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AI is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime. This show is about how to profit from it together.
Each week I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and Content, the ones figuring this out in real time.
I’m also building an AI content business myself and share the lessons I learn along the way.
WHAT WE COVER
The Titans -- How companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI are moving, and why their decisions matter.
The Incumbents -- How content giants like Disney, News Corp, Universal Music Group, and Reddit are responding to AI, and what it means for creators and publishers.
The Playbook -- Real lessons on AI business models, content strategy, creativity, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid.
Family & Our Future -- Every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation.
ABOUT YOUR HOST
Rob Kelly has interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, helped pioneer early web content licensing, and built multiple companies with more than $100 million in total sales. His work has appeared on CNBC, CNN, TIME, and Entrepreneur.
Thanks!
-Rob Kelly
If I went to OpenAI or Anthropic to the C2PA sort of experts over there, people care about this stuff, where would you rank in terms of the most knowledgeable on a technical level?
Erik Svilich:For text, number one. I created the technology. People literally thought it was impossible. Some of the regulators today still think it's impossible and I have to prove it to them technically which is fun for me because I'm a huge nerd about this stuff. So when it comes to text based content, number one for sure.
Erik Svilich:And I do believe that by the way. I fully do.
Rob Kelly:Welcome to Media and the Machine. I'm Rob Kelly, that's my guest, Eric Svilich He's the CEO of Encipher, a technology company that lets you prove who created a piece of content and whether AI made it, changed it, or took it. It's called c two p a. Think of it as a nutrition label for content, and Anthropic just announced they're using it to watermark everything created on Claude.
Rob Kelly:Eric authored the text providence spec for c two p a and co chairs its task force alongside Google, OpenAI, Adobe, Microsoft, and the BBC. We talk about what this Claude watermarking moment means for AI companies who are now required by law to do it under the EU AI act and California's AI transparency act. Eric explains how this finally gives publishers and creators visibility into what AI is doing with their content and gives them a stronger hand in AI licensing deals. Like I do with all my we end up talking about AI's impact on our jobs, our families, and our future. I especially enjoyed Eric's advice for kids ages 10 to 18 in this new era of AI, and his prediction on how soon he thinks we'll see a billion dollar company run by zero people.
Rob Kelly:Please enjoy my conversation with Eric Svilich So Anthropic just announced they're gonna start watermarking content, things people create on Claude. Can you just tell me what's going on there?
Erik Svilich:Yeah. They just did an announcement about a week ago that they're starting to use CGPA metadata on image assets and watermarking text content that's generated by Claude.
Rob Kelly:Is this something a user will see with their naked eye anywhere?
Erik Svilich:No. Not on the actual assets themselves. Can you talk about why did Anthropic do this? Yeah. So the reason why they're doing this is largely due to regulation both with the EU AI act and code of practice that went into effect 08/02/2026, as well as the California AI transparency act that went into effect the same date that requires providers of AI models to mark AI generated content if they have users that use their service that live in those locations.
Erik Svilich:So you're now required to, by law, mark your content as AI generated or edited.
Rob Kelly:Just curious, who's most psyched about both these EU and California laws and the fact that the AI companies are implementing it, at least partially complying with it, doing watermarking, for instance? Who's doing high fives here that this is all happening?
Erik Svilich:Yeah. I would say the lawyers are the most excited about this. Being able to have a cryptographic audit log of this piece of content was created by this organization and to be able to associate intellectual property rights over that asset, for example, even as that asset moves across the digital landscape is a lawyer's dream.
Rob Kelly:Now is this a lawyer representing content creators and media companies, or is it a lawyer representing AI companies?
Erik Svilich:I would say a little bit of both. Mostly lawyers representing IP holders, because of course, if somebody uses your IP you'd wanna be able to prove it's yours and get paid. But actually there's a really interesting use case for and reason why lawyers in the AI space are excited about this and should be if they're not, is it can help limit your liability. So if you're marking all of your content and then somebody downstream modifies it and claims that it came from you, you can prove with 100% or near a 100% certainty if the metadata is there, the c t p a metadata and watermark that that content was then modified. So if somebody tries to use your original service for some illicit use, you actually have an outlaw of that.
Erik Svilich:So I would say both for different reasons.
Rob Kelly:What does it say about Anthropic that they were the first to make a big deal out of this?
Erik Svilich:You know, that's a really good question because I feel like their press release was kind of a flop. I was reading a lot of forums online and public commentary on it on social media and the one resounding message that I got from that announcement was everybody's confused.
