Reality Notaries for Media

Updated: 2025.10.07 14D ago 13 sources
As deepfakes erase easy verification, a new profession could certify the authenticity of media, events, and records—akin to notaries but with cryptographic and forensic tools. These 'custodians of reality' would anchor trust where traditional journalism and platforms can’t keep up. — It reframes the misinformation fight as an institutional design problem, pointing toward formal verification markets and standards rather than content moderation alone.

Sources

Sora 2 Watermark Removers Flood the Web
BeauHD 2025.10.07 80% relevant
The article demonstrates Sora 2’s visible watermark can be removed in seconds across multiple web services and quotes experts calling for stronger, coordinated verification at upload—evidence that ad hoc watermarks will not secure trust and that formal verification systems ('custodians of reality') are needed.
The medbed fantasy
Halina Bennet 2025.10.03 78% relevant
The article’s example—a deepfake of President Trump promising 'medbeds'—illustrates why routine verification services are needed to authenticate leader statements before they shape public debate and policy expectations.
OpenAI's New Social Video App Will Let You Deepfake Your Friends
BeauHD 2025.09.30 72% relevant
By making deepfake‑style cameos a built‑in feature of a popular app, OpenAI accelerates the need for third‑party authenticity services and provenance standards to distinguish real from synthetic media in everyday videos.
AI-Powered Stan Lee Hologram Debuts at LA Comic Con
EditorDavid 2025.09.29 57% relevant
Hyperreal markets 'premium, authenticated digital identities' and offers no technical transparency, underscoring the need for trusted custodians to certify provenance, consent, and authenticity of AI recreations as deepfakes proliferate.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
2025.09.19 62% relevant
Project Xanadu’s core features—permanent versioning, bidirectional links, and transclusion with source attribution—function like a built‑in verification and provenance layer. The article’s contrast with today’s web aligns with the call for 'custodians of reality' that certify authenticity and lineage of digital content.
How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society
msmash 2025.09.18 72% relevant
Pew reports strong public desire to know whether media is AI-made and low confidence in spotting it themselves, reinforcing the proposed need for third-party authenticity verification.
Appendix
Reem Nadeem 2025.09.17 60% relevant
By gauging public reactions to AI involvement in political and cultural content, the Pew appendix underscores why trustworthy authentication and disclosure standards may be needed for media as AI generation spreads.
The Glorious Future of the Book
Ted Gioia 2025.08.26 78% relevant
The article argues that e‑books can be silently altered or revoked (e.g., Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie) while physical books preserve an immutable record—echoing the call for trusted verification layers to anchor truth as synthetic media proliferate.
Authenticate thyself
Marion Fourcade & Kieran Healy 2025.08.21 60% relevant
Both highlight a societal shift toward verification infrastructures: the essay’s 'authenticate thyself' frame shows identity and access increasingly mediated by private authentication and ranking systems, paralleling the call for professional verification layers as trust anchors.
Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months
Ted Gioia 2025.08.20 100% relevant
He writes: “people might work as custodians of reality—a kind of high-powered version of today’s notaries.”
The Consensus Construct: unifying quantum, social and scientific realities
Seeds of Science 2025.07.23 68% relevant
The article’s claim that 'reproducibility, or redundancy of consistent records, is what makes something objectively true' aligns with the proposal for trusted 'reality custodians' who certify authenticity via independent, redundant evidence chains—both foreground redundancy as the basis of objectivity.
Jeffrey Epstein, Dead Man’s Switch
Christopher F. Rufo 2025.07.23 60% relevant
The article argues 'the facts will never be enough' because elites want secrets buried while the public distrusts official accounts; this aligns with the call for formal authenticity/verification institutions to restore trust where scandal narratives otherwise remain unfalsifiable.
Journalistic fraud at Politico
José Duarte 2025.02.04 60% relevant
The piece argues reporters quoted a White House transcript instead of embedding the 16‑second video and highlights a doctored quotation, underscoring the need for trusted third‑party verification of what was actually said.
← Back to All Ideas