The Credit Question: Made With vs Made By

AI tells you what tool made the image. It doesn’t tell you whose idea it was

There’s a badge appearing on LinkedIn posts now.

It’s called a Content Credentials badge, C2PA standard, and it tells you exactly what tool made the image, who certified it, and when. It’s already live on LinkedIn and being rolled out across Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

I published a post with an AI-generated image and saw it for the first time: “Generated by ChatGPT. Issued by OpenAI. April 2025.”

My first reaction was to wonder if I should have disclosed it.

My second reaction, after actually thinking about it: no. And I think the instinct to disclose is based on a confusion I think is worth unpacking.

The Confusion: What Are You Actually Claiming Credit For?

When a designer posts an AI-generated image and presents it as their original creative work, their style, their vision, their craft, and it turns out to be a Midjourney output with a prompt they typed in thirty seconds, that’s a credibility problem. The claim was about the image, and the image wasn’t what they said it was.

But when a PM, a founder, or a writer uses an AI-generated illustration to accompany an idea they spent hours thinking through, nobody comes for the image. The claim is the thinking, and the image is a wallpaper.

These are not the same things.

Same, Same But Different

One is a creative work being misrepresented. The other is a functional visual choice, no different from picking a stock photo, pulling something from Unsplash, or using a Canva template. We don’t write “image sourced from Unsplash” in our LinkedIn posts, and we don’t disclose that their header graphic was made in Canva.

My point is that the bar for disclosure should be proportional to the claim being made.

If the image is the work, disclose. If the image illustrates the work, the C2PA badge is already doing that job.

What C2PA Actually Is And Why It Changes The Calculus

C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, is a content provenance standard being adopted at the infrastructure level (Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Meta, LinkedIn). This isn’t a platform feature but a foundational layer being built into how media travels across the internet.

What it does is embed cryptographically verified metadata into every piece of media and figure out which tool created it, who certified it, and when. That data travels with the image wherever it goes, and anyone can click the badge and see the full origin story.

C2PA: The Origin

This matters for the disclosure debate because it removes the argument that AI images are being used deceptively.

Deception requires hiding something, and C2PA makes hiding impossible. The provenance is in the file, the badge is on the post and the information is one click away for anyone who wants it.

If the infrastructure is already providing transparency, what exactly is the additional verbal disclaimer intended to solve?

The Real Question C2PA Raises

It’s not “should you disclose?”

It’s: as provenance becomes standard infrastructure, what does authorship actually mean?

I directed the image. I wrote the prompt. I chose the aesthetic, the mood, and the visual language to be consistent across every post. I made dozens of decisions about what the image should communicate before a single pixel was generated.

Is that authorship? I think it is. Not the same as illustration. Not the same as photography. But it’s not nothing either.

The interesting frontier isn’t disclosure, it’s credit. As AI becomes embedded in every creative tool, the question of who made something becomes genuinely complicated. C2PA answers “what tool was used.” It doesn’t answer “whose vision was it.”

Is the What more valuable than the With?

That’s the conversation worth having.

What This Means If You’re Building A Personal Brand

Use AI images deliberately. Know what you’re using them for: is it to illustrate your thinking or substitute for it? The content is the argument, and the image is the frame.

Vision Matters.

Let the badge do its job because that’s what the infrastructure is for, and if you’re in a space where the image genuinely is the creative work (design, illustration, art), then yes, have the conversation explicitly. The standard is different because the claim is different.

But for most people, writing on LinkedIn?

Nobody came for the image. They came for what you had to say, so make sure that part is worth coming for.