Rob Kelly:Do you think the reason Anthropic put out a press release on it is that they're trying to flex their safety muscle? In other words, they wanna be a safe environment, safe like with your content?
Erik Svilich:Yeah. I would say Anthropic's been really well known for being one of the almost doom criers of the dangers of AI. Their CEO's been very adamant about this topic especially and I think it's a great move if done well to do a PR announcement that you're complying with these different EU regulation acts and California acts because your target market there is enterprise users and enterprise buyers. If your potential customers don't know that you're compliant with these laws that carry massive fines, they're not gonna use your service.
Rob Kelly:And Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, other AI frontier models, right now they're using this c two p eight like protocol and technology for the output only. Right? Measuring the content created within their AI platforms. But will they also use it for what they ingest? What they scrape or train on?
Erik Svilich:Yes. Absolutely. They're starting to look at the inputs as well because there's also laws related to the EU AI act that you need to be able to prove the provenance of the data that you use to train a model for new models. So AI model providers are now gonna have to essentially provide an audit log of here's the data that I use to train the model and here's how I can prove that I owned the rights to use this data to train my model on. So absolutely, they're gonna be doing that, if not already.
Erik Svilich:So let's talk about the publisher side, content creators, owners of content. What does all of this mean, c two p
Rob Kelly:a and things related to it? What does
Erik Svilich:that mean for publishers? It's essentially what the future of IP and media is gonna look like for this new age that we find ourselves in with AI. And essentially, it's a way where you can attach your organizational identity to a piece of digital IP that you own in a way that is cryptographically bound. So when that marker is present, you can prove it with 100% certainty.
Rob Kelly:Now we're talking about publishers and their content will soon have the equivalent of a nutrition label with the ingredients, meaning things like metadata attached to their content. Is that how it's gonna work?
Erik Svilich:Yes. You need a way to display this type of information to users. So some platforms already support this, showing the nutrition label to users. Touch on LinkedIn, you you may have seen an icon on some imagery showing you some information about how that asset was created. YouTube has a similar functionality as well.
Erik Svilich:If that data is in the video, will show you in the video description.
Rob Kelly:Can you give the top reasons that publishers, content creators are going to want to use the c two p a protocol? What's in it for them?
Erik Svilich:Yeah. Several different things. I would say it's been proven to build trust with users in your brand, being able to display how did this asset come to be? How do I know this was a real image that was actually taken in a war zone for example, not some sort of deep fake imagery. And it also helps build trust with brands.
Erik Svilich:So for example, brands want to place their advertisement next to known authentic content. And because the cost to create AI slop, let's say at scale is is near zero, brands need a way to differentiate what's verified inventory from a publisher versus what was more made for advertising AI generated type content. So they can start seeing potentially increased revenues being part of a pool of verified content inventory and also being able to have analytics of how do different AI models and systems actually pull content from their website for web search and retrieval augmented generation so they know how often is ChatGPT pulling from what sections of my websites for what topics versus what is Claude pulling from my websites and how does that content perform off of my website.
Rob Kelly:So last time we chatted, you talked about how you could give publishers visibility into what AI is doing with their content, which is, you know, there's almost no visibility into that currently. If a AI model scrapes a publisher's content, they might see an AI bot visit, but they don't know what's going on beyond that. What can you show a publisher?
Erik Svilich:So for example, using C2PA technology and metadata watermarking type of technologies that go along with c two p a. And some of the new stuff coming out of the SPUR Coalition's telemetry standard,
Rob Kelly:we're able to show SPUR's the organization in The UK, right, that's got a bunch of publishers that got Sky
Erik Svilich:News, BBC, Associated Press just joined. They might have a data use agreement or partner with one of the big AI companies to license their content, but they just pull content from their website. They don't know how much and how often. They don't know what part of the content they're pulling from, they just see that the AI visited the website. And that's with a actual agreement in place, right?
Erik Svilich:Is that Yes. Exactly. Yeah. That's with an actual agreement in place. They don't even know what parts of their content are being pulled necessarily.
Erik Svilich:They don't have that type of analytics. They don't know when they crawled the site to get the information. They don't know if that content was used to ground a response, so it just was part of the information pool that informed the response or if it was an actual citation, right? And let's say ChatGPT or Claude was representing your brand in a quote, right? But with some of this technology, we're able to show content owners who are licensing content to AI companies that exact information.
