ethics & Provenance · AGE 18—21 · FACTUAL · DURABLE
Provenance chains
An image in your portfolio should answer all four provenance questions before a client asks.
The idea
Provenance is lineage: where a thing came from, what happened to it on the way, who says so, and what stays unknown. For an AI output it asks four questions. Where did the training data come from? Where did the model come from — who built it, on what, under what terms? Where did this output come from — which model, which prompt, which references, which edits? And who may use it, for what? An image in your portfolio should answer all four. Keeping track of them is a professional habit, like citing a source or keeping a drawing register.
Why it matters
A client, a juror or a lawyer will eventually ask one of the four. Have the answer ready before the question comes.
See it in the studio
Two images on a portfolio page. One carries a note: generated with model X from my massing model, references my own site photographs, edited in Y. The other carries nothing. Only one of them can be put in a tender, a publication, or a client's hands without a conversation first.
Watch for this
Provenance that stops at the output. "I generated it" answers the third question only. The first two happened before you arrived, and they are still yours to find out. The fourth comes after, and it decides what the image may be used for.
Try it
Take one image you generated this month and write its four answers. Where you cannot find one — the model's training data, usually — write unknown rather than a guess. The unknowns are the finding.
Prove it
For an image in your portfolio, state its provenance chain in three sentences: data and model, prompt and references and edits, permitted use.
How it works
The machine-learning field built two documentation forms for the upstream links: datasheets for datasets and model cards for models, both proposed in 2018 and now common on model-sharing sites. For the downstream link, an open standard called Content Credentials lets a file carry its own edit history. Neither replaces the habit. They give you somewhere to write it down. The What the licence lets you do card on this map is the fourth question, opened.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
Sources
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.