AI can now make a photo of something that never happened. So the honest question isn't "is it fake?" — it's "can you prove where it came from?" Today you'll try to catch fakes, stamp a piece of media with a tamper-proof passport, and discover the sneaky attack that breaks it.
Here's a photo. Some are "real"; some are AI fakes with a hidden tell (too-perfect symmetry, a doubled object, a warped patch, weird lighting). You guess first. Then an AI detector gives its confidence — and it's sometimes wrong. Watch how often the "magic" detector actually misses.
Honest creators disclose: they attach a "content passport" that says how a piece was made. Fill it in and stamp it — you'll get a signed record. Then try to secretly change a fact and press Verify. Watch what happens.
Provenance sounds bulletproof — until this. The passport lives in hidden metadata next to the image. So what happens if someone just screenshots it? Try it.
Three media items land on your desk. Some carry a valid passport, some were tampered, some have no passport at all. Hit Verify on each (it runs the real check), then file it: Trusted, Tampered, or Unknown. Clear 3 rounds to win!
The passport you built is a shrunk version of tools big companies are rolling out right now, so you can trust what you see online.
contentcredentials.org shows the real "nutrition label" for media — who made it, with what tool, and whether AI was involved. Look for the little "cr" icon.
Camera makers, Adobe, Microsoft, and others agreed on one shared format for provenance so it works everywhere — exactly the signed-record idea you just used.
Google's SynthID hides an invisible watermark right in the pixels — so even after a screenshot strips the metadata, a trace can survive.
The Partnership on AI wrote shared rules for "synthetic media": disclose it, label it, and don't use it to deceive people.
You learned the honesty core of generative AI: detectors are uncertain, not magic; a signed content passport catches any secret edit; but metadata can be stripped, so we also need visible labels and watermarks. The rule for a good creator: disclose and prove it.