Erik Svilich:So when a user asks about sports for example, some sort of sports content and it pulls from the basketball section on your website, you know that that happened and whether you are actually quoted as part of the response incited or not, right? Which is really important information because wouldn't you like to know if you're licensing your content let's say to half a dozen different AI companies. Right? You have a data agreement with all of them. Wouldn't you like visibility as to what parts of your website and content are performing best with users using AI chatbots that are pulling from that content?
Erik Svilich:So interesting. So for tier one publishers who might have an agreement already with the AI companies, you can give them a lot of visibility, transparency into what's going on. What about the rest of the world? There's a big problem that tier two and tier three publishers,
Rob Kelly:you know, big publishing companies, but they're not The Wall Street Journal. They're not The New York Times. A big problem that they've got is how to get a meeting, a seat at the table with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google's AI team, and so forth. Tell me how C2PA is going to help them solve that problem.
Erik Svilich:Yeah. At the end of the day, it's kinda like the Wild West. If you're posting content online and it's not marked, it can be taken and you can't do anything about it. I mean you can try and sue them but if you're a smaller publisher, anything short of collective action, know, you're just gonna be stuck in lawsuits for the next decade to be honest. There's some really good folks out there doing good work like the RSL Collective that is helping with collective licensing approaches, but c two p a is another tool that would work well with something like this to actually attach your terms and license the actual content itself, which makes it a lot more legally enforceable in a court of law.
Erik Svilich:And the C2PA standard isn't just like code you can just put onto your website and it does all this stuff with organizational identity, licensing, rights management and these issues. It's a bit of a technical challenge to get it actually in production. So for example, we have a completely free WordPress plugin that is there for publishers of any size to get started marking their content, linking their organizational identity and license and rights information into their content so that when their content does get taken, it at least carries that information. But if your content is marked and goes into another system and you find yourself in licensing negotiations or a lawsuit, you actually get an audit trail of this was my content and it was taken. But there's nothing you can do after the fact if it's not marked at the end of the day.
Rob Kelly:And so they'd be using say, if they're using WordPress to create their content, writing blogs, other text based articles, maybe media and video too. WordPress can do a ton. The plug in would allow them to attach the nutrition labels to their content going forward? Is that just a no brainer that you recommend they do this?
Erik Svilich:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it's a free way to help protect your content, build a verified pool of inventory to potentially get better ad dollar terms, help with licensing with AI companies, and build trust with your users. And if you're using WordPress, it's free and would take you a day or so to integrate. To me, it's a no brainer.
Rob Kelly:So just a couple pushbacks. One is when I write an article, for instance, this week, I was writing a an essay, and I wrote a bunch of it. I put a draft into Claude. I asked it to correct typos and give me the draft back. Is that now gonna be watermarked that it was AI generated even though I wrote most of
Erik Svilich:it, but just did some spelling corrections and typos and tightening up? How's that work? So something that a watermark provider can do is say that perhaps this was edited by AI. And there's also the ability with C2PA and similar technologies like let's say for an image and you just had it change the color of the sky to have that information embedded into that content. So people could know with full transparency that it was just an edit by AI and here's what it did.
Erik Svilich:But people and providers that don't go into that level of detail might just slap a black and white label on it, and it's unfortunately down to the technology provider who is marking the content to make that decision.
Rob Kelly:And how do you get around this use case? In other words, I create a bunch of content. I write essays on Substack. I've got podcast episodes going out like the one we're on. How do you prevent someone else from laying claim to that content?
Rob Kelly:Let's say they were able to rip it off from Substack. They can just cut and paste, grab my audio somewhere, and then just start to add the nutrition label and notarize it that it came from them. How do you prevent that from happening?
Erik Svilich:Nobody can stop somebody else from copying and pasting your content onto their own website and claiming that it's theirs. However, if you've marked your content and then somebody just copy pastes on their website and says that it's theirs and they don't do anything else and that marker is there, then you now have proof that they've copied from you and stolen your content because this information does survive copy and paste. Huge deal, right? It survives scraping. So even if a bot is pulling your website like an RSS feed for that information and that content's marked, well that mark will still be there when it arrives on some other website trying to take or spin your content.
Erik Svilich:Maybe in the future, that site gets blacklisted or much lower ad revenue because they've been caught stealing content.
Rob Kelly:It seems like the timing is almost perfect for C2PA to succeed. But why you? Your business is in Cypher. You've got some serious competition here, much bigger. Adobe, right, Google.
