provenance (provenience)
noun

- the place of origin or earliest known history of something

- the beginning of something's existence; something's origin

- a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality

- a place of origin, especially that of a work of art or archaeological specimen

Oxford Languages, Collins Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

The word "provenance" entered English in the late 18th century, around 1785.

It was borrowed directly from French provenance meaning "origin, production” … deriving from Latin provenire meaning "to come forth, originate, appear, arise" … from pro-, meaning "forth, forward”, and venire, meaning "to come".

A related English form, "provenience", appeared later in 1881 in the U.S. and is still used today.

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LAWSUITS, COPYRIGHT, & CHAOS

Why Generative AI Could Be a Legal Nightmare

The concept of provenance, traditionally associated with art and artifacts, has found new relevance in the realm of generative AI. The origin and journey of data used to train large language models is now under intense scrutiny.

Just as museums now need to defend their past acquisition practices, tech companies are grappling with questions about the legality and ethics of their data sources. The parallel between art provenance and data provenance is striking. The December 2023 repatriation of 14 looted Cambodian artifacts by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York highlights the importance of thorough provenance research in the art world - a lesson that the tech industry is now learning the hard way.

The legal landscape is shifting rapidly. With lawsuits mounting against AI companies for unauthorized use of creative works, and even users of generative AI potentially liable for copyright infringement, the need for robust data provenance has never been more critical.

As museums hire art provenance experts to navigate complex legal and ethical issues, businesses leveraging generative AI might soon need their own data provenance specialists. The stakes are high—reputational damage, legal consequences, and ethical dilemmas loom large for those who neglect this crucial aspect of data governance.

The current OpenAI and New York Times dispute seeks billions of dollars in damages and aims to set a precedent for how AI companies can use copyrighted material.

As we venture further into the AI-driven future, one thing is clear: in the world of big data and AI, knowing where your bits and bytes come from is becoming as important as knowing the origin of a Rembrandt or a Khmer statue.

Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

- for “provenance”

advent, alpha, ancestral home, ancestry, antecedents, authorship, background, base, beginnings, birth, birthplace, breeding, causation, commencement, cradle, dawn, derivation, descent, development, emergence, extraction, family, family tree, first cause, foundation, fountainhead, genealogy, genesis, germ, ground zero, groundwork, heritage, history, home, inception, infancy, kick-off, launching pad, lineage, native soil, nativity, nest, nursery, onset, origin, outset, parent, parentage, pedigree, place of origin, point of origin, prime mover, PROVENANCE, provenience, record of ownership, root, rootage, rootstock, seed, seedbed, source, spring, starting place, starting point, stemma, stock, taproot, the big bang, the first domino, the spark, umbilical cord, upbringing, watershed moment, wellspring, where it all began, womb

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a sentence. Say something like:

“DATA PROVENANCE builds trust by ensuring the data’s authenticity and reliability.”

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