← Concept Index

Responsible AI & society

Data provenance and consent

Also called: where the data came from, training data consent

DEFINITION

Knowing the origin of data — for training a model or feeding a prompt — and whether the people it concerns agreed to that use.

WHY IT MATTERS

Provenance underlies both fairness and legality: data gathered without consent or rights carries those problems downstream into every output. 'It was on the internet' is not the same as 'we may use it'.

COMMONLY CONFUSED WITH

Data quality. Clean, accurate data can still be used without permission; provenance is about rights and consent, not tidiness.

SOURCES

First-pass citations, limited to primary sources; a reviewer will broaden and verify these before this entry leaves draft.