Abstract Provenance is the chronological history of things, resonating with the fundamental pursuit to uncover origins, trace connections and situate entities within the flow of space and time. As artificial intelligence (AI) advances towards autonomous agents capable of interactive collaboration on complex tasks, the provenance of generated content becomes entangled in the interplay of collective creation, where contributions are continuously revised, extended or overwritten. In a multi-agent generative chain, content undergoes successive transformations, often leaving little, if any, trace of prior contributions. In this study, we investigate the problem of tracking multi-agent provenance across the temporal dimension of generation. We propose a chronological system for post hoc attribution of generative history from content alone, without reliance on internal memory states or external meta-information. At its core lies the notion of symbolic chronicles, representing signed and time-stamped records in a form analogous to the chain of custody in forensic science. The system operates through a feedback loop, whereby each generative timestep updates the chronicle of prior interactions and synchronizes it with the synthetic content in the very act of generation. This research seeks to develop an accountable form of collaborative AI within evolving cyber ecosystems.
Chang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.