Rob Kelly:Think the BBC is doing some stuff around images, especially. I think you mentioned to me the IPTC standards org. But why you? How are you gonna be the one to win at helping publishers succeed here? Yeah.
Erik Svilich:A couple different reasons. For one, I authored the unstructured text standard for C2PA So they had on their website for over two years the need to be able to embed this information into websites, blogs, articles, chat applications because it was widely thought to not be possible. But we still have some proprietary IP because for example, c two p a is once per web page. So it would survive if somebody copies the entire web page.
Erik Svilich:But what happens if somebody just copies a sentence or part of a sentence or a paragraph? Because what a user does and what AI tools do is they pull the content that's most relevant to them which isn't the entire web page. So that's what our technology covers, is the more granular level of that and what our IP is around, so we have a really solid moat there. And we're very cutting edge in regards to the software technology being one of the only companies that exists that have passed the c a conformance program as a generator product to administer these nutrition labels on content. Also being a certificate authority and timestamp authority which is part of the C2PA trust ecosystem to be recognized by other third party validators like Adobe and Google and BBC use, so that your content is recognized as trusted in those other ecosystems.
Erik Svilich:And we just kinda make it plug and play. Just making it really simple and easy. So people can come across a piece of content on the internet, AI or non AI and just get a simple yes no answer of can I use this for this purpose? Right. That's very powerful.
Erik Svilich:So for those reasons and our our work with regulators like the California folks and EU AI folks, I think we're just super well positioned as part of the progenitors of the technology and what we've been able to do so far. I would say as well Mhmm. We're part of the IPTC who is doing a lot of work in this space and they have Bloomberg and AP and Getty and the rest. And I'm presenting at their photo metadata conference the beginning of September.
Rob Kelly:So you're getting to know content publishers real well in the AI space. What are they most wasting their time on AI wise right now in terms of building their business?
Erik Svilich:I would say the number one current red herring is prescribing to GEO guides on how to get your content discovered by AI companies is because it changes so rapidly in the space. Sometimes what AI pulls from and what type of content it pulls from and what it likes to read changes week to week. There was a study done recently in the last two weeks that there was about three to 5% of all chat GPT responses quoted Reddit for example. And this week, it's down to below a percent. It's like half a percent.
Erik Svilich:And that was just in a couple weeks. So what the AI companies do in regards to their search algorithms and what you would do to optimize for that, I would just focus on putting out high quality content. Especially if it's a niche content that you know really really well or you're an expert in,
Rob Kelly:or maybe you're really local and close to the source on it. So the best way to get traffic right now at least from AI is put out the best content and AI will will find you.
Erik Svilich:Especially if you are well known in the space for a certain topic and you have some solid credentials behind you or you're really well known for reporting a certain topic and you do it consistently, AI likes to find those thought and knowledge leaders in the space, less so just trying to min max for itemized list or those type
Rob Kelly:of thing. I'm curious your take on the best way for content publishers to make money from AI? The massive amount of traffic and distribution. But, you know, they're faced with so many different options. You got companies like Pro rata and Tollbit.
Rob Kelly:You got organizations like RSL, SPUR new protocols, and you could also go to brokers like Protege or Trovio and license your content to AI. How do you recommend content execs think about making money from the world of AI?
Erik Svilich:I would say the most important thing is all those services solve a problem and compete with each other in slightly different ways, you know, you have those that try to gate access to your website, like the Tollbits and Cloudflarers of the world and then you have the licensing partners like Proretta and Arcel that you mentioned and they solve two different problems, right? One is access to your content and one is licensing it afterwards. But nobody's really thinking about what happens to your content once it leaves that website or what happens when somebody gets past that gate. So I would say provenance in using C2PA and this technology as a way to relate your content to your license and make it one and the same thing is the fundamental layer underneath all these other access gates and licensing that proves that you actually own this licensable asset in the first place. So let's say you take a photo at a press conference and somebody right next to you takes another photo, same exact photo, same exact time, they're standing right next to each other.
Erik Svilich:And you're trying to sell your photo and they're trying to sell their photo and you have a way to prove the provenance that that was a real legitimate photo and any editorial process that went on behind that and your competitor doesn't and they're the same price, which one would you buy for your website? The one that you can prove is a real photo from a real point in time or the one that could have been AI? You don't know. So it adds real value in these licensing conversations and being able to prove and build trust actually adds value to these licensing negotiations.
Rob Kelly:Alright. I've got a couple of humanitarian questions for you. What can go right in an AI world that's got you excited outside of your own business?
