Style Provenance Ledger

Style Provenance Ledger is the practice of documenting, for every client visual asset, which model produced it, which style reference or fine-tune shaped it, and what rights attach to the output. The category's leverage is speed and volume, but its risk is homogenized output and IP ambiguity, and those two risks compound: when three agencies prompt the same frontier model with the same brand adjectives, the deliverables converge, and nobody can prove which layer of the stack was actually proprietary. The ledger separates the commodity layer (base generation) from the defensible layer (custom styles, brand-trained references, human art direction). Recraft's custom style creation from uploaded images is a concrete example of a defensible layer that can be logged and reused across a client retainer. Adobe's EditAgent research, which needs roughly 10x compute to approach Photoshop-level edits, shows why the ledger matters now: editing quality is still uneven, so provenance records settle client disputes about what was generated versus retouched.