Provenance & content authentication

As AI-generated media becomes good enough that people can no longer reliably tell real from fake by sight or sound, the question shifts from "does this look authentic?" to "can we prove where this came from?" Provenance approaches — including cryptographic signing and content-credential standards that travel with a file — aim to answer that by recording an asset's origin and edit history in a way that can be checked.

Provenance is the durable direction of defence precisely because it does not depend on spotting the fake. It is not a complete solution: watermarking and credentials help mainly at the margins, since determined bad actors simply use tools that leave no marks. But "trust the verified source, not the appearance" is the principle most resistant to improving fakes.