Paul Melcher is a highly influential and visionary leader in visual tech, with 20+ years of experience in licensing, tech innovation, and entrepreneurship. He is the Managing Director of MelcherSystem and has held executive roles at Corbis, Gamma Press, Stipple, and more. Melcher received a Digital Media Licensing Association Award and has been named among the "100 most influential individuals in American photography"
So, What Do We Mean by “Authentic”? The word has been bounced around a lot lately. Understandably. But under different keyboards, it means entirely different things. We’re using one word for two very different ideas. The “Authentic” Feeling Who talks about authenticity? Marketers. They are painfully obsessed with connecting withContinue Reading
The Trust Problem We Face There was a time when a photograph could be trusted to speak for itself. Today, that trust is fractured. The rise of generative AI, synthetic media, and seamless visual manipulation has obliterated the once-solid foundations of visual truth. In response, the industry has rushed toContinue Reading
The industry finally stopped theorizing and started building the infrastructure to preserve truth itself We’ve reached the inflection point. Not the one we’ll read about in retrospect, but the one happening right now—where the exponential flood of AI-generated content threatens to drown out any meaningful signal of authenticity. The WorldContinue Reading
The evolution from cave paintings to written text took millennia. The return journey might just be around the corner Human communication began with images. Long before the first written word, our ancestors painted scenes on cave walls, not as decoration, but as visual communication systems that conveyed complex ideas aboutContinue Reading
As the internet evolves into an AI agent repository database, filled with text, images, videos, and sounds specifically built to be used and consumed by AI systems, we can envision a segregated internet area solely reserved for real human beings, where access is predicated on proving one’s humanity through increasinglyContinue Reading
You used to prove your identity with a password. Now you need to prove you’re not synthetic. The alarm bells started ringing in Hong Kong when an employee transferred $25 million to fraudsters during what appeared to be a routine video conference with colleagues and the CFO. The twist? EveryoneContinue Reading
When Content Trust Becomes a Strategic Asset There was a time when an image’s value was judged by its beauty, originality, or timeliness. Today, a growing portion of its value rests on something far more fundamental: whether we can believe it. From AI‑generated product shots slipping into online catalogs, toContinue Reading
As the EU AI Act’s obligations for general-purpose AI models take effect, the age of opaque training data and untraceable outputs is drawing to a close. The Shifting Sands of AI Regulation The era of unregulated AI development is coming to an end, at least in Europe. As generative AIContinue Reading
When MANGO launched its first fully AI-generated ad campaign last year, it made headlines: one of the first major fashion brands to swap models and sets for pixels and prompts. But now it’s gone a step further. This time, it’s not just campaign visuals or aspirational lookbooks. MANGO has begunContinue Reading
As generative AI continues to infiltrate everything from smartphone cameras to image editors, one deceptively simple question remains unresolved and increasingly urgent: How much AI involvement is enough to call something AI-generated? It is not just a technical question or a legalContinue Reading