Erik Svilich:I mean, to be honest, I use AI all the time for the work that I do. And I've been programming since I've been in elementary school and using AI to help me program new technologies and products with my expertise has become much much easier and faster for somebody like me. My startup is small company. I'm in charge of all the technical work. There's no way I would be able to compete with the powers of, you know, Google and OpenAI anywhere close if this were five, ten years ago.
Erik Svilich:But today, I'm actually able to move super fast and compete very well against much larger companies with much more physical staff and resources because I know how to use AI very effectively for my work and make sure that it outputs quality work.
Rob Kelly:How big a team is needed to create a startup, a company that could be valued at a billion dollars, say, within five years now in this age of AI? I think we'll see it next year, one person easily.
Erik Svilich:And I think within five years, we'll see zero. We'll see fully autonomous billion dollar companies within five years.
Rob Kelly:I want to get your take on what to tell younger folks about changes to make in this new world of AI. So for instance, I have a 10 year old. Let's pick, like, a 10 year old, and let's pick maybe someone about to finish up high school, anywhere in that range. What's your advice to them in this new world? You know a lot more about it than most of them.
Erik Svilich:Yeah. I would hope I know more than a 10 year old, especially in regards to AI. I I'd be in trouble if I didn't, to be honest. I would say to embrace it and learn what you can and it can be a great learning aid. The thing that you're in control of is what you wanna do and what you're dreaming about and what you wanna accomplish.
Erik Svilich:Do not replace your entire critical thinking and brainstorming and what your goals and ambitions are. Don't let these systems or social media tell you who you should be and what you want to do. Figure that out for yourself. Go try different things, figure out what you like, figure out what you're good at, and then use these tools like AI to magnify that hundredfold.
Rob Kelly:You and I both were fortunate to grow up in families where we had an opportunity to go to college. My son will be in the same boat. I'm just curious, what are the odds though at 10 by the time he graduates high school that my son is even gonna go to college?
Erik Svilich:Well, I think the biggest benefits that I personally got out of college is the ability to and practice of working with a team of people to get something done and exploring different forms of knowledge that I didn't know about, but also the community aspect and the connections that you make and potential lifelong friends. So the social aspect of college is oft overlooked and is not something today replaceable with AI. So the percentage of value will be weighted much higher towards social and teamwork than actual study? So if there are really good subject matter experts or teachers that, you know, have been in in an industry before trying to do a job, or there's new careers that we haven't even thought of yet, which I guarantee you there will be in ten years. I think that will be the primary value as well as the social connections, etcetera.
Erik Svilich:I do not think that college will need to be four years because a lot of that knowledge will be widely accessible in an instance and that really base level of knowledge will be a commodity, 100% commodity. It already is with AI today. So I think college for specializations is gonna be very useful. I think trade colleges are still gonna be very useful. Less so on the general knowledge, more so on the domain specific knowledge where you can learn from experts and researchers in the field that go beyond perhaps the training date knowledge of AI.
Erik Svilich:I would stay curious, stay flexible, practice critical thinking through doing different activities, exercises, games, for example, that that help with that. Because you don't know what the future's gonna be like and it's changing faster today than it has been in most of human history, faster than the industrial revolution, in my opinion. So just be prepared, prepare yourself, and be open to change.
Rob Kelly:Hey, Eric. Thanks so much for all the time today.
Erik Svilich:Thank you for having me on, Rob. Really appreciate it.
Rob Kelly:Well, this is Media and the Machine. A few things about you and me. If you wanna hear about the next new episode, make sure you hit follow on the show in your podcast app. If you wanna go a little deeper, head to mediaandthemachine.com and subscribe. When you share your email with me, you can see handcrafted transcripts, read the essays in my newsletter, and be the first to hear about who the guest is on the next show.
Rob Kelly:You can also email me directly from there. Maybe you wanna recommend a guest. I'll give you a shout out if you do. I love paying it forward. From time to time, I also open up office hours and host small meetups for subscribers, just to meet, talk, and build things together.
Rob Kelly:If you're creating something of your own or thinking about it, I'd love to help. Maybe you've got a podcast in you. Finally, I don't have a marketing budget for this show. So if it's finding you and others, it's because someone like you passed it along. I'm genuinely grateful.
Rob Kelly:If you have a moment, an honest rating helps me make this better for you. You just go to the show page and click one of the stars. And I'd rather you give me a low rating than no rating at all. I mean it. It pushes me to get better.
Rob Kelly:Thanks again, and see you next time.